Cowaramup

I thought the names in New Zealand were weird until I came to Australia.  Cowaramup, Wilyabrup, Marangaroo, Yallingup, Metricup, Gnarawary to name a few weird ones I’ve encountered.  Wilyabrup is where Woodlands is located, and down the road a ways in Cowaramup, where I will be living.  Eventually I will be living here:

This amazing rammed earth cottage out in the middle of about 200 acres of land, apparently with sheep during some parts of the year, particularly lambing season, which I am already excited about even though it is months away.   I will be living here with Kirsten, the cellar door manager from Florida, after her current roommates move out later this month.  I was invited to the house for a little gathering of Kirsten’s neighbors and friends and the neighbors’ friends, who came down for the weekend from Perth.  A couple of them are from Tauranga, New Zealand, where I was last year for about 3 months… small world. 

This next section is not for the faint of heart.  You were warned.  Kirsten and her boyfriend have quite a few chickens, and decided to reduce their stock that night so they invited over the owner of the property to help with this.  A couple little boys were there playing with the chickens and got to select the victims.  Some of the gatherers participated in various parts of the process and the others watched as they were hung from a tree by their feet, their heads were held to stretch the necks out, and they were decapitated.  We’ve all heard the phrase “running around like a chicken with its head cut off;” this is no joke.  For about a full minute after losing their heads, the chickens fluttered their wings and thrashed around from their dangling points on the tree.  After this calmed down they would still twitch every once in a while for the next few minutes.  After the chickens were fully limp, they were taken down, soaked in hot water for a minute to loosen the feathers, dunked in cool water so as not to be cooked, and they were plucked.  After all the feathers were gone and the meat was bare, they were gutted with a special process of cutting off the feet, cutting around where the tail was and pulling everything out of the middle, then tucking the wings in and putting the legs through slots made in the skin.  Right before our eyes they were transformed from fluffy, clucking, walking creatures to pieces of white raw meat as you would see in a grocery store… welcome to Australia!  

The rest of the evening was fun as we sampled some wines, socialized, played table tennis, and ate the product of their hard work.

I got back to Andrew’s cottage, where I’m staying for a night or two, and he asked if the possum had bothered me at all.  I said, um, no, what possum, and he pointed to the ceiling in the kitchen, where a tail was hanging down through a small hole!  Then we noticed next to it was a tiny little tail, of the possum’s baby!  Again, welcome to Australia!

The name Cowaramup clearly has something to do with cows… I’m not sure how exactly the name came about, but cows are the general symbol of the town, particularly this statue in the middle of the park in town:

It is the product of a local artist in response to a controversial statue of a naked lady in a diving position on a similar platform that was ridiculed by about half the local public (the other half liked it).  That one was named as “Free as a bird” but was more commonly called “Chick on a stick,” so the cow was named “Free as a cow,” and is more commonly known as “Rump on a Stump” or “Roast on a Post.”