Issue link: https://viewer.e-digitaleditions.com/i/111460
insider o Illustrati ro jimww. n: w k o.u s.c ger Innovation nation Necessity is not Journalist, novelist and public speaker Sue Webster is part of the third generation of a dairying family and director of a company that specialises in agricultural and financial writing. only the mother of invention, it's also the father, the grandpa and the fifth cousin twice removed … In short, it's everything. Equipped with some baling twine, a roll of wire and a pair of used pantyhose, there are few things around the farm that you can't fix. But beyond basic running repairs, there's farm smarts. This involves using things for many purposes … and not always the task for which they were invented. In Alice Springs they're using brightly coloured party balloons to pollinate date palms. The team from the Arid Zone Research Institute is filling party balloons with a mixture of date pollen and flour and then bursting them in front of the female date palm to pollinate the flowers. No chat-up line, not even dinner beforehand. As courtship it leaves a lot to be desired. Nevertheless, researcher Vivek Bhat* is excited. They're hoping the balloon-popping method will mean no-one has to climb up the tree. Meanwhile, down at the other end of the nation, in soggy Gippsland, Wendy uses an old caravan as her chicken coop. She's a dairy farmer and the chooks roam free by day to nourish the paddocks. At night they roost in the caravan, which she tows from place to place around the paddocks. Imagine a caravan designer fronting his boss with a pile of blueprints: "Here's the design for the Gadabout Streamlined Deluxe Family Caravan model … with optional chicken roosts." The other night at my place, there was a leg of lamb in the oven and hungry noises everywhere else. And then the oven door fell off. While there aren't many alternative uses for an axe, I did find one, using it to prop the oven door so I could finish cooking dinner. If only human beings were so dual-purpose … like some of the livestock we've bred. Consider one of my friends, Graham, who worked as a nurse on a settlement about 800 kilometres from Alice Springs. A farm kid from the Coorong in South Australia, he originally trained as a sheet metal worker and then gained nursing qualifications. Stationed at Tjukurla, he not only handled the medical needs, he also fixed the pumps, treated the settlement's many dogs and fixed up the community's battered 4WDs. He was the human equivalent of the oven-propping axe. *I hear he's also a dab hand at table tennis. Can't wait to see what he's got planned for ping-pong balls. 87