When I was a bit younger(and faster),going bike riding,hunting,and fishing all went together(it still does)We went out to the Maquarie Marshes,in 1981,when they had the last"100year drought",35 years later they are having another one.The other blokes went a day earlier,and I went the next afternoon,and had used my 2 spare tyres by the time I got to Walgett,just before the servo shut,so I got a couple of new tyres.I then headed south in the dark,and managed to only hit 2 roos,out of the hundreds,that lined the road trying to get a feed.
When I got onto the property,there were mobs of pigs everywhere,so I knew I was close to the Marshes,I shot a few,but soon realised that I would run out of 30/30 ammo if I kept shooting.Somehow I found the Boys around midnight,they had bogged the Hilux trying to cross a creek,and spent all day hand winching it out.
At daylight,I unloaded the RM125,and went for a look around,away from the Marsh,it was a barren wasteland,and thousands of acres of the reedy marshland had been burnt,to get some new growth when the marsh flooded.It looked like the surface of the moon,with creeks meandering across the blackened,incredibly rough expanse.The only way to cross the burn't marshland,was flat out,bouncing across the tussocks,similar to riding sand,look ahead,and don't worry about where your front wheel is pointing.
The many creeks were lined with a few metres of green reeds,and were loaded with pigs,as all of the cover was burnt,and once they left the reeds they were hard to see in the black tussocks,any way we got heaps,and had a ball racing across the endless marsh,chasing the pigs.A trick for shooting off a bike is to sling your gun, barrel down,across your chest,so that you just lift it up to shoot,and wear an open face helmet,because you can't aim with a full face.
The creeks were full of European carp,and the best fishing method was to herd the carp towards a couple of blokes armed with 12g pump actions,we tried eating a carp,nothing like yellow belly!
