Spoilers start appearing as Farmer Wants a Wife nears its climax

As The Farmer Wants a Wife draws closer to the past tense, posts have been popping up trying to spoil the moment. They claim to know who ends up with Farmer David, given the suitor in question has started a job nearby his apple farm.

Another claims to reveal who Farmer Matt from Bookham has ended up with.

It's hardly fair - Channel 7 wants to do that in its own dramatic promos, like the hints farmer Andrew and Claire may be expecting a surprise baby.

Read more: Farmer recap - Andrew splits, Olivia ditched by the family

And for the hundreds of thousands gripped by the adventures of Wollongong woman Olivia Benic, who is trying to win the hand of Matt, it would be awful to blow it.

How could someone simply say whether she's happily ever after, instead of making us watch through all the drawn-out meltdowns before two more competitors are culled first.

We're not going to do that.

But given the end is drawing near and Olivia's been kissing Matt the most, we know she has a fair chance, and wonder what kind of life awaits the winner ... read: what kind of life they have been living in the months since the show actually finished.

Read more: Episode recap as Olivia goes in for the pash

If it is Olivia how's she going on the farm given she says she's not going to "kill anything, particularly spiders"? The merinos will be fine, they're just shorn, but does she know where the black angus end up? Perhaps Matt will tell her they're off to graduate from Bovine University.

And how would you cope leaving the Illawarra's beaches for the arid bushfire country back of Yass? Not well if it was me. Is that why almost a quarter of the population has left Bookham recently?

If it's not Olivia, how could he be happy ever after? What does Matt happy look like anyway?

As we identified from the first episode, Matt's hands aren't the mashed up hands of a farmer. They're fairly delicate and the nails are intact. They don't look like a bunch of kipfler potatoes stuck into some plasticine. So what's he really been up to?

He's said to be a fifth-generation farmer from the bushfire-prone hamlet of Bookham, population 127, west of Yass. That's down from 161 at the 2016 census - almost a quarter of the population. What's driving people out of town?

Have they had to change the sign to say 128, and is it because of a girl from the Gong?

Since 2016 the number of houses has apparently gone down from 80 to 66. What's going on out there? Was this the aftermath of the terrible bushfires which swept through dozens of Bookham farms in 2013?

It seems true that Matt grew up on a farm - he gave an interview to the Country Education Foundation when he was a second-year agriculture student in 2020, and said growing on a black angus (cattle) and fine merino (sheep) farm helped shape him. His dad's clearly a farmer and a clever one too.

Matt said then that he was keen to run his own agricultural enterprise or work on the family farm.

"Having university-level knowledge will be greatly beneficial and provide a good base in sustainable agriculture," he told the CEF.

Back to the present day: If Matt's a farmer now, why was his "uni friend" in a recent family-ish episode? And which university - would it be Charles Sturt University at Wagga Wagga, where he started his degree in agriculture, only to have it disrupted by Covid?

Where would they shack up? Given Matt recently said he was a volunteer in the local Rural Fire Service brigade in Bookham, is it there - with mum and dad? Or is he still studying - perhaps at the University of Canberra at Belconnen, which is the closest university to Bookham?

That would be a sight for sore eyes, Matt driving the farm four-wheeler along the bike paths between university and the Belconnen mall, perhaps getting some air down at the Belco Bowl.

But the black angus and fine merino farm back in 2020 was at Harden - 55km away from Bookham. Surely a country education foundation would know the difference? Perhaps the farm is at Harden and the family home at Bookham, making mum's trip to work teaching at a high school possible each day.

Adding to the uncertainty about Matt's hometown is the fact it's had an identity change itself - it used to be called Bogolong.

The Bogolong Racetrack inspired Banjo Patterson to write his poem Old Pardon, the Son of Reprieve, after the young Banjo was taken to the Bogolong Town Races at age eight.

Pardon, of course, would go on "win the cup", according to the second stanza of Patterson's The Man from Snowy River, a long poem about horses and men made famous by it being mentioned in this week's recap of Farmer Wants a Wife in the Illawarra Mercury.

"There was Harrison, who made his pile when Pardon won the Cup" reads the poem, and while it had been assumed by many that this was the Melbourne Cup, it's almost certainly the Bogolong Town Plate in question.

Bogolong's name would be changed after a village called Cumbookambookinah was started nearby, if we believe Wikipedia, and was eventually shortened to Bookham through general usage.

Bookham today is also the site of a well-known toilet stop on the Hume Highway, about halfway between Wollongong and Albury, which gets some pretty high 4.1 star ratings on google, though some say it's not cleaned as often as it used to be.

There's a few claims to fame. Has the winner moved there to start farm life? Is she reading this to bone up on some local facts before a family dinner, or is Matt still preparing for his agricultural enterprise in a suburb nearby?

The show itself won't be back on again until Sunday night and don't expectant final answers there for a few more episodes yet.

Whoever the winner may be, let's hope they packed a book of AB "Banjo" Patterson poetry.

The Farmer Wants a Wife airs at 7pm Sunday on Seven and streams on 7Plus.