The bush IQ test

The old man plants potatoes again, paddocks and paddocks of them. We spend our time picking them up, bagging them, stacking them in boxes, sweating away as we trek up and down the hills. It wasn’t exactly my idea of a holiday at 17, but it got worse.

You see, once you sold off all the good potatoes, you were left with the ones for next year. If a potato has what you call eyes—those little bits that stick out—you can slice it into pieces, and each piece can grow into several potatoes. There were boxes and boxes of these, and a knife, and you just sat there and cut them.

Now, that could be fun if you had a group of people who were fun to cut with, if you could listen to music, crack some jokes. But no, we always got the Brethren or the Selected Brethren or the Selected Selected Brethren, the Knights that say Knee or folks from some other religious group who didn’t like radios, talking, young people, or fun. So, cutting in visceral silence was the order of the day.

One day, there was one box left. Of course, the old biddies, the religious nutters, and those clapping their coconuts all decided to leave and leave the last box to me. So, there I was, utterly alone, sitting under the house with a knife, cutting potatoes.

Then a youth pulled up, and we'll protect names to protect the guilty, so let’s call him Simon Freestone. He came out and saw the last big box of potatoes. “Who would know, Forbes, if it was there or not?” Not a bad idea, Mr. Freestone.

Let’s think about this. We went down to the shearing shed and found an old 44-gallon drum. Inspired by an old trick a neighbour taught us, we decided to have some fun. You get a plastic bag, fill it with aluminium nitrate and diesel, a stick of jelly (which the old man used to blow stumps), a fuse, and off you go.

What we didn’t realize, of course, was that potatoes are an excellent accelerant in an explosion. More attention in chemistry would have helped.

So, we packed these potatoes in the 44-gallon drum, filled all the gaps with aluminium nitrate, flooded it off with diesel, rammed in some gelignite with a long fuse, maybe 20 or 30 meters. Feeling quite clever, we loaded it onto the back of the Ute and took it out into the bush. We found a spot with some trees, some grass, and a bit of space. We rolled out the 44-gallon drum, packed with potatoes, diesel, and aluminium nitrate, detonator and set the fuse.

I kneeled down, Freestone stood behind me, and there was a tree behind him. It went bang! I mean, it went kerfucking Kaboom, like Hiroshima revisited. Everything around us was eviscerated, and hot metal flew everywhere. A piece of the 44-gallon drum slammed into the top of the tree above Freestone’s head so hard you’d never be able to pull it out.

We shook for a while, only a rip in the universe had somehow allowed us to be nharmed……..in many universes we were left as cloud of red mist. Eventually we agreed we had failed the bush IQ test, and suggested it was prudent to keep our mouths shut.

Till today.