Prince Harry reveals he refused to castrate calves on Outback Queensland cattle station in Spare

Prince Harry has revealed the one job he didn’t dare do during his stint as a teenage jackaroo in Outback Queensland: castrating calves.

Between leaving Eton College and joining the British Army, the Duke of Sussex spent nine weeks at Tooloombilla Station as a 19-year-old in late 2003.

The 16,000-hectare cattle property 150km northwest of Rome was owned by Annie and Noel Hill, who had been friends with their late mother Diana, Princess of Wales.

Annie Hill had been Diana’s roommate when she was first courted by Harry’s father, then the Prince of Wales, and now King Charles III. Mr. Hill’s father had been a professional polo player who taught Charles the sport.

Harry writes in his new memoir, Spare, that Charles discouraged him from attending university after leaving school, and instead suggested that he take a gap year.

“It was no secret, he tactfully told me, that I was not ‘the intellectual of the family,'” Harry writes in Spare. ‘He didn’t mean to hurt me. Still, I shuddered.

Harry had planned to spend six months on an Australian farm, away from the prying eyes of the paparazzi, and six months in Africa, where he would continue his mother’s charity work.

When the young prince arrived at Tooloombilla, twice the size of his family’s Scottish estate, Balmoral, he soon realized that it would be nothing like Eton.

The Hills had three children, Nikki, Eustie, and their eldest son, George, who, despite being Harry’s age, would become his boss, mentor, and tutor.

The first change in their circumstances that caught Harry’s attention was the searing heat. Coming from a cool climate, he was now forced to work in furnace-like conditions.

Fortunately, Harry was allowed to stay in the Hills’ main house, which he describes as a charming little bungalow, while his bodyguards were trapped in an outbuilding on the edge of the station.

Harry writes that he felt uncomfortable at dinner when the conversation inevitably turned to his mother, who had died in a car accident in Paris six years earlier.

A typical work day began in the hours before dawn with Harry and George completing as many tasks as possible before dawn.

The pair would then saddle up and head off to round up cattle, which sometimes did not end well if a beast strayed from the herd.

“Occasionally, in the heat of the chase, you’d fall out of your saddle hitting a low branch and sometimes knock yourself unconscious,” Harry writes.

Upon recovering from such a fall, Harry would check his body for broken bones or internal bleeding. Some days the only person he saw at the station was George.

As Harry immersed himself in the life of the station, there was a job he refused to do.

“The only job I didn’t take care of, the only difficult task I avoided, was cutting off their testicles,” he writes in Spare. ‘Every time George pulled out that long shiny blade, he would throw up on my hands. No way, man, I can’t. You do it.’

At the end of a long day, Harry and George would eat dinner and then sit on the veranda rolling cigarettes and drinking cold beers. They were in bed at 8:30 p.m.

Harry writes that he lost so much weight from the backbreaking work that he felt himself wasting away and began to look and sound more like George the stockman than an English prince.

Harry’s hair had never fully recovered after being shaved off by his Eton classmates. Some strands stood up and others stuck to her head.

After a trip to Taronga Zoo while attending a Rugby World Cup match in Sydney, the prince posed for a photo with an echidna that had been named ‘Spike’ because of its quills.

George saw the photograph and thought that Harry looked like the echidna and named him Spike, just like his bodyguards.

Harry started calling himself Spike on the walkie-talkie when talking to his security team, some of whom had T-shirts that read ‘Spikes 2003’.

Eventually, the name even caught on with Harry’s friends and some of his family in England.

A Facebook profile that existed between 2008 and 2012 under the name ‘Spike Wells’ and is believed to have been used by the prince had friends with some of Britain’s richest young men.

Harry’s planned stay at Tooloombilla was interrupted by the appearance of paparazzi. In December, police found an intruder at the station, and two more broke in the next day.

Not wanting to expose the Hills to an invasion of their privacy, Harry flew home to England, arriving days before Christmas.

“I’ve had a great time working here, meeting people and learning a bit about being a jackaroo,” Harry said in a statement at the end of the trip.

And of course the rugby was absolutely fantastic. It’s a big country.