![]() In terms of the film, Cosner has never had a better role, Lancaster as Doc Graham finally showed what a great actor he really was, and James Earl Jones was simply perfect. ![]() ![]() The film is not about baseball, it is about a second chance ! An opportunity to say hiya Dad, I was didn't know then, but I'm older now and understand more about the way the world works. I'm English, so for me the baseball element was lost, but what did hit home was the awareness that we are all flawed people, and the expectations we have for our parents, are way and beyond what we achieve ourselves as we grow older. When I first saw this movie, my father was still alive, we had not spoken for 8 years, and I thought, cute, but it knows nothing about real life ! When I saw it again, he had been dead for over a year, and I cried like a baby. “Perhaps the present era should be labelled ‘the IT Farming Revolution’.Very rarely, you see a film that means one thing when your father is alive, and another when he is dead. “The current use of technology in farming is utterly amazing,” he says. Still, he appreciates the contribution of new technologies such as drones and robotics. With a small farm on the NSW Central Tablelands, King maintained a life on the land until 2013 when he sold – at the age 85, the physical demands of the job were too difficult. King sold Nilgie Park in 1969 and moved to Sydney where he helped establish a successful futures broking firm. The drought foreshadowed the end of the good times: prices fell, costs rose and droughts became more frequent. This way they put on weight and I was able to sell them.” ![]() “I decided to move my stock into feed yards and feed them using troughs. “Farmers used to spread their drought rations on the ground for the stock to eat, but that had real downsides,” King says. Majoring in animal nutrition under Professor Franklin, a pioneer in drought-feeding research, helped King when the drought hit in 1965. “Flock testing was unconventional at the time because it emphasised breeding for financial return.” “Previously, flocks had been bred for a standard look,” King explains. King worked on his farm during university holidays, putting his knowledge to work through new practices such as flock testing, whereby flocks are bred to emphasise genetic traits such as fleece weight. “I wanted to know more about what made the world go around and why people did the things they did.” “I left school at 15 and felt it was too early,” he says. With the loan on Nilgie Park paid and two men employed to run the farm, King returned to Sydney to study in 1953. King’s second wool cheque was double the amount he had paid for the property. The early 1950s saw the massive ‘pound for a pound’ Korean War wool boom. ![]() King had just £300 but raised the finance to purchase. It was 1949 and he was just 20 with three years as a jackaroo under his belt when Nilgie Park came on the market for £13,500. He was prompted to move to the country – far from where he lived in Sydney’s Manly – by a city clerking job at one of Australia’s most important pastoral firms, Australian Mercantile Land & Finance. Hugh King (BScAgr ’58) wasn’t a farmer when he purchased Nilgie Park, a sheep station at Mungindi, some 600 kilometres north-west of Sydney. Putting new ideas into practice helped Hugh King weather some hard times and make the most of his farm. ![]()
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