Have I already told this one?
Once upon a time I was a boy living on a farm. My father operated the dairy-farm side of things, and my two uncles, Jack and Charlie, ran a few beef cattle, tinkered with fences and machinery, cooked up a storm, and otherwise kept pretty much to themselves. For the early years of my life they lived on a separate property, in a house on a hill halfway between our part of the farm and the town of Fish Creek. When they sold that property, they moved into a house at the other end of the remaining property from us. Uncle Jack concentrated on his cooking and on collecting an unfeasibly large collection of spare parts, nuts and bolts, old solid-state radios and the like. Uncle Charlie took on the role of weed destroyer, trooping through the many areas of untrammeled bush on the property, poison bottle and mattock in hand. He systematically worked his way from one end of the farm to the other over a period of several weeks, and would then start again, a bit like the blokes who paint the Sydney Harbour Bridge.
But there is one corner that he must have missed.
One day he came into our house in a state of some excitement. "I've found somethin' over in the bush near the Pollettis'. I think it might be" -- and here I must write the word as it was then pronounced, not as it is spelt -- "marry-jew-arna". At which point my teenage ears pricked up. "We better go and have a look", my dad said. I kind of quietly tagged along. There had been a spate of dope-related incidents involving some of the high school teachers that I actually liked, and of course there were references always appearing in my beloved NME, and on 2JJ, and in the records I owned, so I thought there might be something to be gained by being in the presence of the dreaded weed.
I knew our end of the farm like the back of my hand, but the part beyond the edges of the dairy paddocks was less familiar, as I spent much less time there. They seemed to go on forever, and the layout was confusing, so even now I'm not entirely sure where I was, but eventually we walked through a bit of bush I had never been in before, and there before us stood two circular groups of marijuana plants, looking thin and healthy, well leafed (if that is a word), and standing, at least this is how I remember them, about seven feet tall. There were buckets and a hose nearby. The plants clearly hadn't finished up there by accident, and nor were they suffering from neglect. Over by the boundary fence, there were well-worn track marks along the Pollettis' side, leading along the fence for a while and then across a paddock to a road. We surmised that the owners of the plants, our unknown and uninvited tenants, were regular users of those tracks, coming in, tapping into a water supply somewhere nearby (there are several stories from my youth on the farm that involve illegal tapping of the water mains), most likely a trough on the Pollettis' property, and then climbing through the boundary fence to check on and keep the water up to their crop.
"We better tell Duffus", Charlie said. "We better talk to Jack first", dad said. Nobody ever did anything without talking to Uncle Jack first. Duffus was the local policeman. He was duly told, and turned up a bit later that day with a couple of other coppers whom I didn't recognise, most likely from Foster, to inspect the merchandise. Unsurprisingly, dad and my two uncles were fairly quickly ruled out as suspects. On reflection I was probably a much more likely suspect, but if there was any heat on me I didn't feel it. The crop was unceremoniously pulled up and removed from the farm, never to be seen again. I imagined a phalanx of heavily armed policemen laying in wait in the far reaches of our farm for the unsuspecting marijuana farmers to return. But the cops seemed to be more interested in destroying the dope (or possibly keeping it for their own use) than in catching the culprits. I also wondered if the enterprising growers, upon discovering the destruction of their hard-won cash crop, might not reasonably have suspected the involvement of our family, and if we may have soon found ourselves involved in some kind of drug war, but I had probably been watching too much television.
