Country men are tough, self confident types as a rule. They don't like being told what to do, and they especially don't like to be told what to do by some clerk still wet behind the years. A farmer who's been using a chainsaw for the last thirty years does not think he needs a two-day course if he wants to continue using it.
A farmer nearby was furious when they fined him for using the saw bench that had been on his property for many years, and he'd been using perfectly safely for decades. But new regulations came in and suddenly he was supposed to pay money to learn how to use it, and even probably, a license to have it.
This poem was given to me on our recent trip Outback,
though it applies just as much to any farmer.
Bureaucracy is a curse sometimes, and I'm going to add a few photos - not of the Outback, but of other kids growing up on a farm. A bonfire - how many are allowed to light bonfires these days? Plucking chooks at the saw bench, though naturally, young kids were kept away when timber was being sawn up for the fire.
These pictures were taken in the 1950s when interfering bureaucrats were not nearly as bad as they are now.
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