Apparently, I am able to drive a registered tractor on the road. Never mind that I have little or no experience with the machine. My C class licence gives me that privilege, and darn it – I intend to use it! The open road unfurls before me, beckoning me to trundle down its bitumen surface in our Kubota at a breathtaking 20km/ hour. Well, our tractor isn’t registered, but I’m sure I can find a local farmer who would loan me theirs for a whirlwind road trip to Warwick and back.

Driving a tractor is soooo easy – my husband reckons, anyway. He asked me to drive the tractor one day in the paddock and just said, “There’s the gears; there’s the brake. You don’t even need to use the accelerator.” And that was my intensive driver training done. So there I was, rolling along in the furrows in the dirt, not steering or using any cognitive functions, while hubby distributed fertiliser from the rear carry-all platform. In my mind, I was thinking of the chores I had to do once we were finished, and what we should have for dinner…

Hmmm, I could always do mashed potato. You can never have too much mashed potato. But are there enough in the cupboard? Have I even looked? That’s the problem with keeping potatoes in a hessian sack; you can’t see at a glance how many spuds are left. You have to rummage around in its chunky folds and encounter soft squishy things that you’d rather not know about… And then there’s the dirt that breathes out through the material and leaves a fine brown dust all over the shelf.

Meanwhile, the tractor was getting down the end of the paddock that is always boggy and doesn’t drain well. In between contemplations of dinner I observed the way the mud sort of flowed around the base of the tractor tyre there. Is it normal to have a sort of backwash of sludge like that? And next thing, hubby was saying, “Stop! You’re getting us bogged.” And lo, and behold, when I looked at the back of the tractor, the carry-all was digging into the ground and we seemed to be going not forwards, but sort of downwards.

I tried to reverse back and then come forward again. No good. Hubby sighed and ordered me to step aside to let the expert fix the problem. I climbed out and watched as he changed gears, stood up, sat down, rocked forward and sighed again. We got some planks of wood to wedge under the rear tyres. The tractor spat mud on them but did not want to climb out of its hole I had dug for it. I know tractors are pretty versatile machines but I’m fairly sure they are not amphibious, and also not designed for burrowing into the centre of the earth. But this one was giving it a darn good go, with its axles embedded in the mire and the whole chassis squatting firmly on the hill of soil. We were meant to have vegetables growing there, but it looked like we had planted a mass of steel, hoping to grow a John Deere or something with more grunt.

And do I need to mention this was the day that we decided to drive to the vege paddock in the car, not the ute? So hubby had no shovels or miscellaneous tools with which to extricate the tractor. No chain, no hefty 4 WD to help manoeuvre things. I felt a familiar sense of wishing I was somewhere completely different, somewhere far, far away in a distant universe perhaps.

Well, I decided – clearly there’s more to driving tractors than we first thought.

I often wonder what my husband was thinking when he married me. If I had to go through a rigorous interview process I doubt I would have made the short list, let alone been successful in securing a position. But maybe hubby was considering my other qualities when he gave me a go.

Interview for position of Farmer’s Wife:

Do you ride a horse? No.

Do you ride a motorbike? No.

Do you know much about cattle or other livestock? No, but I have had various pets over the years.

Are you experienced in fixing fences? Does a paddle-pop stick creation in primary school count?

Do you have experience in growing, harvesting or packing produce? Well…. I can pack a shopping bag of veges quite efficiently so the bananas don’t get squashed on the bottom.

Are you a hard worker? No comment.

Are you willing to learn new things about rural life? Yes…

Oh, all right then. You don’t look too ugly.

And that’s how I ended up where I am today. Admittedly I was also a tad shallow in my estimations of what a farmer’s wife would do. Maybe stand around and look supportive… I do recall that the way hubby’s red football shorts fit his muscular physique was a factor in my decision to marry him, so much so that I mentioned it in the speech at my wedding reception. (In hindsight, I realise I could have been a tiny bit more discreet.)

So, it’s been a big learning curve for both of us. I discovered what exactly farmers do – quite a lot of intensive hard work… and worry - and hubby realised what ex-city chicks do – spend time on the computer and point out all the cute calves (that are really almost fully grown steers). Somehow between the two of us, we have managed to appreciate our different skills. And maybe, just one day, I will get the hang of this tractor driving thing.

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