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Kids on the go: Colleen and Mark on the farm buggies.<br />
different. It’s fine if you’re at Kariba with a cold beer in your hand, but<br />
working in it’s a bit hard.”<br />
And flies. In Zimbabwe, his biggest nuisance were the war vets. In Wongan<br />
it’s the pesky bush flies.<br />
“I guess you get used to them in the end,” he says with a laugh, “but they’re<br />
pretty hard to handle when you’re working with both hands and you can’t swat<br />
them away!”<br />
<strong>The</strong> Tonkins grew their first grain crop in WA on a quarter of the rainfall<br />
they’d been used to.<br />
“In Zim we wait for the soil to be full of water - here we plant on a sniff of<br />
moisture.”<br />
<strong>The</strong> 250ml (about a cupful!) they received at Wongan Hills last season came<br />
at the right time and he delivered 2800 tonnes of grain and seed worth about<br />
$A600,000.<br />
If there’s one thing he misses about Zimbabwe it’s the farm dams. In Wongan<br />
it’s bone dry and rivers are non-existent.<br />
“In Zim we’d go down to the dam after work and try for a bass or two,” he<br />
says. “I miss that.”<br />
But the tradeoffs are greater.<br />
“We intend to become naturalised Australians as soon as possible,” he says.<br />
“We are committed to our new life and land.<br />
“We feel safe here. People do not realise how lucky they are in Australia.”<br />
Success: <strong>The</strong> Tonkin’s first crop is heads for market.<br />
mailto:outofafricai@hotmail.com http://www.outofafricai.com out of africa international MARCH - APRIL 2002 9
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