In the heat of the late February afternoon, I pulled out my phone and began writing a text to a farmer neighbour – let’s call him Barry. “I have just had to chase four of your sheep from our garden once again,” I began.
The four small ewes we had persuaded to go home had forced their way through one part of a 150m or so bit of fence separating our driveway from paddocks owned by another neighbour (let’s call him Gary), who leases Barry his paddocks for grazing.
For a fortnight, we had been finding Barry’s sheep in the garden because the bit of fence wasn’t doing the job. It had almost become a game; not for us, but for the damn sheep.
Wandering stock is not something you have to cope with much as a townie. You might have to put up with early-morning mowers, late-night carousers and yippy-yappy dogs pooing on your berm. But you’re unlikely to wake up, as we have done, to find a neighbour’s cows eating bits of your garden.
Wandering stock generally isn’t too much of a problem in the country either, though in the eight years since moving to Lush Places, we have grown used to Barry’s stock getting on to our place through various routes. There was the calf in 2018. There was the goat the following year. One time it was a dozen or so cattle that came thundering up the drive. Multiple sheep have arrived on multiple occasions. Until that late February afternoon, sorting it out had not been much of an issue; we’ve chased them back, or Barry would come and get them, or we would put them in one of our paddocks until he could.
“The fence running at the back of Gary’s property has very loose wire,” I continued in my text. “You need to sort out the fence asap.”
This, it turned out, wouldn’t be happening. “As it is not my fence, you need to talk to Gary about it. Cheers,” Barry wrote.
Later that same afternoon, Gary, who I didn’t know well, came over to talk. He and I agreed the best thing to do was get the fence fixed as soon as possible; it helped that during our 45-minute chat, Barry’s sheep came through that fence three more times.
This column might be called The Good Life, but the country isn’t all sunshine and lambs and neighbours popping over with freshly baked cinnamon scrolls.
Just like in town, when you share fences, there is always the potential for unpleasant issues – in fact more so, given you could actually have many more neighbours in the country. Our 4.5ha shares fences with seven different properties, including one where they breed enormous prize-winning bulls.
Just like in town, too, the Fencing Act holds sway. It is a blunt instrument: you must pay half to build a fence or to repair one, whatever the circumstances.
Within days of Gary’s visit, Bob, a 24-carat bloke and a meticulous fencer who has done work for us before, was contracted to mend, not just the problem bit, but the entire, L-shaped length of the boundary fence Lush Places shares with Gary’s place.
Bob likes a yarn about fences, as you’d expect, but also about neighbours and fences. He told me about one he has who won’t pay to upgrade their shared boundary fence, which means he loses lambs through it every spring, and the lambs die because they can’t find their mothers.
The cost of Bob’s excellent work will come in at about $2500 total. We will pay our share, as required. Of course we will. But it does feel faintly absurd and somewhat lacking in equity, whatever the law says. After all, we were the only ones finding sheep in the garden.
