9 March
‘Come on, Possum. Move over!’ Possum has me wedged between her flank and the fence and is resting on me. I’m giving her a midday milk. This is new. Milking Possum has been a giant learning curve. We were quick to realise she was a mistake. First, she had two large horns, two very small teats, and she came with two kids, Earthworm Jim and Hallelujah.
Possum arrived stressed and refused to feed the pair, who bleated pathetically and tried their hardest, even though Possum used those two large horns to defend her two very small teats. I learnt the limitations of reading. My whole life has been about developing an interest in something, and immediately devouring every book I can on the subject. Usually, during the process, I find something else of interest as interests intersect with other interests to form a giant ball of research that never really amounts to anything other than entertaining stories.
Buying books about goats did not assist when buying goats. It wasn’t until later I learnt first fresheners give less milk and are typically less broken in to milking, that small teats you can only get one finger around are not ideal (by week four we had managed to milk all of 20 millilitres), and that Toggenburgs and Anglo Nubians are the noisiest breeds, something Possum, a cross between both, takes very seriously.
We tried to do what Possum’s former owner advised: separate Possum from the kids overnight then milk her in the morning so at least we’d get one milk out of her a day. In theory it sounded easy. For one full hour we listened to the clamour of three distraught goats and felt unbearably cruel. We liberated them and gave the neighbours a dozen eggs each. We tried again, this time during daylight hours. We tied Earth-worm and Hallelujah to the outside of the pen and they managed to stay there a whole day before losing their voices. I ran down every 10 minutes to check the horrible gargle coming out of Hallelujah wasn’t the sound of a strangulation in process. Possum seemed to enjoy the day’s respite, but their noise must have bothered her too, and she threw them around when they got back inside as if to reprimand them for their tiresome behaviour. Still, we failed to milk her. By this stage we were completely cowed and the goat knew it. All pretence at cooperation was dropped as she refused outright to stand still and be milked. Hallelujah had an infected foot on arrival and it never healed. She was incredibly skittish, and went into a frenzy of small horns and hooves every time we attempted to apply curative to the hoof. We gave her to someone more experienced than we. Her departure signalled a turning point in our goat-keeping phase. We gave up. Stressed by Hallelujah’s disappearance, Possum fretted and summarily dismissed Earthworm from all ‘booby feeding’ as Caleb called it. Several days later, her udders were huge and distended. She wouldn’t let us touch her. We couldn’t milk her. We hung out a ‘to give away sign and decided to call the vet.
We were resigned to letting her dry up when Shane dropped around for an early morning visit. He’s an ex-dairy farmer and was in the process of asking Trev for a favour when I quickly dropped in a request of my own. Sure, he’d take a look at her. Two minutes later she was being successfully milked for the first time, streams of it. He made it look easy. She fought, but knew she’d met her match and eventually submitted to the indignity. It was a week before we managed to do it with anywhere near the assurance he had.
Due to her dislike of humans robbing her of milk, Possum would struggle, turn this way and that, lift her hooves and aim for the jug. One of us would straddle her neck and suffer the twist and shove of horn in thigh (Trey) or stomach (me) while the other milked, though, on one memorable occasion, she took off so unexpectedly I couldn’t get either foot on the ground and did a lap of the goat pen on her back. Caleb thought it was hilarious. ‘Do it again, Mum, do it again!’ With my dignity dragged through the small black balls of goat poo, I got back to milking. ‘Why can’t goats just piss milk into a bucket and leave it for me to retrieve, like chooks leave eggs? I grizzle. Why can’t they be like plants and just grow where you put them?’
First, we had to drop all our preconceived notions of how to milk a goat, throw out all the textbook images. Shane taught us to strip her: roll our thumb and forefinger very firmly down the teat and see lovely jets of white milk land in our milking jugs. We used milk as lubricant but found it wasn’t that great, so we used small amounts of olive oil. It worked. The first few jugs were rendered undrinkable by the addition of hoof, but we were away. My textbooks (I referred to them by the hour those first few months) said it was not wise to use stripping as a method of milking, but Shane shrugged and said it would do no harm. I’m still doing it. Compared with Earthworm Jim’s technique of milk extraction, winceable, ours seemed mild.
Earthworm Jim was a delight with his scrambling, tumbling falls and graceful leaps: ‘Did you see him? He clicked his heels in mid-flight!’ He was the first to enjoy a bit of human interaction. Caleb quickly dubbed him ‘his’ and enjoyed climbing over the railing to play with him. Then Earthworm grew hormones. His general rambunctiousness, his amusing cavorting, became dangerous. Caleb learnt the hard way how hard a goat’s head is when it hits yours. He left the pen swearing at Earthworm all the way to the house. ‘I hate you, you fuckin’, you’re not my friend!’ Earthworm began to pick on Possum too. Every time she tried to eat, he pushed her out of the way, shoved his head under hers and tossed his homs into her neck. She was getting skinnier while he was often seen bulging until he looked like one more bite would bring him to point pop.
She got sick of him. When he got his head stuck under the fence and had to be ‘surgically removed’, she tossed him around for five minutes as if to say, ‘Don’t bother doing that again, you little idiot’ Then, unbelievably, he managed to jump onto the shade-cloth sail that covers their pen and motored around head first, pushing himself along with his back legs until he fell off. Possum shook her head in dismay and looked away. He used a tree stump to hijack her, jumping on her back if she walked past. They were often seen in various stages of entanglement, he underneath, his head wearing a pair of painfully large udders as he attempted to walk uphill while she walked down. He became noisier and more demanding, ‘yelling’ out all day for ‘more food, more food.’ If I tried to give Possum a brush, which she loves, Earthworm would shove himself under the brush so he got it instead. He began to butt in earnest. We vowed he would go, and our squeamishness over his demise lessened as his painful behaviour increased. I hung up a give-away sign. But no one wants a castrated male kid with a bad attitude.
Ehren was our saviour. He arrived in his shiny white ute, loaded Earthworm on board and took him to the meatworks where he was turned into chops of various sizes and dog bones. Ehren arrived home and I asked him in a whisper how it had gone. ‘Wow!’ he said, ‘I got there, they came outside, stunned him and cut his throat right there and then.’ ‘Sh!’ I said, but the kids heard and all the stories of ice-cream three times a week came to naught.
Trey ate him, but then we always knew he would. All that’s over now, and we’ve become very fond of Possum. When in the garden she follows our progress, and enjoys the titbits we feed her. She nibbles us gently with her lips, grabbing hold of any piece of clothing she can, and tugging ever so softly. She’s mild and patient, though quick to respond to any change in routine – negatively.
Each morning at 6am I bend over Possum’s rear (from the road it must look disturbingly bestial). With my left hand, I hold the jug, my right does the milking. Trey’s crouched to the left, as he milks the other udder. My udder’s always more fruitful, and it’s a race to see who finishes first. Trey and I discuss the garden, the lack of rain, Possum, the number of flies, the lack of rain, our plans for the day, the lack of rain. It’s become our morning and evening ritual, bending over the back of a goat, expressing milk from reluctant udders, and waxing pessimistic over drought cycles. We’ve added to our routine. Once we’ve milked her we stand up, stretch our backs and give each other a quick morning cuddle. I laugh about how romantic it is standing there, covered in goat hair, amid the little black balls of poo, with Light Orange the deranged chook giving our feet a good peck to check out our food content, and having an opportunistic snuggle.
The milk’s then filtered, measured and chilled. Unless I’m making ricotta, yoghurt or cheese, I don’t pasteurise it. We’ve been keeping notes and records on Possum’s behaviour and milk production. The most she’s produced is 4.2 litres in a day, the least, 1.1.
Goat’s milk isn’t an acquired taste if it’s fresh. It’s certainly sweeter. Caleb developed an aversion to the idea of goat’s milk and requested a glass of cow’s booby milk, please. I resorted to subterfuge, telling him the glass he was handed contained cow’s milk when it didn’t. He consumed every drop, declaring it far superior to that goat stuff. He wasn’t impressed with my smirk and explanation as to the origins of his own milky grin. From then on he was happy to drink it. His daily drink is goat’s milk, raw egg, vanilla and a banana blended up and gulped down.
Caleb became interested in mastering the art of milking. Possum isn’t keen on his ticklish fingers, but he does manage to express 5 mililitres of so before she forces him to desist. One night, when I thought he’d completed his 5ml exercise, I saw him bend down and quickly express milk in one well-aimed shot into his mouth. He came up grinning and I wondered what happened to his former squeamishness about the origins of his glass of milk.
First published 2006 – Hardie Grant
Republished 2025 – Together Press
Available at www.togetherpress.com.au and on Amazon https://tinyurl.com/LTGL2024
