In 1965 my father, a breeder of pedigree Hereford cattle, decided to contribute a bull to a trade effort aimed at encouraging sales of Australian Herefords and Poll Herefords to Chile.So in July our bull joined a handful of other pedigree bulls and 750 commercial Hereford females in Sydney, to be shipped across the Pacific.
     
I was drafted to represent the Hereford Society on the voyage and on arrival in Santiago, to spend three months at that city's show ground,  preparing the stud animals and then showing and selling them at the capital's annual agricultural show. But that is another story and a successful one.

Not so the fate of the Hereford heifers.
    
There had been a moderately severe drought in many parts of Victoria and New South Wales which had made it difficult for Dalgety, the buying and shipping agency, to acquire the most suitable cattle to be exported.  In any event its agents bought in-calf heifers largely from New England, on the proviso that they would not calve until some months after they arrived in Chile.
   
The cattle, with considerable feed, were uneventfully loaded on the 7000 tonne Danish owned ship the Cimbria in Sydney. 
    
But we were only an hour or so outside Sydney when the engines stopped.  Then we heard the ship would have to be towed back.The engine had failed because it had been serviced in Sydney and the huge pistons had been chromed when they should not have been. So the cylinder heads came off and men with angle grinders worked for a week removing chrome.

The cattle remained on board and we again set sail, this time without stopping as we ploughed our way across the South Pacific.
    
But only a week or so after leaving Sydney, the heifers started calving and I and my two colleagues - one was Terry Ryan from Finley who now lives in Benalla - were hard pressed as we helped the many heifers having difficulties producing their first calves.  In rough weather it was quite an experience doing the All Creatures Great and Small arm inside the heifer where is the calf thing, while feeling miserably seasick.
   
While this was bad enough, the feed supplied, while from a reputable miller, was fairly liberally polluted by bale hooks, vicious barbed devices for holding wool bales closed.  The cattle ate these with the feed and they tended to lodge at the bottom of one of the stomachs which was very close to the heart. This caused quite a few deaths.

After three weeks we arrived in Concepcion and the commercial heifers and their calves were unloaded and held on a quarantine farm. Luckily our stud cattle went straight to the showground which was effectively their quarantine area.

Now foot and mouth disease was a problem in South America and the cattle had to be vaccinated.  But being patriotic Chlieans, the local vets would not use an excellent vaccine made by Coopers in Argentina. Instead they opted for what I was told was a live brew cooked up in Santiago backyards.  The end result was that many of the cattle died of foot and mouth while in quarantine; fortunately we were able to wangle some of the Cooper product for our 12 strong show team.

It was at this stage that I felt obliged to report what had been going on to the secretary of the Hereford Society, my boss.  I pulled no punches, so was horrified to find that the Society had reproduced my letter and mailed it to the several hundred members of the Society around Australia. I was then told by Mike Frost, the Chilean Dalgety representative that the second in charge of Dalgety Australia, was on his way to Chile and as the saying goes, wanted my guts for garters.  Fortunately for me my report had been accurate and I never heard a cross word from anyone in Dalgety.

The whole exercise was most unfortunate because it was funded by the United Nations to enable the Chileans to produce more beef. At the time it was illegal to eat beef for three days a week and we often ate horse meat instead.

Strangely enough, my brother the following year accompanied a shipment of Herefords to South Africa.  While in a taxi in Durban he was offered an Australian passport for a considerable sum.
He reported (blew the whistle) on the incident to the Australian embassy, demonstrating whistle blowing skills he continued to draw upon throughout a most adventurous working life! 

Trees and aeroplanes don’t mix
 
It was a summer day in the early 1980’s and I was working for Stock and Land Newspaper. 
 
The previous day I’d flown my immediate boss, his wife and teenage daughter, from Benalla to Bathurst to look at and do a story on some agricultural enterprise with Murray Grey cattle as the centre piece.  We’d refuelled at Bathurst to the extent that I filled the fuel tanks and we flew into a mountain top resort airstrip above Mittagong and about 1000 metres above sea level.
 
I can’t remember what we did there, but in the late afternoon we taxied to the far end of the not very long runway – I knew we were fairly heavy – stood on the breaks and opened the throttle.
 
Unfortunately, because the day was warm and the altitude high, the air was less dense than it would have been further down the mountain.  The aeroplane did not accelerate as nimbly as it should have done, although I had an inkling of the problem because of the weather before we took off.
 
I managed to lift the plane into the air, but then we sank through the top of a dead gum tree.
 
Fortunately, just beyond that the ground fell away sharply and we were able to pick up almost normal flying sepped although there were some serious indentations in the front of the wing.
 
At the same time, it was obvious that the tree had ruptured at least one of the wing fuel tanks because there was a stream of fuel in the airstream, in much the same fashion as war movies tend to show a troubled aeroplane.
 
I could have returned to the airstrip we had departed from, but because it would have been difficult to repair the damage, chose to fly on to Goulburn about 20 minutes flying to the west.  This decision was not helped by a teenager who seemed to be convinced we were doomed and screamed all the way to Goulburn.
 
Fortunately we were able to land safely, tie the aeroplane down, advise the Civil Aviation Authority and the Eildon owner of the aeroplane of the damage, hire a car and drive back to Benalla, where I bailed out and the other three proceeded to Melbourne.
 
Obviously it was very traumatic for all of us, but after doing the due reporting, I was quite keen to forget the whole thing.
 
Unfortunately  the Goulburn Newspaper picked up the story and a school friend of my cousin, who lives near there, sent him the cutting.  That meant the story was out in the wider family – which is where I hoped it would stop.
 
However the following week I went to a Farm Writers and Broadcasters Society monthly meeting in Melbourne and there was my boss passing round photos of the damaged plane to an intrigued audience.  To give him his due he did look slightly embarrassed.  The cat was well and truly out of the bag.
 
Much later I wrote up the particulars of my stupidity for the Aviation Safety Digest (aka Crash Comics).  They were kind enough to publish with ‘Anonymous’ as the writer. 
 
David Palmer
October 2015