The Curly Cow. Joanne Le Maitre

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      Published in Australia by Sid Harta Publishers Pty Ltd,

      ABN: 46 119 415 842

      23 Stirling Crescent, Glen Waverley, Victoria 3150 Australia

      Telephone: [phone], Facsimile: [phone]

      E-mail: [email protected]

      First published in Australia 2018

      This edition published 2018

      Copyright © Joanne Le Maitre 2018

      Cover design, typesetting: WorkingType (www.workingtype.com.au)

      The right of Joanne Le Maitre to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

      All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

      Joanne Le Maitre

      The Curly Cow

      ISBN: 9781925283815 (eBook)

      Digital distribution by Ebook Alchemy

      eBook Created by Warren Broom

      ABOUT THE AUTHOR

      Having spent most of her educational years in suburbia around the Newcastle region, Joanne Le Maitre became a farmer by default. After she graduated high school, her parents ‘retired’ onto a small property in the Hunter Valley. She took a job on a neighbouring property where she milked cows for a year before attending college. When an old brindle cow entered her life, it was here that her love affair with cattle began. After attending the local Agricultural College, she returned to the farm to dedicate her life to taking care of a herd of Murray Grey cattle and some Wiltshire Horn sheep. She still shares the farm with all her pets and wild friends.

      Preface

      This is a true story. Everything happened as described in the story about the love affair between an old jersey cow, her daughters and granddaughters, and the girl who looked after them. The story still goes on to this day, 37 years later.

      Dedicated to my parents, without whose lifelong hard work, the privileged life that I lead with all the animals on my farm, both domestic and wild, would not have been possible. Thankyou.

      Chapter 1

      Grandma

      Beaumont Pets Dream the 2nd lived on a small dairy farm at Knockfin in the Hunter Valley of New South Wales, and twice per day, every day, she gave her lovely creamy milk to the farmer who owned her. You may have guessed by now that Beaumont Pets Dream the 2nd was a dairy cow, a jersey cow more precisely, with a pair of mismatched horns and a lovely temperament.

      Her registered name was a bit of a mouthful, so the farmer called her Seven Hills, after the place she was born on the 3rd of May, 1969.

      In 1980, the elderly farmer decided to sell his farm and retire, so Seven Hills and all of her cow friends found themselves up for sale. Seven Hills had spent all of her working-life at the farm, and so it was quite an upheaval to be sold off to some stranger and go somewhere she did not know, with people she had never met. She was almost 11 years old, and for a dairy cow that is quite old, probably a little too old for another dairy farmer to want to buy her.

      On the day of the sale, a kind-hearted man named George and his wife Winnie went to look at the cows because they had just moved onto a small farm themselves, with their daughter Joanne. George was not a farmer by trade but he decided to embrace country life and buy a house cow to milk.

      George needed a quiet cow that was well behaved, and it didn’t matter if she was a bit old, so when Seven Hills walked up to the fence where George and Winnie were standing, Seven Hills took a handful of grass straight out of George’s hand. He decided that she was the cow for him and it was as if Seven Hills had just won the cow lottery!

      The farmhand and his wife who had milked Seven Hills for all those years were pleased that she had gone to a good home, but they told George that she had only ever had bull calves, which was a shame because she was such a nice cow they had always wanted a heifer calf to keep as a replacement. Seven Hills was in-calf to a jersey bull when George bought her and shortly after arriving at her new home, she gave birth to another bull calf, who was named Caramello.

      George, Winnie and Joanne had a small herd of Murray Grey cows on their farm, and so the next time that Seven (shortened from Seven Hills) went in-calf, it was to a Murray Grey bull named Glenalvon Huntsman.