IN the 1983 drought I had cattle scattered across the Northern Tablelands and its coastal valleys.
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One of the less fortunate mobs was on "Main Camp", below Tenterfield, then owned by a West Australian goat entrepreneur.
He selected the place because of the Cataract River.
He said "I will be the last man alive, lying in the bottom of the deepest hole gazing up at the sun".
The image left a deep impression on me.
He has gone, but we survived, following a deluge in May 1983.
This time, the north has no haven as a tsunami of drought engulfs us all.
The fastest spring failure I have seen sees missing ancestral crowbars and pliers surfacing in the dust.
Last month, as I tagged more than 600 head in a rushed three weeks of sale and relocation to southern Victoria I thought of how things have altered since 1983.
Each time I closed the pliers on a $3 National Livestock Identification tag I thought of the fools who introduced a scheme that handicaps us on the export market and proves nothing.
I thought of the $3 tags lying in rotting carcases, multiplying by the thousands per day across Queensland and NSW.
I thought of the $4.29 a kilogram for steers with no tags in the US, while my similar steers brought $1.70/kg.
I thought of the US cattleman's December 52 per cent share of the consumer dollar while I got 25pc, information Meat and Livestock Australia (MLA) only published once.
The retail duopoly gouges some of the highest beef prices in the world while government does nothing.
I thought of drought-stricken Queensland colleagues quarantined into bankruptcy for possible bovine Johne's disease connections in a repeat of the odious ovine Johne's disease saga in the south.
I thought of the NSW move to Local Land Services (LLS) so producers will pay the salaries of former Department of Primary Industries, Catchment Management and Livestock Health and Pest Authority officers with no control over what they provide in return.
We will be paying our own hangman.
I explained the importance of movement of stock and fodder in Australia in evidence to productivity commissioners on the Drought Assistance Inquiry some years ago.
They politely listened, but their eyes betrayed their knowing better than my 60 years experience and the aborigines' thousands of years of migration with seasons.
I thought of huge subsidies to farmers in Europe, of the US Farm Bill, of the Brazilian Development Bank loans to farmers, of Chinese and Japanese assistance to farmers.
I thought of the National Party's compulsory unionism model for MLA and now LLS and their relentless "sell out" of farmers since the National Farmers Federation's 1978 establishment in Canberra.
Barnaby Joyce has a lot of fence mending to do.
His appointment of an ag advisory council free of agripoliticians is a good start.
John Carter is a columnist for The Land.
