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I thoroughly enjoyed my three week WWOOFing stint at Bookara Goat Farm. The main jobs were milking, as you would expect, and cheese making along with other tasks such as weeding and digging over the vegie patch. I have done home cheese making in the past so it was interesting to see how it’s managed on a larger scale. Hopefully the customers that eat ‘my’ cheese will find it to their liking and maybe one lucky customer will notice the little smiley face on the surface of the goats curd: it was a tad subtle but signified cheese packed with love and care. Gary – he of the strangled and most un-cockerel like cockle-do-da-doing – set off the alarm well before the allotted 4:45 rising time required for a 5am milking start. But what can you do? Just get up and get on with milking, basically. I found milking the most fun at Bookara with the time taken for the morning or afternoon sessions predominantly dictated by the rhythm of the machines and the pace of the goats. Despite these dependencies, I enjoyed the challenge of being part of a two-person shift working to squeeze the maximum efficiency from the process. My first shift was 3 and a half hours and the final one an hour and 45 minutes. We were flying but the goats were given the time they needed and 100L of milk flowed smoothly into the vat. I can’t deny that I found udders fascinating, which was influenced by fellow WWOOFer Fumi’s playful interest in these productive appendages. Like us girls, some goat’s udders are large, some are petite and they present themselves in a diversity of shapes. Should there perchance be a need to assist a teat or two in its delivery of milk – there is a temptation to be tactile around udders – then you would find them soft and warm. Most goats were reasonably tolerant of my fumbling attempts but Fumi, with her emergency nursing background, was the queen of hand milking bringing patience and sensitivity to the task. My overwhelming feeling in relation to the milking was that it was a privilege to have had the chance to work in a dairy. Milk and cheese are basics of my diet and it’s good to have more understanding of what it takes to produce these staples. The people were the icing on the cake of the Bookara experience. The roster board (see photo) delightfully reflects the international team that the owners, Mark and Kate, regularly collect around them: Japanese, Welsh-Australian, Belgian, Canadian, Swiss, Singaporean and Hong Kongese with French, English, German and Taiwanese not long departed. Such is the spirit of Bookara that, despite language barriers and many cultural differences, we worked hard together to keep the milk flowing and the cheese curdling. More people around means a few more photos of me – just to prove that I really am on this trip and not just making it all up whilst based in Adelaide.