The Cow Cocky
When I was a young minister freshly graduated and ordained, my first ministry in the 1960’s, after seven years of the slums of Newmarket, was in a small country church, in the small country town of Ararat, gateway to the Wimmera in Western Victoria. There I learnt the difficult art faced by all city bred ministers, of becoming a country parson.
Most of the farmers connected with the church at Ararat were either sheep, wheat, oats, beef or chicken farmers. We only had one dairy farmer. He was an absolute gem. Loy Fleming was already 65 years of age when we came to know him. He and his wife, Nellie, had seven children and he was a delightful man. From the first day I met him I had already made up my mind that he was a man of absolute trust and one upon whom you could utterly depend.
He had spent a lifetime of service in a number of Baptist churches in Western Victoria around his dairy farms. In more recent years he had established each of his seven daughters and their husbands on dairy farms which he had pioneered.
As he would say himself, “I am nothing but an old fashioned cow cocky,” and with a laugh he would push his hat onto the back of his head and hook his thumbs behind his braces and survey the dairy farm. He was short of stature, rather stout but with immense strong arms which had come from years of hand milking 120 or 150 cows every morning and night. He had pioneered dairy farming in each of the areas in which he had lived around Warrnambool, Portland, Hamilton and now Ararat. Most of the contemporary wisdom had said that this country was not suitable for dairy farming when Loy had first come into the area. But he had taken country that previously been fit only for sheep or cattle, or further up north for wheat or oats, and by the time he had finished six or eight years later, there was a thriving dairy farm in that area.
He was an amazing mixture of old fashioned knowledge and a user of the latest ideas. You could chart his improved knowledge and techniques by visiting each of the farms he had established and you would see the different kind of milking shed, for example, which he had built at that time. His earliest farm had a very traditional milking shed where the cows walked in and up to a bail. They would poke their heads through the bail into one of the long mangers that ran along one wall and then they were held in place by a neck bail which allowed them to munch some oats while their back leg was held back with a leg rope.
The next shed he built was a long walk through shed where the cows came in one end and went out the other, and it contained a number of improvements on the previous walk in walk out shed.
The next shed he built, however, was quite different. It consisted of a herringbone pattern, where the cows walked into a long herringbone shaped shed from each side and backed into a central milking position. A long walk way in the form of a pit ran down the centre and from the central pit the farmer was able to reach with his milking machine the udder of each cow that backed in before him. This enabled one man to wash, connect up and milk, and then disconnect 50 cows at a time.
The next shed he built was the pride of the fleet. It was a circular shed with a large circular yard outside. Everything was ramped for easy cleaning. The cows moved up the ramp into the circular yard as a large automatic boom gradually moved them up towards the circular shed. One cow at a time moved in the entry way of the shed and walked round the circular milking shed until she found an empty stall. In the centre was a pit so the farmer had no stooping or bending and could easily attend to washing the udders and placing 50 milking machines onto the cows. Without moving up and down a long shed but by simply moving around in a circle, one man could milk all of the cows. As each was detached from the milking machine it moved on its way out the exit.
I was always amazed that farmers could train their cows to come into different kinds of sheds, to put their head into a bail, or back up to a machine. Yet there was one aspect of a cow’s life over which the farmer
had no control whatever. Loy gave me the first instruction in milking cows that I had received since I had been a young school boy and had stayed on my Aunty Bella’s dairy farm.
He showed me how to walk up behind the cow and place one hand or her rump while I washed her udder and teats with the other hand. As soon as I made mention about connecting up the milking machine to one of her teats, Loy roared at me in a typical dairy farmer’s fashion, for you must remember that the milking shed is very noisy with perhaps 50 milking attachments each with four large suction cups sucking away “Don’t ever come into a cow cocky’s shed and speak about teats. They are tits!”
I found sometimes the farmer’s language rather embarrassing but nevertheless this newly ordained minister struggled with the embarrassment. He showed me how to wash the udders and the cows tits and to join up the four suction cups of the milking machine.
So far so good. But this is where no dairy farmer seemed to have the capacity to train his cows. The reason why you placed your hand on the rump was to feel the muscles of the cow as she flexed to raise her tail. You had a split second to move to one side before being covered with a cascade of golden, warm liquid, or a torrent of hot, smelly cow pats.
I learnt to keep my hand near to the cow’s rump and to feel for any movement of the muscle which moved me very quickly out of the line of fire. But every time I milked there would always be one cow who never raised her tail and I would be suddenly showered, as I stood there connecting her up to the milking machine, from head to toe, or else suddenly feel the thick dollop slid down my side and into my gum boot.
I have heard cow cockies say that there is nothing nicer on cold winter’s morning when you are milking than to have your gum boots full of squelchy brown cow. But I could never take to it myself.
Loy would roar laughing and direct me to a hose with which I would hose down the side of my overalls and inside my gum boot.
Loy Fleming always felt he had a special call in life to train young ministers who came from the city to minister in country churches. He had many stories of young, experienced, city bred ministers who had come to the churches where he had served over the years and how he needed to break them in. He had no time for theological lecturers in the college. He used to derisively say, “They don’t know nothing at all. Their head is full of Greek and Hebrew and obscure passages of the Old Testament, but none of them have ever had a successful country ministry. There is not one of them that is any use if you put them out into a parish. Those lecturers are about as useful as tits on a bull.”
I never quite understood why he disliked theological lecturers so much but I certainly burst out laughing at the uselessness engendered by the vision of his illustration.
I once asked him about which breed of cow he preferred most of all. He replied as he pushed his hat onto the back of head and hooked his thumbs into his braces, “You remind me of another young minister who pointed out the animals in my herd one day and said, ‘What kind of a cow is that one at the back?’ So I looked him in the eye and said, ‘There are different kinds of cows in a herd like this. The ones without any horns are called Poll Shorthorns. The big framed ones over there, with the reddish colour, are Holsteins and they are really good butter fat milkers. And those black and white Friesians are probably the biggest producers of all. But that odd looking one over there is different from the rest because that is not a cow, that is a horse!’.”
And with that he would take his hat off and slap the side of his thigh and double over in laughter.
Loy Fleming was a man of great humour and yet of gentle devout spirit. His prayers in a public meeting were always spoken in a soft voice but were some of the most memorable as I had ever heard. He prayed for people and their needs and asked God’s blessing on projects which we were undertaking in such a way that led one to really want to trust God in this new venture. And he always lived with a spirit of bright thankfulness. No matter what happened he would always claim that this was part of the will of God and that it was for the right purpose and we should give thanks to God in everything.
I remember going out to see him and Nellie one day. Nellie told me he was down at the back paddock inspecting the body of one of their best cows who had died during the night. I walked down the paddock and Loy was standing beside the bloated carcass of a cow, lying on its side with its neck stretched out and its four legs stiff in the air. I did not know quite what to say to him because a cow was not just an animal. A cow on Loy Fleming’s dairy farm was a member of the family, a loyal producer of income, a friend with whom he had daily contact, one whom he knew by name personally, and one of God’s most kindly creatures.
I sympathized with Loy in the death of his best cow and then, remembering what he had said to me only a few days earlier, said “But Loy, tell me now honestly, were you able to thank the Lord for the death of your best cow?” He looked at me with his blue eyes transparent with honesty and put one foot up on the side of the dead beast. Tipping his hat to the back of his head and hooking his thumbs in his braces he said, “As a matter of fact, young Gordon, I’ve just said a prayer of thanksgiving to God for the life of Bessie, and I finished up by saying, ‘Well, Lord, I thank you that it is not two!’.”
Towards the end of our time at Ararat Loy and Nellie retired from the dairy farm leaving it to one of their daughters and son in law and moved into town. He took to town life as easily as he took to a dairy farm provided he had his tank for his own collection of rain water. “I can’t stand this orangy, muddy, chlorinated town water that they put in the pipes, it isn’t even fit for the vegetables.” Loy was happy. He then worked full time without pay in a voluntary capacity helping me with tasks around the church and caring for many of the aged and shut in people.
Once when a certain member of our church had broken the moral law, he encouraged me by saying, “Don’t despair when one of the sheep misbehaves himself. The devil is pretty active in the church you know. The devil isn’t nearly as active in the world as he is in the church. The devil loves to work among church members, because he has already got the others.” From that moment on I looked with a new light upon those people who lived under temptation and faced moral lapses.
But I guess the thing for which I will always be thankful to God in the life of Loy Fleming more than anything else was the way that he became the self appointed encourager of my wife.
He just arrived at the back door of the old wooden manse a day or two after we had settled in with a basket of freshly made scones from his wife, a large bunch of rhubarb that he had just cut that morning and an assortment of other fruit that he had picked from his trees, together with a large bottle of freshly clotted cream and some milk. When I came down from the study to meet him and thank him he said to me simply, “You go on with your work. I just want to sit and talk to your wife for a while. You know the greatest sacrifice in coming to a small country church is not made by the husband; it is made by the wife. If you don’t mind I’d like to drop in every now and then just to have a cup of tea and a chat with her.”
He was such a darling man that my wife dearly enjoyed his visits. He was a fund of knowledge about everything. His warm humour helped cheer what could have been a very lonely existence for a young wife in a strange country town. From that day on every single day he called with a basket of scones and cream or milk or vegetables or something else that he was growing in his garden at that moment. He always said he could not stop, but that he had just called in for a moment. My wife would say, “We’ll have a cup of tea while you are with me” and pour him out a cup and together they would drink that and Loy would talk with her about life in the country town.
It was over a year later after he had called every day that, talking with his wife one day, we discovered that he could not abide tea, but that he had drunk it every single day without saying a word lest he embarrassed the young wife and mother. From that moment on, whenever he came he had his usual cuppa, a cup half filled with milk and filled with boiling water.
Three score years and ten were already past when Loy quietly died and he was laid to rest down in the small Western District Cemetery outside of Warrnambool where his forefathers lay. But his wife, Nellie, has lived on in strength and for the next 35 years we continued to write notes to each other and send a Christmas card keeping the contact with one of God’s choicest families and the first cow cocky of Ararat. Then Nellie died in her nineties, a wonderful wife and partner for Loy.
I’ll never forget the day that I came back from the dairy, having to hose the warm brown liquid out of my gum boots, and having heard the story that the main reason why that cow was different was because it was a horse! And so I headed back to the country manse at 90 High Street, opposite the Railway Station, having learnt another lesson in the difficult art of becoming a country parson.
GORDON MOYES