Christmas Appeal
Posted on 13 December 2019
The plight of our farmers has never been so heartbreakingly dire, and we needed to help make their Christmases lighter by getting behind them. Laverty’s Pathology, Port Base Hospital have been running a drought relief drive and the OCR Social Committee pledged their support.
Our farmers need everything including groceries (non perishables), household products, pet food, toiletries, Christmas goodies and presents - even toilet paper! The cut off date was 14 November to allow for collection and delivery.
As always, our homeowners never disappoint, however, we imagine with the lack of rain, our farmers will need continued support.
A Tamworth resident wrote the following:
“We live 10km out of Tamworth. Our garden is dying, we have no grass except the little bit watered by the grey water outflow. Everything is dusty and so dry. I have been buying water for most of the last year, every month another truckload.
Normally you don’t see ‘roos except at dawn and dusk – now we see them any time of the day, they have come out of the hills and are in the paddocks,
eating the last of the tall dead grass. Huge mobs.
They are even coming into town, eating any grass or plants they can find. They are desperate.
Even the indigenous trees are dying. Driving in through the pass in the hills behind Tamworth, the gums on the ridgelines are starting to die – dead
leaves, dead branches on almost every tree.
There are no frogs – the last six months we have hardly heard any frogs at all.
We are losing things that are precious to us – the breed lines for the farmers, the special trees and plants in our gardens and parks, the lovely green
lawns we used to have. It seems so long since we have seen green grass, since we have heard rain on the metal roof. It is a hard slog, minimising water
use, shuffling buckets of water out to the remaining treasured plants, knowing that it may all be useless unless the rain comes.”