Outback Magazine – August 2018

GREAT FATHER’S DAY OFFER INSIDE

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RIDING THE INLAND TIDE

Oldfields of Cowarie

Music in the bush Chasing desert brumbies Kimberley Coastal Camp

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C O N T E N T S

Goats run free at dawn, Bunda station, NT. Photo by Ken Eastwood.

UP FRON T 8

OUTBA CK LI FE

EDITOR’S LETTER

80 NATURE Tree kangaroo rescue

11

FEEDBACK Readers’ letters

82

20

ROUNDUP Outback news

34

UP CLOSE Where beef is king: King Island, Tas

PHOTO ESSAY Brumby chasers

96 PROFILE Quiet achiever: James Beale 100 PEOPLE Pearl mistress: Alison Brown 102 PEOPLE Yard boss: Noel Cuffe

O UT TH E RE 40

OUTBACK STORY Waltzing Australia: music in the bush

62 STATIONS Riding the inland tide: Cowarie station, SA

76 HORIZONS Signs of the times: Arnhem Land sign language

106 ART Rusty resurrection: Jordan Sprigg 108 BUSINESS Respite from the land: Farm Sitters 110 BUSINESS Far out fashion: So You Consulting 112 AT WORK A Stirling idea: oyster farming, Merimbula, NSW

116 HISTORY Promised lands: German wagon migration

A U G U S T - S E P T E M B E R

2 0 1 8

WA L KAB OU T

OUT BA CK

120 GEAR For the kids

150 BUSH KIDS

122 TRAVEL Laid-back adventuring:

151 MAILBOXES

Kimberley Coastal Camp

152 DOGS

130 TRAVEL Verdant valley: Mitta Valley, Vic

154 BUSH WEDDINGS

137 MOTORING Toyota Hilux heroes

155 BOOTS

138 TOWN Michelago, NSW

156 WATCH OUT FOR ... Events around Australia

140 PUB The right brew: Forrest Brewery, Vic

158 OUTBACK CROSSWORD NO.53

142 GARDENS Eden on the Warrego: Cunnamulla, Qld

144 R.M.WILLIAMS Moree mainstay: Assef’s 146 DINING Finding their whey: Grandvewe Cheeses, Tas

160 BOOKS 162 POETRY The old wood stove 170 LAUGH-LINES Fast food

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E D I T O R I A L

M

emories of music bubble through my life. I imagine we can all think of favourite songs or pieces of music that are poignant, or exciting, or sad; music that reminds us of places and times and people and emotions. Music that takes us away from ourselves, and music that reminds us of who we are, or were, or hope to be. In our Outback story on music in the bush (p40–61), associate editor – and accomplished musician – Ken Eastwood writes that, “Music’s power and beauty lies partly in its ability to get around our conscious selves, to seep into our being and become part of us, shaping the way we move, think and behave.”

This resonates with me. My mother is a fine musician, and my love of music was formed on her knee. She is a gifted pianist with a beautiful voice. To this day she heads down to the hospital in Penola, SA, with her friend Judith Georgeson to play and sing with the people there. My grandmother, too, was a talented pianist and organist. All were schooled in the Western tradition, all are influenced by the space and beauty of the Australian bush. Ken goes on to write, “For tens of thousands of years, life in the bush, and the country itself, has inspired songs and music across all genres … The music of the bush is wildly eclectic and, like an ancient river red gum, it has twisted roots and intertwining branches, but at its core it suckles from the sun-kissed Aussie soil itself.”

I was up in the Kimberley recently, suckling on sun-kissed soil and working up a story on the Kimberley Coastal Camp (p122–128). Turns out Jules van Duuren – who with her partner Tubs White owns and runs the camp – was a professional singer for 17 years.

Sitting around a fire beneath the wheeling Kimberley stars, listening to Jules sing to the sky remains a highlight of that trip, though the fresh mud crabs were pretty good, too…

I can’t quite remember who said it to me, but for years I’ve had this notion in my head that a well-rounded individual should be able to sing a song, recite a poem, sail a boat, ride a horse, and fire a rifle. Some of these skills are probably more useful than others, depending on where you are and what you’re doing. But I like the idea, and have endeavoured to develop half a grip on them, with varying degrees of success. I’m glad to say that in my experience OUTBACK readers, and the people whose stories we share, are more likely than most to have the full set.

PATRON Ken Cowley AO EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Mark Muller SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR Terri Cowley ART DIRECTOR Peter Pap ASSOCIATE EDITOR Ken Eastwood SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR Therese Hall PRODUCTION & DESIGN Clare Das Neves CARTOGR APHER Yvette Salt NATIONAL ADV ERTISING CONTACTS National Sales Manager Bronte Smith: 0414 383 619 smithbk@bigpond.net.au Advertising Assistant Lesley Henry: (02) 9028 5435 ACCOU NTANT Ian Hannaford ACCOU NTS ASSISTANT Rhonda Traversi SUBSCRIPTIONS COORDINATOR Andrea Wallace SUBSCRIPTIONS ASSISTANT Michelle Higgins CONTRIBUTORS Martin Auldist, Amanda Burdon, John Dunn, Nathan Dyer, Shane Eecen, David Hancock, Robert Lang, David Kelly, Russell Kelly, Simone Kelly, Mandy McKeesick, Bruce McMahon, Jack Newnham, Edwina Robinson, Ockert Le Roux, Kerry Sharp, Gretel Sneath, Leeroy Todd, Grenville Turner PRINTING OUTBACK is printed by PMP Limited under ISO14001 Environmental Certification.

Paper fibre is from certified forests and audited sources.

Mark Muller Editor-in-Chief

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BEHIND THE SCENES

ISSN 1441-1776

R.M.Williams Publishing Pty Ltd ACN 068 461 263

Associate editor Ken Eastwood has been around the country for this issue, visiting Bunda Station, NT (Prof ile, p94), King Island, Tas (Up Close, p32), and various locations in SA and NSW for the Outback story (p40). One of his highlights was interviewing the grand lady of country music, Joy McKean (pictured above), at the Slim Dusty Centre in Kempsey.

Before leaving home for the 2000km round trip to Cowarie Station (Stations, p62), on the Birdsville Track, Port Lincoln photographer Robert Lang slipped over to Coff in Bay for seven dozen fresh oysters.

They were well received by the Oldfields, who hosted Robert and journalist Gretel Sneath while they reported on the arrival of the Channel Country floodwaters.

CONTACT US Level 11, 52 Alfred Street Milsons Point 2061 Phone: (02) 9028 5400 Fax: (02) 9028 5431 Website: www.outbackmag.com.au R.M.Williams website: www.rmwilliams.com.au Editorial: publishing@rmwilliams.com.au Advertising: smithbk@bigpond.net.au Subscriptions: subscribe@rmwilliams.com.au Accounts: rtraversi@rmwilliams.com.au COVER: Fun on Cowarie Station: (l-r) Craig Oldfield, partner Maria Madsen, Craig’s brother Christopher and his partner Kristy Pinjuh relax in a waterhole. Photo by Robert Lang.

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F E E D B A C K

WIN AN AKUBRA The letter judged the best in each issue wins an Akubra hat. Email editor Mark Muller at mmuller@rmwilliams.com.au or send your letter to Feedback, R.M.Williams Publishing, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015. Include contact details (your address and phone number). If you are sending a digital photo with your letter, don’t print it out – email it instead. Letters may be edited for length and clarity. Not all will be published.

WINNER

Astonished by Chinese Morrison

Although I’ve read OUTBACK for many years and loved all of the stories about a vast range of topics, I have never taken pen to paper until now. The astonishing story of George Morrison enthralled me so much that I read it again and again, and I’m amazed that I and my peers have never heard of him. His relatively short life was so meaningful and adventurous that I’m sure it would make a great movie or television documentary. Hopefully Belinda Ingpen takes it further.

Michael Cripps, Cronulla, NSW

Trust in R.M.Williams boots

We have just opened our first OUTBACK magazine, courtesy of our son Jamie and his wife Bel, who kindly organised a subscription for us.

We really enjoyed reading every page

– both informative and very interesting.

Much appreciated.

Many years ago, when waiting for a flight in LA Airport, one gentleman next to me requested that I look after his precious bag while he went the men’s room. No problem – only too pleased to help. When he returned to collect his valuables, I asked, “How can you trust a complete stranger with your precious bag?”. Would you believe his reply was, “You are wearing R.M.Williams boots, so I can certainly trust you”. True story, and I had never seen this man before then and have never seen him since.

We have been wearing R.M.Williams boots and clothing ever since buying our first outfit from Reginald Williams in Toowoomba more than 30 years ago.

Please keep up the good work.

Bob Gunson, Onga Onga, Hawkes Bay, New Zealand

STATE LIBRARY OF NSW PX*D 153/2

A beautifully illustrated letter and envelope from Mikko Lindell, Docklands, Vic.

Adventurer, doctor, journalist and ambassador George ‘Chinese’ Morrison, aged approximately 25.

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Amelia Olsen and her son Riley at the tip of Cape York.

Top memories

In May, my son Riley and I rode 1000 kilometres on motorbikes from Cairns to Cape York. After my husband took his own life almost three years ago, we didn’t deliberately set out to tick the remaining boxes on our bucket list, but one by one the opportunities have arisen and it seemed fitting to push forward and complete this last epic goal.

There is no closure on suicide. But this was the best we could do to honour the memory of my husband and my children’s dad, kiss him goodbye, wish him well and find some kind of freedom for the next part of life.

Thank you to Cape York Motorcycle Adventures for our incredible trip to the tip. The level of difficulty was well and truly above our ability as riders, but owner/operator Roy and tour guides Ned, Jake and Westy gave us the trip of a lifetime. It was a challenge to say the least, and I gratefully took the easier option on the day that the boys rode the Telegraph Track.

Many thanks to: my good mate Llew for the rider preparation; Dymo for helping us get the right bike; Col from South Burnett Motorcycle Rider Training for getting both Riley and me road-ready; Mum for allowing me to be a gutsy girl; and Dad for teaching me to be a lady among men. To the friends we made on our tour, your encouragement and understanding was appreciated. Thanks for sharing fabulous memories that will last a lifetime.

Amelia Olsen, Kilkivan, Qld

Boots made for marching

Last Anzac Day I went to Melbourne for the march. I ran into a couple of young reservists helping out with the crowd.

Looking down at their boots I thought to myself, ‘I know those boots’. Yes, they were RMs. I approached the boys and found out those boots are now part of regulation issue. Well done to R.M.Williams and the Defence Forces.

Vincent Booth, Mornington, Vic

Solar future

The Innamincka Hotel has proved beyond doubt that the future of renewable energy in Australia is as bright as the sunlight shining on its solar panels. Their success demonstrates what can be achieved when we choose to embrace a sustainable future.

Michael Wouters, Cootharaba, Qld

St Margaret’s PRE-PREP - YEAR 12

Back of Bourke

Thanks for the memories. Issue 118 certainly stirred up plenty for me.

I was born in Walgett, NSW, grew up around Goodooga, and spent three years at the Brewarrina Convent in the early ’50s. Many early mornings I’d be searching for the convent cow, often finding her along the river near the Ngunnhu fish traps, then would get her back to the cow yard and I would still make 7 o’clock mass.

I landed at Tooraweenah on many occasions in the latter half of the ’50s in an Avro Anson and later a DC3 on the way to and from boarding school in Sydney. There were quite a few hairy moments in the hot weather, as the updrafts there were legendary, but the Butlers pilots always did a fantastic job.

Arthur Butler was a great bloke.

Later in life, Bourke and Brewarrina played a big part in my life as Goodooga was in their local rugby league competition.

The front cover photo of the great old North Bourke Bridge enticed me to purchase this copy of OUTBACK. Many good times were spent crossing that bridge. We pulled up at the pub there as it was the last waterhole on the road home.

Sheep and cattle sales played a big part in our lives and Bourke was a major centre – a good town then and seems to be just as good now. I remember when 2WEB came on the air, it was a good break from the ABC, but you had to check your own watch during the early days when those first kids were learning to tell the time. It was worth the minor inconvenience for the country and western music – mostly Slim Dusty.

The article on Lightning Ridge artists Viki and John Murray was great too – it’s good to see them back and thriving.

My brother Bob does a bit of work for John on the really big murals, filling in the background, sky, etc.

Keep up the fabulous work.

Chris Barrett, Toowoomba, Qld

BOARDING YEARS 5-12

From the farm gate to the school gate, we’ve been caring for the daughters of rural Australia for over 120 years.

Starry, starry night

I took this photo (below) a couple of nights ago in Braidwood, NSW, at our property called Huntervale.

Harry Shoemark, Braidwood, NSW

Standing proud beneath the Milky Way.

Now Boarding Years 5 - 12

11 Petrie St, Ascot, Brisbane • www.stmargarets.qld.edu.au Tel: +61738620777 • admissions@stmargarets.qld.edu.au

St Margaret’s School Council Ltd ABN: 69069684019 CRICOS Code: 00511K

F E E D B A C K

Gordon Shaw discusses Mawari horses in India.

Wild riding

My wife, our two sons and I recently went to India for the first time, mostly travelling in the north-western state of Rajahstan. One of the places we stayed was a beautiful homestay in Udaipur, which was the home of Major Durga Das and his wife Jyoti.

The first evening we were talking about riding the Mawari horses of India, and how they had similarities to Australian stockhorses. The Mawari horses are beautiful, and are very distinctive, as their ears curve inwards at the top and almost touch.

We started explaining polocrosse to Durga, who listened very intently. He then told us about his experience in the cavalry in the Indian Army. The Indian Army had a course in ‘Equitation’, which involved attaining high levels of competence in a number of equestrian disciplines. One of these was pig sticking, which was developed during the time of the British Raj in India in the 1800s and banned in the 1980s. It involved men on horseback armed with spears running down wild boar. The basic rules were to ride into the grassland and try to spear a wild pig.

The person who drew first blood, or the one who speared the heaviest boar was declared the winner. Riders and horses often fell and the ferocious pigs attacked, so riders risked injuries and even fatalities. You had to be a fantastic horseman with an extremely agile, fast and courageous horse to take part.

Durga described his hunt, which took place in the early 1980s just before it was banned. It was on an uninhabited island in the sacred Yamuna River, which runs through Delhi in the north of India. The island was thick with elephant grass. At dawn the riders assembled in a long column two by two and entered the river for a 200-metre walk through the river to the island. This was potentially treacherous as there was quicksand in many places. Durga said it was a wonderful sight, some 200 riders in two columns riding through the river, spears glinting in the morning sun.

Once on the island they lined up abreast in teams of 10 in front of dignitaries who were spectating on elephants. Beaters were employed at the other side of the island to flush out the pigs. Teams took off into the tall grass as the pigs came. One team came to a deep ravine and a horse and rider somersaulted into it, the rider sustaining a broken collarbone, and the horse taking off back to the river, where it was sucked down by the quicksand and rescued by a farmer with his tractor.

Durga’s team didn’t win, but he remembers this as the most exciting day he had ever had on a horse!

Gordon Shaw, Jindera, NSW

F E E D B A C K

Country hospitality

I am the scout leader at 1st Austinmer Scout Group, located in the northern suburbs of Wollongong.

Early in 2017, the scouts suggested our annual family camp should be out in the country; maybe on a farm.

Well, come July last year, my wife Sylvia and I were staying at the caravan park in Yowah, Qld, making damper and billy tea around the camp fire for the afternoon blow-ins. One afternoon a number of adults and children were around the fire and we got talking about geocaching and scouts. A couple of the children told us they lived on a farm at Red Heart, Tullamore, NSW. I then explained that our scouts would love to visit a farm. We were then introduced to Amanda and Peter Thomas, who invited us to stay at Red Heart in the school holidays.

There were seven families – 23 people in total, with caravan, camper trailer and tents.

As planned, we ventured to Coonabarabran for four days, staying in the Gateway Caravan Park, where the owners couldn’t do enough for us. From there to Red Heart, and the welcome was amazing. Everyone camped near the house and for five days we gained a glimpse of life on the farm, where the food on our table comes from, and how it is produced.

Everyone had a go at driving the Ferguson tractor and 4WD side by side, yabbying and doing sheep work (putting rings on, ear tags, injections) before Peter gave us a demo shearing a sheep. Then it was up the road to the neighbour’s place, a cropping farm, where we looked at the various crops and the massive machinery required to harvest. We also visited

Golden moment

Using a drone I took this photo of our farm as the sun was setting.

Junaya Ireland, Wallerwang, NSW

Western Plains Zoo, the geographic centre of New South Wales to find a geocache, and on the last day our farewell lunch was at the Rabbit Trap Hotel in Albert.

A chance meeting with a remarkable family created a true country experience that will be talked about for years.

Neville ‘Nifty’ Brown OAM, Austinmer, NSW

Open case

Thanks for a wonderful magazine. I have all issues of your magazine from the launch issue, kept in cases handmade by my dad and me. Each case contains 10 issues. A few are still empty, because we got a bit carried away making them and made a few extra – enough storage until issue 170!

Peter Thomas, of Red Heart at Tullamore, demonstrates shearing to the 1st Austinmer Scout Group.

F E E D B A C K

Jochem Akkermans’ custom OUTBACK cases; Owen Pointon’s beautiful painting, Dingoes Guard The Wreck.

I bought my first issue, 13, during my first trip to Australia in 2000 in Bundaberg, Qld. Once back home in The Netherlands I was able to buy each magazine in the local shops for a few years. I bought many remaining issues through ebay, often spending more on postage than on the actual magazine. More recently I have given myself a subscription. Thanks for a truly wonderful

magazine. I still enjoy reading them.

Jochem Akkermans, Zutphen, The Netherlands

Wreck gone to the dogs

I was delighted to read your article on Fraser Island (issue 117, p132). I have visited Fraser Island regularly over the past 30 years. In 2014 I was asked by a member of the Fraser Island Progress Association to paint the SS

Maheno, a wreck on the island, as part of the Anzac Day celebrations for the 100-year anniversary of Gallipoli. The Maheno was employed as a hospital ship for the New Zealand armed forces during World War I. I included a couple of dingoes, which are often found around the wreck, and call the painting (above) Dingoes Guard The Wreck.

Owen Pointon, Atherton, Qld

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AUSTRALIAN RED CROSS

R O U N D U P

Bob Handby is interviewed while working in Sierra Leone.

PORT FAIRY’S INTERNATIONAL SAVIOUR Bob Handby has been held at gunpoint, had someone threaten to throw a grenade in his car, has worked in the midst of Ebola virus outbreaks in Sierra Leone, and camped for months with no communication in northern Iraq. An environmental health officer, who has participated in 16 overseas missions with the Red Cross, he’s flown into tense conflict and disaster situations, helping millions of distressed people, and preventing further outbreaks of illness and disease. In Australia, he’s worked in the aftermath of cyclones in Queensland, floods in New South Wales and bushfires in Victoria.

In June this year, the long-time resident of the pretty Victorian town of Port Fairy was made an Officer in the General Division of the Order of Australia (AO) for his distinguished service in disasters and environmental health. “I was very honoured,” Bob says. “I’ve received awards before from the Red Cross, but this one certainly sits at the top of the table.”

Bob grew up in Horsham, Vic, and after a short stint in the public service began a career in environmental health in the Dandenongs.

In 1983 he helped with the recovery from the Ash Wednesday bushfires and so, in 1984 when the Red Cross was looking for an environmental health expert to help people in the civil war in Uganda, they contacted Bob. His jobs included building refugee camps and helping provide clean water and sanitation, all the while facing serious threats.

For the next two decades, as he moved to Port Fairy and began work in councils there, he was regularly released for threemonth Red Cross missions in disaster areas – Pakistan, Iraq and, in 1994, Rwanda, “where 800,000 people died in 100 days in a country the size of Tasmania”.

“Disasters are not always easy, but they are interesting,” Bob says. “You’re dealing with vulnerable people at the worst time of their life, and you’ve got an opportunity to do something about it. Working in environmental health, I don’t treat malaria, but I put things in place to stop people getting malaria. Or if people are going to get sick from drinking contaminated water, we look at providing clean water supplies.”

Bob worked full-time for the Red Cross

from 2007 to 2012, during which time he helped provide clean water in 20 villages in Fiji, as well as assessing water supplies on Palm Island in northern Queensland.

Although still involved as a Red Cross ambassador, he has gradually slipped into retirement since then. His son Mark has the same environmental health qualifications and is now involved in Red Cross missions himself. “I’m phasing myself out very quickly and handballing the role to him,” Bob says.

In Port Fairy, Bob has volunteered on the Port Fairy Folk Festival committee for 25 years, raising some $850,000 for the local hospital and thousands more for local clubs and services. “It’s a massive event and it has such an impact on the town,” he says. “It really is such a privilege to be involved in something that has such an impact.”

He attributes his international career to his wife Judi, who encouraged and enabled him to leave for months at a time.

Bob says the Queen’s Birthday honour has motivated him to finish writing a book about his extraordinary life. “It’s a good winter project,” he says.

Locations of Australia’s current silo art sites

Artistic inspiration on high The past decade has been tough for the people of Thallon, in western Queensland. By early 2013, drought had tightened its grip, the town’s population had declined to just 100 and only one business survived – the pub.

There was a real prospect that Thallon would soon lose its postcode.

Drought maintains its stranglehold today but there’s new hope on the horizon – in the soaring beauty of the vibrant mural that emblazons the town’s grain silos. “It’s been transformative,” says Leanne Brosnan, secretary of the Thallon Progress Association. “The artists [ Joel Fergie and Travis Vinson] said they wanted the community to be able to look up every day and be reminded why they love this place, and I think they’ve achieved that.”

A harvest this year is again looking doubtful, but the life-giving Moonie River and vibrant western sunset depicted celebrates the latent power of this tough landscape and its people. “Nothing is a substitute for rain and a good season, but the artwork has engendered a sense of community pride and hope that good times will return,” Leanne says.

It’s a common sentiment expressed across Australia in the small towns that have been swept up in the silo-art phenomenon.

Although economic evidence is scant, many communities anecdotally report higher visitation rates, more economic activity and renewed optimism. Having their distinctive assets writ large on the concrete sentinels has put a spring in everybody’s step.

Down south in Weethalle, NSW, where a shearer and a grain grower loom large, business at the town’s only cafe is booming, a second-hand store has re-opened and showground camp sites are in demand.

“It’s been incredibly positive,” says Bland Shire community relations officer Craig Sutton.

“Nothing could compare with the first couple of weeks, but significant numbers of people are still making detours and staying over in town, and this shows no signs of abating.”

Since artist Guido van Helten added his ghostly characters to the Brim silos in 2016, another five have been painted to create a dedicated 200-kilometre Silo

Art Trail in central Victoria. A further 19 works – and counting – are now on show in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia, where artists Phlegm and Hense started the silo-art movement in March 2015. Created

by Australian and international artists in the most challenging of conditions, the galleries honour farmers and cowgirls, Indigenous elders, energetic youngsters, history, landmarks, botany and wildlife.

In Western Australia, where the arts organisation FORM and grain handler CBH Group have been coordinating a silo trail between six sites, project manager Rhianna Pezzaniti says the potential of culture and the arts to enrich lives, foster social cohesion, support wellbeing and strengthen identity is being realised. She believes the silo art, wherever it is created, is helping struggling towns to retain and support their populations and embrace diversity.

“In highlighting the achievements, characters and story of each town, the art signals that these are places and people worth knowing,” she says. “This WA landscape lends

itself to monumental artistic expression and the different artistic styles of each mural offer trail-goers something new at each town.”

GrainCorp, which has provided the ‘canvasses’ – some of which are up to 60 years old and rise 40 metres – has been inundated with proposals to adorn others. “We’ve had formal applications or inquiries for an additional 40 silo sites, pending funding,” spokesperson Luke O’Donnell says. “We have been a part of the Australian agricultural landscape for 102 years and this is a unique opportunity to tell some of the stories of these towns, where many of our employees live.”

In Thallon, the artistic landmark has even inspired seven residents to volunteer as tourism ambassadors. “People are now taking new pride in the place and are happy to show visitors around,” Leanne says.

Amanda Burdon

The silo mural at Thallon, Qld, has given the small town a sense of pride.

R O U N D U P

Clifford Peel centenary Although many Australians would know that John Flynn started the Royal Flying Doctor Service, few would know of Clifford Peel, the 23-year-old pilot and medical student who inspired him to take to the air. September 19 this year marks the 100th anniversary of the death of Clifford, who disappeared during a patrol in France during World War I. Flynn was already toying with ideas about how to expand the reach of the Australian Inland Mission to benefit more people living in remote areas when Peel wrote to him, suggesting that planes were a safe and effective way of providing care across vast distances. Peel even plotted out the time it would take by plane to get to many remote places.

Although they never met, the two discussed Peel’s ideas by mail. “Flynn just picked it up and ran with it, so it must have made an impression,” says Peel’s nephew, Doug Peel, of Robe, SA. “He always acknowledged that Cliff ’s letter was where the idea came from.”

Peel grew up in Inverleigh, Vic, and studied medicine at Melbourne University.

When he read Flynn’s book Northern Territory and Central Australia: A call to the church, he thought about the logistics of providing help across Central Australia.

“Had he lived, he probably would have returned from the war to help Flynn build the Flying Doctor Service he had clearly foreseen,” Doug says.

Peel’s letters to Flynn are preserved in the National Library of Australia in Canberra, and he is remembered by a plaque in the John Flynn Memorial Church in Alice Springs and, perhaps most fittingly, a 1.5-kilometre, 24-hour emergency airstrip on the Silver City Highway north of Broken Hill, which in 2015 was named the Lieutenant J Clifford Peel Airstrip.

After volunteering for WWI, Clifford undertook flight training at Laverton, Vic.

Singing for Dolly

FINE-LINE PHOTOGRAPHY

Katherine-based country singer Tom Curtain, featured in our Outback story this issue (p42), has teamed up with Sara Storer to release a single called ‘Speak Up’, to raise awareness and funds for Dolly’s Dream Foundation.

Tom was moved to write the song when 14-year-old Amy ‘Dolly’ Everett, who lived on a cattle station near Katherine, took her own life after intense bullying.

One of the last things she wrote was, “Speak, even if your voice shakes”.

“Living out here, you think you are quite removed from anything like this, so to have a beautiful young girl that you’ve seen grow up take her life and then a family ripped apart, is just devastating,” Tom says. “The incident inspired me to write the song and then try to raise more awareness about bullying. The more we’ve become involved, the more we’re learning how prolific bullying is in society.”

Pinjarra Primary School and Pinjarra Senior High School, near Mandurah, WA, were involved in the film clip and recording. All proceeds from the single will go directly to Dolly’s Dream Foundation, an organisation established by her family and friends to raise awareness of bullying, anxiety, depression and youth suicide. The song can be bought through iTunes, Google Play or www. katherineoutbackexperience.com.au.

Meanwhile, the four yellow vehicles of the R U OK? Conversation Convoy will be on the road for six weeks from July 30, visiting towns across the country and hosting community events to remind Australia to ask the question: “Are you ok?”. Towns visited will include Alice Springs, Mount Isa, Broome, Halls Creek, Longreach, Hervey Bay, Mt Barker, Ulverstone/Davenport, Rockhampton, Young, Griffith, Mildura, Kununurra and Darwin. For more information, see www.ruok.org.au.

Country singer Tom Curtain has written a song to raise awareness of bullying.

SIMONE KELLY

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Taking on the Mongol Derby High Country cattlewoman Kathy Gabriel is riding hard around the steep hills of Benambra, Vic, in preparation for this year’s Mongol Derby, but she reckons the best training for the toughest horse race in the world was the three years she spent contract mustering and working on stations in northern Australia.

“It’s a mental toughness,” she says. “You are used to being on a horse from sun-up to well after sundown, and you can’t just say, ‘I want to go home’. You’re already dealing with the dust or the heat or the humidity and you have no option but to keep going.”

On top of that, she says the range of horses in northern Australia probably helps prepare riders for the semi-wild horses in Mongolia. “You’re used to hopping on something that has a bit of a snoot in it first thing in the morning – not just really welldisciplined horses,” Kathy says. “I’m hoping that is an advantage.”

Kathy, 27, is one of 14 Aussies who will be attempting the 1000-kilometre ride across the Mongolian Steppe from August 8 this year. Competitors ride up to 160km a day, navigating independently and changing horses every 40km, with every horse checked at each station. This year’s race features 17 men and 28 women from 13 countries.

“I’d seen [former winner and Queenslander] Will Comiskey do it a couple of times and when I was watching

Kathy Gabriel trains for the Mongol Derby on the steep hills of the High Country.

him, I thought, ‘If he could do it, why can’t I?’” Kathy says. “I’ve always been fascinated with Mongolia, too – the way the nomadic herders live. Everything is unfenced and it hasn’t changed in 200–300 years.”

Taking the honour for the oldest rider ever in the event is 70-year-old Rod Herman of Maleny, Qld. The previous oldest rider, in 2009, was 64-year-old Dave Coddington. But Rod, who has worked most of his adult life in the equestrian industry, says he is ready and able.

“I’ve been working my butt off,” he says. “I’m retired now, so I have plenty of time to ride my three horses, I’m going to the gym and I’m walking a lot. I’m really going for it. I am the fittest that I’ve ever been – I’m really feeling strong – enough that I think I can finish it.

“I’ve worked with horses all my life, done breaking in, worked on stations, all of it, so I’m really looking forward to it.”

During the race you can track the riders’ progress via www.mongolderby.com.

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What does a farmer look like?

Photographer and sheep grazier Kim Storey has finished her ‘What does a farmer look like?’ project, releasing her 268-page book that showcases more than 100 different farming families across Australia.

Kim, of Eugowra, NSW, began the project two years ago when she googled ‘What does a farmer look like’ and the results were clichéd pictures of “old blokes and dumbed down versions of normal people”, she says.

Determined to change the stereotypical views, she photographed farmers from every state. She says she was blown away by the diversity of what people are doing and the enthusiasm for agriculture among younger people. “It’s a complete turnaround from when I was growing up,” 37-year-old Kim says. “My generation was never really encouraged to come back to the farm, but to go out and find a secure, well-paying job instead. So I was really impressed seeing so many young people, both men and women, giving it a go and being really passionate about what they are doing, embracing technology and using social media to get their story out there.

“They’re doing all different things and growing things you wouldn’t think were growing here: like a buffalo dairy that produces cheese, then there’s native flowers, yabbies, and even things people have all the time but may not associate with farming, like oysters.”

Some of her favourite moments were photographing Max Hockey, in Monto, Qld, “who’s 102 and still farming”, and interviewing Jason Smith, a dairy farmer in Simpson, Vic. “He’s gay and very open about that. Talking to him was really interesting about how it is okay for gay people to be on the land, and wanting to come back to the land, and how the community has been really supportive.”

Kim says she has found the whole project very encouraging.

“We’re in drought at the moment in the central west, but it’s still an exciting time,” she says. “Despite the drought, there are lots of positives.”

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PETER HAMMOND

Kangaroo Island goat-free In June, Kangaroo Island, SA (featured in issue 118, p72), officially became the largest island in the world to eradicate feral goats. More than 1200 goats were culled in an eight-year program that has included intensive monitoring and surveillance to ensure that none are left on the 4405-square-kilometre island.

Mixed enterprise farmer and member of the Kangaroo Island Natural Resource Management Board, Richard Trethewey, says goats have been on the island for about 200 years, and removing them is just the beginning of a larger feral-eradication program that includes pigs, deer and cats. “Deer were a more recent escapee, but within 10 years we’ve cleaned them up,” he says. “Feral cats are a huge problem here and they cause a problem for our sheep industry. Every sheep farmer is affected because they spread sarcocystosis and toxoplasmosis to cattle, causing about $2 million worth of damage a year.”

In the island’s wilder west, feral cats are found on every survey line. That is almost certainly having a negative impact on one of the most threatened animals in Australia – the Kangaroo Island dunnart – according to Heidi Groffen of Kangaroo Island Land for Wildlife, who is coordinating feral-eradication efforts over 5000 hectares of private land. “There have only ever been 35 records of the dunnart, and it is on a list of the 20 Australian animals OB120 Ironbark.pdf

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The endangered Kangaroo Island dunnart will benefit from the eradication of feral animals.

most at risk of extinction,” she says. “They’re very unknown and pretty close to slipping through our fingers, but we’ve found some already on private land, which is really exciting.

“Feral goats pretty much eat everything – all of that native vegetation that the dunnart relies upon, taking away the habitat and the food that the dunnart needs, so eradicating the goats and the deer is a fantastic initiative. It’s amazing how the vegetation has come back.”

Heidi says that to support the 15-year plan to eradicate feral cats from Kangaroo Island by 2030, Land for Wildlife has invested in 50 cat traps and is using dogs to sniff cats

out. At the eastern end of the island, plans are being finalised to build a 1.5km feralproof fence across the isthmus that leads to the Dudley Peninsula, and cats will be removed from that area first.

Richard says the fight against feral cats will involve new technologies. “Things like drones that can pick up the heat emitted from a cat’s eyes – it’s quite exciting when you start to think about that,” he says. “It’s definitely possible to get rid of cats, I’m just not sure we can do it in 15 years. But hopefully my grandkids won’t have to put up with them when they’re 50.”

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R O U N D U P

Mind your own beeswax Bearded shearers and bikies beware: soaring prices for Australian beeswax could soon leave your chops in a tangle.

The clean, green nature of Australian beekeeping, and absence of the destructive varroa mite, has created global demand for our high-quality beeswax. Prices have skyrocketed – from about $5 per kilogram retail five years ago to more than $36 today for the rarest organic beeswax. And it’s not just the hirsute users of beard products who are in a frenzy.

Executive director of the Australian Honey Bee Industry Council (AHBIC), Trevor Weatherhead, says some apiarists will also be getting stung. “Some are capitalising on these high prices by selling any excess beeswax to wax suppliers, but anyone looking to get started or to expand is having trouble getting their hands on wax or facing premium prices,” Trevor says.

Beeswax is used to manufacture furniture polish, cleaning products, crayons, lubricants and candles. Being pharmaceutical grade,

Australian beeswax is also coveted for making cosmetics. It is popular because it contains no residues of the chemicals used to control the varroa mite.

Bill Winner, beekeeper services manager with Australia’s largest beeswax exporter, Capilano, says the company exports 120–200 tonnes of it a year, mostly for cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, and he predicts continued drought conditions will make every skerrick valuable. “The drought doesn’t look like easing, so the demand for beeswax will remain strong,” Bill says. “In Australia, candle makers are also chasing up the price.”

Kirsty Hunter, who established The Dead Man’s Beard Company in regional Victoria two years ago, says beeswax prices have pushed up the costs of her wax-based beard balms and moustache waxes, which are popular among everyone from bikies and urban hipsters to truck drivers and shearers.

“It’s by far the best beeswax in the world – smooth and clean and great for blending with the oils we use,” Kirsty says. “It has great

Australian beeswax is used to tame wild beards.

healing and moisturising properties, and we are dedicated to using Australian ingredients.”

Trevor certainly doesn’t expect prices to fall any time soon. “While ever we keep the varroa mite out, we will continue to enjoy high prices for Australian beeswax,” he says.

Which leaves Kirsty wrestling with a price rise to stay in production. “No-one wants to be on the receiving end of an angry man who can’t tame his beard,” she says.

Amanda Burdon

WIN Miles Franklin book pack Once again, to celebrate the announcement of this year’s Miles Franklin award finalists, OUTBACK will give away all six books in a pack to a lucky winner. First presented in 1957, the Miles Franklin award was set up through the will of the author of My Brilliant Career and celebrates a distinctly Australian novel with the highest literary merit. The author judged the winner receives a $60,000 first prize, and each finalist $5000. Perpetual is the trustee of the award, which is supported by the Copyright Agency.

To win this fantastic reading pack, simply let us know which of the finalists you would read first, and why. You can read more about this year’s finalists at milesfranklin.com.au. Email your answer, with ‘Miles Franklin Competition’ in the subject line to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au, or write to ‘Miles Franklin Competition’, PO Box 7015, Alexandria, NSW 2015. Competition closes September 1, 2018.

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R O U N D U P

In Zanda’s memory Passionate and determined young agri-leaders from Australia and New Zealand are being urged to apply for the 2019 Zanda McDonald Award. Applications for this prestigious award are open for those aged under 35 until August 24, with an impressive prize package worth more than $50,000.

Now in its fifth year, the award provides the winner with an all-expenses paid transTasman mentoring trip, $1000 cash, a place in Rabobank’s farm managers course, and access to the Platinum Primary Producers Group (PPP) – a network of more than 150 influential agribusiness men and women from across Australasia.

Richard Rains, chairman of the Zanda McDonald Award, says the award provides a fantastic opportunity for young agricultural leaders to further their career and their personal development. “The mentoring package is … tailored to their needs and provides them with a great insight into some of the best farms and agriculture companies on both sides of the Tasman,” he says. “This …

can really help take their career to the next level.”

Thomas Macdonald, business manager of Spring Sheep Milk in Taupo, New Zealand, is the current award winner.

“It’s been a real privilege to win the award,” Thomas says. “I’ve already made some great contacts and am really looking Julie McDonald and Richard Rains with 2018 winner Thomas MacDonald. forward to learning how their businesses tick, and which is run by Zanda McDonald’s parents the ways I can incorporate these learnings and wife Julie, encompassing about 180,000 into my own career.” head of cattle. Zanda was a prominent Thomas is using the opportunity to visit integrated food and farming businesses, gain a identity in the Australian beef and livestock industry and a foundation member of the better understanding of large-scale Australian PPP Group. He died in April 2013 at the farming operations and also explore the grain age of 41, following an accident on his and arable sector. During the Australian Queensland cattle property. leg of his mentoring tour, he will visit PPP Application forms for the award can be Group members including the McDonald downloaded at www.pppgroup.org. beef farming operation in north Queensland,

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WHERE BEEF IS KING A quarter of Tasmania’s beef is produced on King Island, in western Bass Strait.

STORY + PHOTOS KEN EASTWOOD

King Island cattle on Mark and Anita Poulsen’s lush paddocks.

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eef producers on King Island are sitting on a good thing. Some are fourth-generation farmers who have no intention of ever being blown off their lush, green outpost by the ferocious south-westerlies. Others are Queenslanders, sick of battling drought, who caught wind of the Bass Strait nirvana and jumped aboard, joining an isolated community that produces one-quarter of Tasmania’s beef on the 100,000-hectare island.

With rain falling steadily, and a constant icy wind making the 14 degrees Celsius ‘summer’ temperatures seem almost Antarctic, third-generation King Islander Bob Cooper is at home in short sleeves wandering around his fat Herefords.

“My grandfather came 120 years ago. He was one of the pioneer settlers,” Bob says. Farming on the island has gone

through several periods since then, with sheep and dairy dominant for many years. About 20 years ago, black beef cattle became king, and Angus now make up 70 percent of the King Island herd. But Bob loves his Herefords.

“Shorthorn cattle do pretty good here,” he says. “In the earlier days, the temperament of Herefords was far superior to black cattle. The bulk of Angus genetics are developed for feedlots, but we have grass-finishing as a focus here. And if things are tough, you can always sell a Hereford.”

On the best of his 2400ha, Bob has more than 20 head per hectare, munching to their heart’s content on the rye grasses and fodder crops that thrive on the solid sandy loams. “At Egg Lagoon we’ve got 460 head on 50 acres [20ha],” he says. The cattle are finished off at two years of age, at around 600 kilograms.

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Bob Cooper with his fat Herefords.

Rainfall varies across the island, but averages about 800 millimetres a year. “We have no trough in the seasons though, so you get continued weight gain and you haven’t got the stress of those dry periods,” Bob says.

Testament to how good life is on King Island, all three of Bob’s daughters returned to the island to farm after exploring careers and lives elsewhere. First his daughter Shey married president of the King Island Beef Producers Group, Richard Sutton. “So she’s now our neighbour,” Bob says. Then he was advertising for a position on the property, and his daughter Shannon, who was working in a cafe in Victoria, said she’d like to apply, and so she returned. Meanwhile, eldest daughter Tara had married Adam Clark, an abalone farmer, but wanted to return to the island, too. Adam now manages the fattening operation for the family’s King Island Cattle Company. “So I regard myself as a very lucky person,” Bob says.

At the yards, with the rain still delivering its plentiful payload, Shannon and Adam are beaming through splatters of mud and dung as Victorian Rob Yelland inserts semen straws into the well-behaved cattle. “The careers adviser really didn’t like me,” Rob jokes, his arm well up inside another beast. “I tell my kids I work in the sex industry.”

The following day, at an EAT Your Beef producers’ event organised by Shannon, Jamie Roebuck, manager of one of the biggest producers on the island, Waverley station, with 7500 breeders, explains why King Island is such a top beefproducing area. “I think we’ve got somewhere really special,” Jamie says. “There’s no place like King Island to grow beef.

There’s very rarely an extremely dry period, so cattle are on

such a constant plane of nutrition. We never get over 30°C and we never get a frost. There are very few places in the world that can produce what we produce. Consumers are after that grass-fed product more and more, and the beef here is unique [in terms of ] flavour and tenderness.”

Also at the event, Mark and Anita Poulsen explain why they are part of the Queensland contingent that has migrated to the island. They moved from St George in the middle of 2017 with five dogs, two cats, two horses, two kids and 200 poll Herefords. “We were chasing grass,” Mark says. “We looked at a lot of areas in New England [NSW], etcetera, but Dad had a chance meeting about three years ago. He ran into one of the locals here, and he was telling him how good it was, and that’s how it started. We think the grass-fattening market is going to be pretty good going forward, and there’s not that many places you can do that reliably. Two weeks ago, we had a paddock that was mowed off to the ground. Now it’s ready to go again.”

“We had a look at Ebor, Dorrigo, that sort of place where it’s high rainfall, but compared to there, this is cheap,” Anita says.

Instead of looking despairingly at dusty paddocks, the Poulsens have a 180-degree view of the ocean from one paddock, and the kids go snorkelling after school. “I love waking up every morning and the world has been washed clean,” Anita says.

“It’s just a relief really. Grass. Rain. Rain and grass.”

Another Queensland family that has made the move is the Raffs. After 50 years on the western Darling Downs breeding Angus seedstock, battling increasingly tough droughts and a lifestyle where fears of feed or water running out dominated, they brought their highly successful Raff

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Shannon Cooper checks cows in the race before they are artificially inseminated; animal reproduction technician Rob Yelland, loving his work; King Islanders enjoy the taste of local beef at the EAT Your Beef day – Tim Shuuring, Richard Sutton and Jamie Roebuck.

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Andrew and Anna Raff with cattle at their Angus stud.

Angus stud to the island two years ago, purchasing 900ha in the highest rainfall area on the island. It gets up to 1250mm a year, making mud management in winter one of their biggest problems.

“We don’t miss the financial and emotional stress,” Anna says. “Here was the best business proposal we could get anywhere in Australia, with lifestyle thrown in. The kids bought a skateboard first and the second thing was a wetsuit, then snorkel gear.” The family has joined the sailing club, they love fishing, and platypuses have even been seen out the back door during one wet period.

“For production levels, it’s the best value farming land we’ve found,” Andrew says. “Every hectare here is equivalent to four or five hectares where we were up in Queensland. We’ve never been in an environment where budgeting has been so easy, and it’s an easy place to make a living. We can run 30% more cattle on much less land, and our first 12-month feed bill was $7000. On our last year in Queensland, it was just short of half a million.”

Andrew says bulls have gained an average of 2.2kg a day on the grasses during spring, with the top weight gain being a whopping 3.6kg a day. “We get to see the genetics of our animals truly expressed in a natural environment,” he says. “Another group average for nine-month-old autumnborn steers was 430kg, and we had four over 500kg.”

“So the land is doing its job,” Anna says. Savvy business people, the Raffs noticed a market for free-range eggs, and so their children, Harry, Charlie, Georgina and Olivia are now producing eggs for island golf clubhouses, restaurants and cafes. “We see opportunities everywhere,” Anna says.

One of the only headaches for them has been the approved plans for a new island abattoir on their neighbour’s property. Since JBS closed its island abattoir in 2012, about 35,000 cattle a year have been shipped live off the island to abattoirs and markets in Victoria and mainland Tasmania. It costs the farmers more than $100 a head and most of the beef producers on the island are keen to have a local abattoir again.

“It’s a cost, but that’s not the main thing,” says Bob Cooper, who wonders whether consumer fears about live export will eventually put an end to the often rough boat trip off the island. “You spend all your life treating them softly, and then you put them on a boat and they get seasick and they’re not in the best condition when they get to market.”

But the Raffs say that they believe the $53.5 million abattoir is unlikely to be commercially successful, and that there are much better sites suited for an abattoir, including next to the port, rather than using some of the island’s prime farming land for an industrial site. They took their objections to the Resources Management and Planning Appeal Tribunal, which ruled in June that the abattoir could go ahead. They are now taking their objections to the Supreme Court.

In the meantime, the rain keeps falling, the grass keeps growing and the cattle keep getting fatter. “We’ve got grass coming out our ears, and our cows are as fat as mud,” says another beef producer, Nathan Conley, on Bindaree. “It’s so good being able to say, ‘I’m a King Island beef producer’ and people say ‘Oh, that’s good stuff ’.”

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O U T B A C K

Darren Coggan entertains the crowds at Tamworth’s 2018 Toyota Star Maker grand f inal.

Photo Mark Muller

S T O R Y

Waltzing Australia Music has long echoed through the Australian bush, and we’ll move to its rhythms for a long time to come.

STORY KEN EASTWOOD

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W

hen Northern Territory horse trainer and former stockman Tom Curtain rides a horse, he hears music. “Different horses have different gaits and a longer or taller horse is going to have a different rhythm,” he says.

“Some have a bluesy sort of rhythm.” Swirling through Tom’s mind, these rhythms build into songs, which are then recorded and performed across Australia.

Tom started writing songs when he was working on Mount Sanford station 17 years ago. “It was all just in my head. Tunes would just come to me while I was out mustering cattle,” he says. “As I was trotting or cantering along, definitely I’d get the rhythm.”

Head stockman at the time, Martin Oakes, was a country music singer, and taught Tom three guitar chords. Every night Tom would practise his three chords and sing around the stock camp fire. “The other blokes would say, ‘You sound horrendous. Get your own fire and go and sit over there’,” he says.

Tom laughs and self-deprecatingly says he still only knows about two-and-a-half chords. Yet he is now a revered country artist, having won two Golden Guitar awards at this year’s Country Music Festival in Tamworth.

His Katherine Outback Experience show entertains thousands of people every year, and his songs are loved nationwide. Many are about funny characters and have a Territory focus. “I think in songwriting you try to embrace the Aussie, the laconic nature, or the characters – it’s very Aussie out here in the bush,” he says. For example, one song describes two blokes who bet each other $50 to swing from the top of a windmill. Another tells the story of a fella who ended up with a cold frog in his jocks. It’s called ‘Billy don’t like no hip hop’. “People want to come in off the land and forget about the drought and the cattle prices, and my job is to make them smile,” Tom says.

Cattleman and musician Dean Perrett, of Kingaroy, Qld, says Australian country-music fans love genuine performers. “They can see the authenticity in someone who does work the land or has known the land,” he says.

Dean balances his time between his 1600-hectare cattle property and his music career, in which the four-time Golden Guitar winner has recorded duets with Troy Cassar-Daley and Lee Kernaghan.

“Much of our music is influenced by the American sound, but I think our true people, like Slim Dusty, just kept an Australian accent, a certain sound and a certain feel,” he says. “The way Australians feel their music and play their music – it’s the feel of Australia. It’s hard to explain, but it’s laid-back in approach.”

Dean says that, like Tom, he regularly gets inspiration for songs on the back of a horse. “When I’m mustering, sometimes you’ll just have a line, or a little idea which pops in your head. I used to be kicking myself if I didn’t have a notebook on me, but these days with mobile phones you can just pull it straight out and record it.”

One hundred kays down the road from Tom’s place, Ellen Amy is playing seven nights a week for 150–200 people at the Mataranka Homestead and Caravan Park.

From dairy stock in Bargo, NSW, she says she much prefers playing in the bush to the city. “People out here just appreciate it so much more,” she says. “You can be terrible and they’ll still appreciate it. I hated playing in Sydney because, firstly I couldn’t play country music there, and people didn’t appreciate it as much because music was just so common. I’ll play cattle station parties out here, and you can play anything and they just love it.”

Ellen says last year she was working in the dairy industry and playing music as well. “I would milk from 5 to 9am, drive an hour home, shower and start a gig at 1pm. Then I’d be back at the dairy for the afternoon

EDWINA ROBERTSON PHOTOGRAPHY

Tom Curtain performs from atop Oakes Bailey during his Katherine Outback Experience show.

S T O R Y

KEN EASTWOOD

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At the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, lecturer Grayson Rotumah (drums), director Aaron Corn (bass), student Ben Wanganeen (guitar) and student Christian Aspel rehearse one of Christian's latest songs.

milking. Occasionally I would finish milking at 5pm and play a gig from 9pm till midnight and be up at 4am to head to the farm again.”

She says growing up in the bush, hunting, shooting milk bottles and fishing, gives her songs more authenticity. “You’d be amazed how many country artists live in the city,” Ellen says. “I think Australians see through BS pretty easily. It just makes it much more natural singing about that stuff when you actually did it.

Now I’m living in a donga in the dirt, and my backyard is an airstrip with termite mounds. I love it.”

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or tens of thousands of years, life in the bush, and the country itself, has inspired songs and music across all genres: from ancient Dreamtime songs to the mayhem of metal coming out of Black Wreath records at Alice Springs; and from Peter Sculthorpe’s complex classical works of Kakadu or Mangrove, through to simple songs sung in Aboriginal missions during the early 20th century. The music of the bush is wildly eclectic and, like an ancient river red gum, it has twisted roots and intertwining branches, but at its core it suckles from the sun-kissed Aussie soil itself.

Surprisingly, there are very few instruments that we can consider ‘Australian’ – the yidaki (didgeridoo), kulap (seedpod shaker), warup (drum made from driftwood and goanna skin), and the gum leaf – but that’s because our music results from a focus on lyrics and stories,

and an assimilation of myriad cultures. It’s only been in the past 40 years or so that Australian instrument makers such as Graham Caldersmith, at Comboyne, NSW, have found ways to use native timbers such as King William pine and blackwood to create violins and guitars with warm, clear tones.

According to Aaron Corn, director of the Centre for Aboriginal Studies in Music at the University of Adelaide, for many thousands of years the main Australian instrument was the human voice. Traditional Indigenous music always used words, and the songs were used for ceremonies, information sharing, story-telling and celebration. “There were songs where men would try to outdo each other, in order to court the women. A bit like rap,” he says. “But most traditional songs used in ceremony are about the features of the country and the agency of the ancestors in shaping that country.”

About 15 students each year use the centre’s recording studio to write and record new songs that use Indigenous languages, themes and concepts in fresh ways. “It’s not just about preserving culture in some static form, it’s about trying to work out a way forward so those things can continue,” Aaron says. “What makes any music authentic is the fact that it’s observant of what’s actually in that country. Country itself provides the template for what to sing about. There is a saying, ‘If you don’t know what to sing about, go home and the country will tell you’.”

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Perhaps the settlers who came to the Great Southern Land in the 18th and 19th centuries didn’t want to listen to what the new land was saying. Instead, they brought their traditions and instruments to remind them of home, and gradually adapted them to fit their new surrounds. English and Irish folk songs, in particular, were gradually reworked by convicts and free settlers alike to tell new stories of their journeys, their struggles and life in the new land.

“Folk songs provide the colour of history,” says cultural historian and music producer Warren Fahey, who has collected and recorded hundreds of colonial songs. “In

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the old days a song about a shearer’s life or a drover’s life had relevance – how they worked hard and played hard, and many battled their demons such as alcohol.”

He says many songs that we think are ridgy-didge Australian are often borrowed from elsewhere. For example, ‘Click goes the shears’ was originally an American tune called ‘Ring the bell, watchman’ (ring, ring, ring).

Instruments to accompany songs varied: pianos have been imported since surgeon George Worgan brought one out on the First Fleet, and pipe organs were shipped at great expense to country churches, but lightweight instruments such as concertinas, harmonicas, ukuleles, fifes and fiddles were far more transportable and popular. “The majority of old bush songs sung by itinerant workers and people on the land were mainly unaccompanied,” Warren says. “They may have played the fiddle or button accordion, but they’d put that down and sing, then pick it up and play again.

“We do know that during the gold rushes, most sizeable gold-rush towns had singing rooms, where the miners would get a drink and someone would be on the piano.”

“Most pubs in early colonial times would have a fiddler – possibly not a very good one, but he’d play song tunes,” says another music historian, Graeme Skinner. Gradually, musical talent pooled in larger towns, and bands began to form. “The first places you get records of local music-making are the large towns of New South Wales and Victoria – Bathurst and Maitland, then Geelong in the 1840s, then the goldrush towns,” Graeme says. “In the 1850s, Beechworth had many professional musos. By the late 19th century, larger towns would have had quite sophisticated amateur musical bands.”

The bands would play for elections, or at race days, for special occasions and church services. Many were

STATE LIBRARY OF QUEENSLAND

ABOVE: A bush band at Mount Surprise, Qld, in 1905. Women generally didn't play wind or brass instruments until the 1950s.

OPPOSITE: Going into the bush to practice, a pen and ink watercolour by HJ Graham, 1882.

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PHOTOS: KEN EASTWOOD

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Tanunda Town Band members Jacob Staehr, Eric Molenaar, Steven Packer, John Bartsch and Callum Borchard before the show (opposite).

sponsored by the local temperance movement, Graeme says, to encourage people to listen to rants against alcohol use. But, not surprisingly, the music also helped people have a rollicking good time, such as a wedding at Albury in 1861, where the Border Post reported, “Flat was illuminated by bonfires and blazing tar barrels, and enlivened with the rough music of marrow-bones, cleavers, tin pots, and other instruments … The serenade was kept up till a late hour”.

Incredibly, there is one band from that era that is still going: the Tanunda Town Band in the Barossa, SA. Begun in 1857 by Lutheran migrants, it got down to just a handful of members at times but is now a 40-piece ensemble of tubas, trombones, cornets and timpani that tours the world.

Sixth-generation band member, trombonist Stephen John, says there is only one other similar band in the United Kingdom that has continued as long as the Tanunda band. “Every town had a band – we’re the one that has been continuously operating,” he says, as players around him warm up instruments and themselves for a gig in Tanunda. “They used them for church services – that was the music for the town – and they played for everything. It’s terrific to see it keep on going. And good to see the young ones coming up.”

Like many of the locals who have played in the band, Stephen is a winemaker, and although the band includes some imported players from Adelaide, he loves its Barossan feel. “Brass has always been very, very strong in this district,” he says. “I love the spirit of it – the

community involvement, the very high calibre of players.

We’ve had guys from the symphony orchestra play with us for the past 70 years.”

In May each year for the past 52 years, the band has put on its biggest show of the year in Tanunda Agricultural Show shed. Up to 1000 people attend each of the two nights to clap, sing and enjoy the music and the gluhwein, as the well-rehearsed musos play Mozart, then the theme from Jurassic Park and ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’. “It’s unique in the world,” Stephen says. “We play everything from Lady Gaga to opera on a shell-grit floor in a tin shed.

James Morrison [Australian jazz trumpeter] played with us a few years ago and it blew him away – he’d heard about it, but when he came here he couldn’t believe it.”

At 84 years of age, retired bandmaster and cornet player Neville Alderslade doesn’t join the band on stage anymore but looks wistfully from afar. “This band’s one of the best bands in the world. Not as good as when I was conducting though,” he says with a smile. “It drives me nuts now. If they’re good I hate it, and if they’re bad I hate it.”

While in the band, Neville made a name for himself by using a mouthpiece to play solo performances on a .303 rifle. “A trumpet is only a piece of tubing, and a rifle is only a piece of tubing,” he says. Although he can still wrap his lips around a cornet mouthpiece and do a pretty fine rendition of a concerto or jazz standard, Neville generally has to content himself with playing the ‘Last Post’ at the retirement village. “They love me down there, but they’re all deaf,” he says.

“WE PLAY EVERYTHING FROM LADY GAGA TO OPERA ON A SHELL-GRIT FLOOR IN A TIN SHED.”

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PHOTOS: KEN EASTWOOD

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Old German songs spark beautiful memories for Charlotte Bretschneider, a resident in the Tanunda Lutheran Home.

Next door to Neville’s place, at the Tanunda Lutheran Home, music is bringing about an astounding transformation. In the Memory Unit, the majority of residents have dementia, but music from their past is being played to them as part of a clinical trial to determine if it can help with sleep patterns, unsettled behaviour and communication.

Charlotte Bretschneider, who moved to South Australia from Germany in 1952, stands near a CD player, initially with a look of incomprehension and confusion on her face, as lifestyle coordinator Shaun Hyland puts on a CD with old German songs on it. Suddenly there’s a spark of recognition, and then joy – unspeakable joy – envelops her face in an all-encompassing smile. There’s laughter and dancing, and Charlotte begins singing some of the words in German.

“Music is a bit like how to pick up a knife and fork – it’s an unconscious memory,” says Prue Mellor, clinician and research fellow with the Harmony in the Bush project, which is based at Flinders University. “There’s an area in the brain that seems to retain it. If you ask them what music they like, they might not understand the question, but if you play some music from their past, there’s that moment of recognition. There’s a smile, there’s that movement. People are mouthing words even.”

The research is going on at several nursing homes around the country. In just two weeks of treatment at Port Douglas, music resulted in a decreased use of tranquilisers. One woman who hadn’t spoken for two

years calmly said to the staff one morning, “I’m fine, thank you very much”. Another who had been very aggressive calmed considerably.

“There’s always been music in nursing homes, but it hasn’t always been good music,” Prue says. “It was often community groups wanting to do some good and it was often very loud, with no chance to escape. Then everyone got baroque music for a while because some paper declared that baroque music was good for dementia. But some people have never heard baroque music before, so it has no effect. You put music on that they’ve heard before.

Some of the residents here have Australian music – we had a truck driver and he was into country and western, Slim Dusty and that, but there are other people who had Abba and Neil Diamond and Elton John.”

Music’s power and beauty lies partly in its ability to get around our conscious selves, to seep into our being and become part of us, shaping the way we move, think and behave. Watch the way people dance or notice how moods are changed by a gentle song sung around the camp fire. A driver on a country road listening to AC/DC’s ‘Thunderstruck’ will drive differently to someone listening to Jimmy Little’s ‘Down the Road’.

Like a scent that triggers recollections, music from our past can suddenly take us back to long childhood summers, or special events like funerals, weddings, birthdays and parties. Our collective memories might be triggered by Gangajang’s ‘Sounds of Then’, John Williamson’s ‘True Blue’ or Christine Anu singing ‘My Island Home’.

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PHOTOS: KEN EASTWOOD

One of Troy Cassar-Daley’s guitars sits with about 40 other instruments and volunteer curator Judy Loffel, in a storeroom in the Country Music Hall of Fame, Tamworth.

TOP: Exhibits in the Hall of Fame Museum take visitors on a journey through time.

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“MUSIC IS THE LANDSCAPE OF OUR LIVES – THERE ARE SONGS THAT REMIND US OF EVERYTHING.” “Songs bring tears to your eyes sometimes, they really do,” says self-confessed Slim Dusty tragic Judy Loffel, the curator of the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum in Tamworth, NSW. So moved by Slim’s songs and the country music of her childhood, Judy voluntarily spends five days a week among boxes of Akubra hats and R.M.Williams boots, thousands of records and CDs, 16,000 documents, and 50 or so guitars and other musical instruments donated by various performers, to keep the guitar-shaped Hall of Fame and Museum afloat for the 40-odd patrons who come in each day. Although Judy says the country-music era peaked before the late 1970s, she says bush balladeer stories still move her. “Australian songs were written from real life and stories about people,” she says. “A lot of their songs were made from their own stories, or fellas out in the bush. They worked hard to make it succeed, but they just did what they loved.” Judy pauses, surrounded by a sea of mannequins in brightly coloured handmade outfits worn by a wide range of stars. “They did dress nicely, too,” she says.

“The fans are incredible,” says Cheryl Byrnes, who helps make a lot of country music happen in Tamworth.

She is the managing editor of Capital News, Australia’s longest running monthly country-music magazine, and also works at Tamworth Regional Council as country music coordinator. “People drive huge distances just to see a gig – particularly the grey nomads who follow the bush balladeers around. It’s like family for them, when all their families have grown up and left,” she says.

Cheryl’s dad, ‘Gentleman Geoff ’ Brown, was one of the first country musicians to have a regular gig in Tamworth, at Joe Maguires Pub in 1964, and she grew up with jam sessions in the lounge room at home. Old photos show her with a range of stars, including a very young Tommy and (the late) Phil Emmanuel, and a nine-year-old Keith Urban. “Music is the landscape of our lives – there are songs that remind us of everything we’ve ever done,” she says.

Part of Cheryl’s role involves coordinating Star Maker, Australia’s longest running search for the next country music star. But Cheryl has seen enough Star Maker competitions and Golden Guitar awards to know it is no easy leg-up in the music industry. Former winners still

work as hairdressers and hotel managers. “As much as you’d want to sing all the time, life just gets in the way,” she says. “A few years after Lee Kernaghan won Star Maker, he was selling real estate. It’s a stepping stone.

The first thing I tell them when they win is, ‘You’re not a star yet – that’s just the name of the competition. But the judges see potential in you and you could go all the way’.”

Tamworth seems to have gone all the way since those first gigs at Joe Maguires. By the end of the 1960s, Tamworth’s radio station 2TM had a widely listenedto country-music show called Hoedown, playing the likes of Tex Morton and Buddy Williams, and was holding annual talent quests. Country music manager for Tamworth Regional Council Barry Harley says that at one of the talent quests it was decided to call Tamworth the ‘country music capital of Australia’. “No-one else had claimed it,” he says. “It probably wasn’t that popular with Tamworthians who weren’t country-music fans. Even today, there is a proportion of locals that enjoys country music, but it’s not the predominant music that’s played here.” Perhaps as a sign of the times, a new jazz bar is due to open in Tamworth later this year.

In 1973, the first country-music awards were held and the juggernaut that is the Tamworth Country Music Festival began. “In the early ’70s, probably the only people involved were dyed-in-the-wool local fans, and they probably attracted 1000 people for the three days,” Barry says. “There were probably six or seven events and that probably included a barbecue at Mrs Brown’s house. Now we have 700 artists performing at 2800 events over 10 days, and we get 50,000 people a day. It injects up to $50odd million into the local economy. We are certainly the largest music festival in Australia, by any genre, and one of the largest in the world.”

In total, there are more than 300 dedicated music festivals in Australia, many in rural areas. Styles range from the 41-year-old Port Fairy Folk Festival to the six-year-old Blacken Festival, which attracts some 500 heavy-metal fans to Alice Springs to hear 28 bands such as Shatter Brain, The Horror, Southeast Desert Metal and Vicious Circle. Organiser ‘Pirate’ says the event will become an open-air festival next year. “Year on year it’s getting bigger and people are coming from interstate,”

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LEEROY TODD

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There’s nothing like being at the gig – Gympie Music Muster, 2017.

he says. “The sound is abrasive, but we’ve got a lot of raw honesty as well. We’re not following any trends as to what’s popular in the city, so it’s a bit grittier than metal elsewhere. All the band members work jobs like everybody else, but in our spare time we just love making music.”

Pirate set up Black Wreath recording studio in Alice late last year, and already four local bands have recorded albums there. “So, the second half of this year there’s going to be a lot of new music coming out of this area,” he says. “It’s really building momentum – a peak creative era.”

In Mount Gambier, the long-running Generations in Jazz festival inspired jazz legend James Morrison to set up his jazz academy in the South Australian town (issue 116, p136). At the May festival this year, a record 350 ensembles from 128 schools performed across 13 venues, including an onion shed, horse stables and a 6000-seat big top. “There are plenty of music festivals that young people go to, but the big difference with this one is that it’s all about jazz and everyone performs,” James says.

“What festival do you go to where all 6000 people who are coming actually play?”

Jeff Chandler, program director at the Gympie Music Muster in south-eastern Queensland, says rural music festivals nearly always give a lot back to the community.

“Instead of us paying a commercial operator to clean the toilets or serve behind the bar or whatever, we get the local soccer club or school group or whatever to do the work,” he says. “We pay them what we would pay a

commercial company. It’s their biggest earner for the year – that’s a lot of lamington drives they don’t have to do.”

An estimated 25,000 people will come to Gympie over the four days in August, contributing about $3.5 million to the local economy. “It’s a massive community feeling. It’s a tent city,” Jeff says. “People set up their own little bars around the place. One of the most famous is the Bra Bar, promoting women’s breast-cancer prevention, and a lot of women donate their bras and they’re hanging up.”

Jeff says that big concerts and festivals will continue to be popular. “The live performance is never going to fade because people will always want to see an artist live,” he says. “Just the atmosphere of seeing the artist in the flesh – there’s a whole inclusiveness in being with a crowd.”

He says that in his experience, Australian music at its core is different to music from elsewhere. “Storytelling is a bit more front and centre in Australian music and that comes out in the performances as well. It’s good to listen to the lyrics as well as jump around a bit,” he says. “We’ve got our own expressions, and whether it be storytellers like Paul Kelly or Sara Storer, they’re writing about our characters, our country, and I think that seeps into our music. There’s also a great sense of humour and sense of irony. We’re very satirical. And compared to Americans, we’re not afraid of censorship, so there are a few more protest songs – such as Shane Howard singing about the Franklin River, or the songs of Midnight Oil.”

MARK MULLER LEEROY TODD

Amamoor State Forest turns into a tent city for the Gympie Music Muster.

TOP: Casey Donovan and guitarist Daniel Walsh perform for the crowd on the final night of the Tjungu Festival.

NEWSPIX

GRENVILLE TURNER

OCKERT LE ROUX

MARGARET BRITT COLLECTION

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Musterers by day and musos by night, Rodney and Trevor Coulthard and Louis Okai at Hidden Hills, Kings Creek Station, NT; country music singer Smoky Dawson and his horse Flash enjoy a beer at the Outback Bar at the Kingsgate Hotel in Sydney in 1974; jazz legend James Morrison at Generations in Jazz, Mount Gambier, SA; The Vamps, an all-female band that toured the Queensland show circuit in the late 1960s. OPPOSITE: One of Warren Fahey’s collections of folk songs.

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“THEY WERE POLITICALLY INCORRECT, BUT MASSIVELY POPULAR.”

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or some 170 years, rural areas have been serenaded by touring musicians. In the early days, many were poor itinerants, scrounging a living as best they could. Others were touring Americans with black-face minstrel shows, who headed to areas where entertainment was scant because they knew they’d get an audience. “They were politically incorrect, but massively popular,” Warren Fahey says. “They sang material such as Stephen Foster’s ‘Oh Susanna’, and a lot of those songs were Australianised, singing about everything from the gold rushes to life on the land.”

The success of such shows encouraged more Australian groups to tour key bush towns, with everything from bell-ringers to gum-leaf orchestras in the 1890s.

These days, touring shows can include everything from Co-Opera, a mob that brings colourful classics such as Rossini’s The Barber of Seville to the bush, to solo artists. Western-Australian-based organisation Desert Feet does a reverse sort of tour, where it travels to remote Aboriginal communities for a week at a time, trucking in a recording studio that folds out into a stage. They then help each community record music during the day and put on a big show at night. “We try to go out to remote places where they just don’t have

anything like that,” says coordinator of the trips Ewan Buckley. “We’re very community-driven – we try to work with whatever is going on in each place. It might be just a recording project with a band, or it might be the kids, or women, or the oldies.”

Ewan says he is always blown away by the extraordinary talent he finds in remote communities.

“They’ll get on the drums and play flawlessly and amazingly. I’ll ask them where they learnt to play like that, and they’ll say this is the first time they’ve ever played on a proper kit. It’s just outrageous talent. They don’t even have drum sticks – they’re just playing with sticks. Then there are amazing guitarists and songwriters who don’t even know the name of the chords. I’ll say, ‘Everyone play C’, and they don’t know what C is, but they lock onto it and they shred it, and I don’t understand how that happens.”

In the western desert communities, Ewan says the most popular form of music is reggae, with harder-edged rock often found in communities east of Alice Springs.

He says that, according to some people, the reggae influence comes from tours by South African Rastafarian Lucky Dube, who toured the outback in the early 1990s.

“But the absolute biggest song in the desert is ‘Wipe

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Out’ [recorded by Californian group The Surfaris in 1963],” Ewan says. “Every kid in every community plays it. Where the hell did that come from, and how come it’s still going?”

As Ewan and his professional team record musicians in these communities, he finds one very common theme in the lyrics – ‘home’. He cites the Wild Dingo Band, which Desert Feet has recorded at Jigalong and Punmu, in the Pilbara, WA. “Almost every song of theirs has a line ‘I want to go back’, and that’s the same for every artist that we’ve ever recorded. It’s just so strong,” he says. “Grown men just crying for home. We try to work with them to sing about something else, just to get diversity in their songwriting.”

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ithout something as obvious as a didgeridoo drone, is there anything that defines Australian music? Several musicians interviewed for this story believe the Australian style is perhaps simpler and sparser: less layered and less produced than American music.

Riverland country-music artist Kelly Menhennett is well aware that her latest album, Small Dreams, recorded in Nashville, USA, “sounds American”. “There is slide guitar and different musical styles that have originated

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from the States – a lot of blues music, and songs with pedal steel,” she says. “When it comes to rock and country music, there’s a lot of American influence.”

However, having grown up in a family of grape growers, Kelly says there are still plenty of indicators in her music that point to her bush roots and a childhood growing and eating so many butternut pumpkins that she “turned orange”. “The leading track on my new album is called ‘Lone Tree’, and that was inspired by country drives, seeing a big lone tree in a paddock and wondering what had caused that farmer to spare it,” she says. According to Kelly, there are plenty of uses of Aussie vernacular too, such as in another of her songs, ‘Easy Go’, which has a line, “The old van spat the dummy”.

Despite winning multiple awards, Kelly has done it tough at times, scratching out an existence between gigs and wondering whether she should return to the winemaking career she left 10 years ago. “I think I’m at a point now where I have established a name and having that other job on the side might help,” she says.

Kelly laughs about her first gig as a teenager in the Moorook and District Club, which was run by parents of a friend of hers. “They offered me $100 to play in the dining room, and I thought that was very generous

KEN EASTWOOD

National award-winning singer/songwriter Kelly Menhennett, from the Riverland, SA.

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FAIRFAXPHOTOS

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Sydney Symphony Orchestra musicians Kirsten Williams and Alexei Dupressoir were part of a 2014 tour to Yiramalay Wesley Studio School in the Kimberley.

considering how much I shook,” she says. “I remember a big blackboard behind my head that said ‘crumbed garfish’ and at one point the chef leant over the microphone and said, ‘Kel, can you just let number 31 know their schnitzel and gravy is ready?’ and from then on I was calling out meals between songs. There wasn’t a lot of live music in the Riverland then – certainly not original music.”

The grand lady of Australian country music, Joy McKean, certainly knows what hard yards are for musicians. For almost two decades from the mid 1950s, she and her husband Slim Dusty lived and worked from a caravan, performing six nights a week and travelling long distances between towns each day. In the early years, they were flat broke.

Now, speaking from the $9 million, three-year-old Slim Dusty Centre outside Kempsey, NSW, she says it’s important today’s musicians realise it isn’t easy.

“We wanted to make this a place that preserves the legend of Australian music and Slim’s ballads, and to provide inspiration for young artists,” she says. “We want them to see that this stands for Slim’s values – the things he believed in and to see that it didn’t happen by sitting on your bottom. Seventeen years we lived in that caravan and it was hard yakka.”

Joy was the very first Golden Guitar winner in 1973, and won a further six, which sit alongside Slim’s 38 in the heart of the centre. As well as performing in a duet

with her sister and playing bass for many years for Slim, she wrote many of his biggest hits, including ‘Lights on the Hill’ and ‘The Biggest Disappointment’. Aged 88, Joy’s arthritis has stopped her playing strings, but she still plays keys and occasionally writes songs.

“We went out there year after year and we got to know people and we wrote about people,” she says.

“Slim and I tried to tell their stories the right way.

Slim became a voice for all those people. If they were having trouble with something, people would write to Slim – even problems with water supplies and council issues.”

Joy didn’t quite understand the power that Slim held over audiences until one open-air gig in Chillagoe, Qld. For once she wasn’t performing, so she snuck out front to watch. “And I thought, ‘My God’,” she says. “For the first time I could see it happen. Truly, it was the force that was coming from him as he was singing those songs. I’ve never been able to explain it properly – I can’t. But I felt the full force that night.”

In her song ‘The Front Row’, Joy described the rapture she saw music can bring to audiences.

Their faces are transparent as they listen to your songs, Their minds are far away, for now they’re free.

“Music lifts them,” she says. “It’s not only their story that you’re singing, but it’s their escape. A singer who believes in what they’re singing can lift them right out of their now and everyday, to be what they’d like it to be.”

PHOTOS: KEN EASTWOOD

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Racks of golden guitars at The Slim Dusty Centre, Kempsey; Joy McKean; Slim Dusty and Joy in the early days of their long music careers.

RIDING THE INLAND TIDE Until this year, Cowarie Station hadn’t seen a flood since 2011. Now a new generation is ready to make a splash.

STORY GRETEL SNEATH PHOTOS ROBERT LANG

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Craig Oldfield, Maria Madsen, Christopher Oldfield and Kristy Pinjuh cool off after cut-out at Mona Downs waterhole, where the Oldfield story began.

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T

he chopper cuts through cobalt sky, bringing news like a carrier pigeon. Craig Oldfield leaps from the cockpit onto the sunburnt soil of Cowarie Station with the message his family has been waiting to hear for seven long years: “The floodwaters are coming!”

Higher up the Birdsville Track, the behemoth Clifton Hills Station has been inundated with water that began as a record-breaking deluge of rain over Winton in Queensland eight weeks prior. Slowly it’s snaking down the Diamantina River into Goyder Lagoon, the Warburton Creek and, eventually, Lake Eyre. It’s a sight to behold as it generously spills far beyond the channels, across the gibber plains of Sturt Stony Desert and the sandy Simpson Desert, sending a saturating lifeline to the long-suffering outback landscape. “From the air, it looks like fingers or arteries, and then when you see it on a big, flat flood plain rather than broken country, it pans right out and the front is kilometres wide, just silently creeping, creeping,” Craig says. “It’s a pretty amazing thing

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to see; when that flood’s coming and you know the potential of it, it just makes you smile.”

Craig’s mother, Sharon Oldfield, flies up in a fixedwing Piper Lance aircraft the following day to see the spectacle, and shares her eldest son’s joy. She used to tell her children that mirages were magic puddles, but this is the real deal. The magic lies with nature. “It’s like veins bringing the country to life,” she says. “In two weeks’ time, this will all be green.”

Seen from 1000 feet above, the headwaters are easy to spot, as hundreds of migratory birds swoop on startled fish riding the inland tide. Cattle stand along the edge of the channels, cautiously eyeing the bubbles that emerge as the thirsty earth gulps the milky flow.

Brace yourselves, stoic beasts, for an organic native

CLOCKWISE FROM OPPOSITE: Siblings Ashlee White, Christopher and Craig Oldfield; Maria and Brett examine cattle; pilot Padraic O’Neill from Cloncurry Mustering Company with Craig; the Oldfields are focused on cleaning up their herd and returning to Shorthorn/Santa Gertrudis composites.

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The arrival of floodwaters from the north is like “veins bringing the country back to life”, according to Sharon Oldfield.

salad bowl bringing up to 2.5 kilograms weight gain per day is but a sniff away. Everything is going to be okay – and it’s about time.

The Oldfields have done it tougher than many.

Tough breeds tough, it seems. Imagine the wives of patriarchs Claude and Jim Oldfield, who camped among the coolibahs on the banks of Kallakoopah Creek during the 1930s while their husbands began the dream. Legend has it that the nearby Mona Downs waterhole was named after their moaning, but they stuck it out in their spartan stick huts.

Six decades later, Sharon could also have easily walked away. She was 31 years old when her husband Grant hopped in his plane for a mustering run one day in February 1994 and never came home. His body was found in crumpled wreckage on the same unforgiving land that has raised five generations of Oldfields.

Sharon and their young children, Ashlee, Craig and Christopher, encased Grant’s ashes in a stone monument beneath the Birthday Tree, a sacred family place on the 5000-square-kilometre property. It’s the same spot where Grant’s father, Claude, spent his 21st birthday minding cattle, and where he, too, was laid to rest in 1987.

Six weeks after farewelling Grant, Sharon’s grief intensified when her mum, Maureen, also died suddenly.

Everything was a mess, and Sharon wondered how she could possibly stay on at remote Cowarie to continue a family dynasty that felt so foreign. “The odds were certainly stacked against me,” Sharon says. “After my husband passed away, I was left here on my own with three young kids aged 6, 5, and 2. I had absolutely no idea how to run this place – I was a nurse born in Scotland, who had grown up in Sydney, and here I was with a cattle station and little kids to look after.”

Then came the drought. By July 1994, she was forced to destock all but 500 head of cattle, which were sent north to Clifton Hills on agistment. Sharon says she felt so numb that she needed to escape. “We went to Grant’s family in the Barossa Valley for six months – I couldn’t come back here,” she says. “But then I decided that we needed to come home. I don’t know that I made a conscious decision at that point to continue to run the property; I think I was paralysed and couldn’t make a decision. But after a period of time I realised, well, I’m still here, I’ve got a lot of support, and I had better learn how to make this run.”

Ashlee was old enough to feel the sadness and confusion following her father’s death. Now with two small boys of her own (Thomas, 4, and six-monthold Henry), she’s in awe of her mother’s strength.

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S T A T I O N S

S T A T I O N S

“Imagine being a widow with three young kids, having also recently lost your mum; it would have been so much easier to walk away,” she says. “She’s tough and stubborn as hell and doesn’t back down, and I’m pretty proud of her.”

The year after Grant died, Sharon began the process of gaining organic certification for Cowarie. She became a foundation member of Organic Beef Enterprises (OBE Organic), along with Mary Oldfield from neighbouring Mungerannie Station, and Birdsville’s David and Nell Brook. “We were always organic farming – we don’t use any fertilisers, herbicides or weedicides, and the livestock don’t need nutritional inputs – but we needed to formalise our grazing management practices in order to reach more markets,” Sharon says.

Sharon is now an authority on holistic and environmentally sustainable management. “Mum’s been involved in organics for over 20 years, so a lot of people are now coming to her and asking her for advice,” Ashlee says. “I think it’s pretty cool that this little townie nurse from Sydney is now really respected in her own right.”

Sharon credits Birdsville Track locals with the bulk of her learning, and says Grant’s uncle Eric Oldfield offered critical direction during those freefalling early years when she was trying to find her way. “He would come up and drive around with me and tell me about the different grasses, and he’d say, ‘That’s good

grass, that’s sweet grass, that’s good sweet grass’,” she says. “I was confused but so keen to learn, so I tried a different approach and asked him why the cattle were eating a certain type of grass, and then he explained that it was because there was nothing else to eat. I learned to ask the right questions.”

Eric’s detailed knowledge of the Channel Country’s complex supply chain has helped to ensure Cowarie’s survival in the driest of conditions, and his wisdom lives on in all who work the land. “Cowarie is special because of the land systems; you’ve got a very even mix of sandhill country, gibber country and channel country and they all react differently to rain and all offer very different types of feed, which can last a long time,” Eric’s great-nephew Craig explains.

“Most city people would look at the country out here and wonder how the cattle live – they look at it as a very dry, barren, unproductive place, but the amount of different feed growing is unbelievable,” adds station hand Warren Glynne. “The cattle will eat leaves off the coolabah trees, they get a taste for the saltbush, and you even get clover in the right conditions.”

Cowarie’s mantra is simple: you have to match your grazing load to your pasture availability – and when the menu runs dry, it’s time to lighten off. Average annual rainfall is a modest 120–200 millimetres, but the property rarely sees those figures and has fallen on

CLOCKWISE FROM ABOVE: Mustering the last of the agisted cattle; cattle yarded waiting to be trucked; Craig Oldfield, Maria Madsen and Brett White ready to truck cattle; Brett inspects the solar power system, housed in a dust and vermin-proof storage container; Sharon Oldfield views the floodwaters from the air.

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S T A T I O N S

extremely hard times on numerous occasions. “It actually got that bad in 2014 that we were completely destocked and nearly had to sell the place,” Craig, now 30, says.

Everyone felt the pain. “You’re seeing poor, weak cattle and everything looking dry and horrible and, as a mother, it was so difficult watching the kids deal with it,” Sharon says. “I wondered if this was the future that I wanted for them – constantly tackling drought and also dealing with the business realities of it. But they came back to me and said they wanted to give it a crack. I think it was their energy that I admired so much, as I had nothing left.”

All three Oldfield kids embarked on work, studies and travel after completing high school in Adelaide, but one by one they returned home to their roots. Craig was first, and after several years working at Cowarie as an apprentice to then manager John Germein, he asked for the top job. “I was sitting here at 21 and our manager was 70 by then and wanted to retire,” Craig says. “I was faced with the call: do I take it on, or what? I took it on for 12 months, but I thought it was a bit big for me, so we got a manager for another 12 months, and when he moved on, I was faced, at 23, with the question: Do I try again?”

Sharon had already advertised for another manager, but John convinced Craig to take charge. “He knew my father and grandfather really well, and I was telling him

that I thought I was too young to take it on, but he said, ‘That’s not right mate – you were born here. This is your place, you know what to do’,” Craig says.

Craig promised his mother that he would give it a minimum of five years, and wouldn’t back out even when it got tough. It was an enormous learning curve. “We actually had three floods in a row in 2009, 2010 and 2011. They weren’t massive, but each one was a little bit bigger than the last and they were pretty bloody handy for the station. Unfortunately, though, we were buggered as we didn’t have the stock to run on it,” he says. “I didn’t know enough then to take my opportunity.”

Instead, the situation worsened; by the end of 2014, they were down to 600 cows. “Mum and I went to see the bank managers to tell them that we just didn’t know where we could go any more,” Craig says. “There was no more money, there was no more time, we had no cattle and we had big debts.”

In December 2014, the Oldfields were told that they had six months to sell Cowarie. By this stage, Ashlee and her husband, Brett White, had been back living on the station for a year. Christopher had also returned home full of energy, leaving Adelaide as a certified boilermaker with now-fiancée Kristy Pinjuh. “I’d been gone for too long – I missed the lifestyle and the people,” he says.

ABOVE: Derwent Creek waterhole at the Cowarie homestead. OPPOSITE, CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The Cowarie mob: Christopher Oldf ield, Kristy Pinjuh, station hand ‘Wazza’ Glynne, Sharon Oldfield, Ashlee White, Brett White (holding Henry), Thomas White, Maria Madsen and Craig Oldfield; station hands Kathleen Waterman (left) and Jody Brown, of Latrobe station, catch their breath after mustering; Brett White with eldest son Thomas.

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Mildura-born Kristy says she was overwhelmed by a sense of isolation when she arrived. “I wasn’t sure if this was for me, but the longer I am out here, the more I love it and the more I see how much it means to these guys,” she says.

Craig’s Danish partner, Maria Madsen, has now also joined the siblings permanently since finishing her nursing studies.

She initially visited Cowarie as a backpacker, with dreams of becoming a cowgirl. “Sharon picked us up,” she says. “At first the houses disappeared, then the trees disappeared, then the bushes disappeared, and then it was just rock, if you were lucky, and sand, and we kept asking ‘Are we there yet?’”

Sharon has a real soft spot for these girls, for that was her story once. “The three kids bring different strengths to the business and so do their partners and, as part of our succession planning, we’ve identified each other’s strengths rather than any shortcomings, which is a positive note to start on,” she says.

“They’re brothers and sisters, and they’re family – warts and all.

They all bounce off each other, but they all complement one another, and I want them to be friends – it’s important.”

The Oldfields credit Ashlee’s husband, Brett, with Cowarie’s high cattle-handling standards. The 193-centimetre Queenslander swapped lucrative stud cattle and the intoxicating smell of lucerne for dusty station life, and has slotted in well with the family. “I met the love of my life, packed up and followed her to paradise,” he jokes.

The couples live in separate houses, but meet up to discuss the day’s work schedule over breakfast and dinner in the main homestead. Sharon remembers the guilt she felt during the 12-month period when no-one drew a wage, but everyone could see the bigger picture: the recovery from debt is almost harder than drought itself. “For every one year of drought, it takes five years of recovery – you can’t afford to buy back your breeders, so you have to breed your way back out again,” she says.

But when the rain came in 2015, the next generation had hatched a plan. “The kids had a discussion and decided they were sidestepping me because they thought I had become a little cautious,” Sharon says. “Their plan was to bring in agistment cattle to get us out of a hole.”

After the first stock arrived at Cowarie, everyone spent the rest of the year with their hearts in their mouths for there was no further rain. It took a new-year downpour to wash away any doubts. “It kept raining and we ended up with nine different clients in on agistment; I was just going for it, and we went big,” Craig says. “I’d been waiting for 10 years and we’d nearly gone down, and I wasn’t going to let it happen again. We pushed every risk to the absolute limit – there was a 12-month period during that agistment when we had only one inch of rain – but we got them out at the right time and everyone did very well; they were all fat and we haven’t looked back.”

The Oldfields sold $9 million worth of stock for other people in 2016–17. The outgoing profit highlighted the land’s potential and, with growing confidence all round, they began to rebuild their own herd of Shorthorn/Santa Gertrudis composites and gradually send the agisted stock back home.

Cowarie is low-stress country, and while the feed takes a long time to run out, floods bring welcome relief.

S T A T I O N S

Star trails over Cowarie, where Sharon’s three children and their partners are working towards the family’s centenary on the station.

About 500 Droughtmaster cattle from Latrobe station near Longreach, Qld, were the last to go. Owners Donald and Wendy Brown can’t believe the condition of their animals after spending three years at Cowarie.

“This country is as dry as I’ve seen it in three years, and the cattle are as good as I’ve seen,” Donald says.

“When your cow herd is 1000km away, you’ve got to feel comfortable that the people who are looking after them feel like you do about cattle. The last three years, we’ve got everything right.”

Cut-out was held at Mona Downs waterhole, where the Oldfield story began. It was stinking hot, and a spontaneous dunking by the brothers and their partners highlighted the youthful energy of this new generation of station overseers. “Agisting cattle here has certainly got us out of trouble and helped us to get back on our feet, but we also hope that we have been able to help other people, too – we’ve used our own skills to look after their herds like our own,” Christopher says. “We’re now a powerhouse compared to what we were, and we’re not relying on a manager; it’s our decision now, and it’s a good feeling to know that we are going forward and succeeding, so I suppose you’ve just got to have a party, I guess – dip your toes in, crack a beer and be happy.”

Craig wonders if many other families would be able to stick together and sweat it out for a single goal. “I’ve got to give it to these guys – at the end of the day, they leave the big calls to me and let me be

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boss, and it would be hard for them working for your brother,” Craig says. “I struggled a bit and I made a few mistakes, but now we are so far in front that we can go anywhere we want between the three of us. Three years after being told to sell the place we’re back to full capacity, we’re getting this flood and we are just cocked, primed and loaded, ready to go.”

Sharon Oldfield knows that Cowarie is in the right hands. “We’ve had a few discussions along the way – Craig still calls me a handbrake, which I think I’m quite happy to be at this stage, but I have to be honest, I’m extremely proud of the way that they have all got together,” she says. “They have worked incredibly hard through the process and have done a really good job of managing it, and we’ve come out the other side.”

It’s getting close to 80 years of Oldfields on Cowarie and Mona Downs, and the young guard already has centennial celebrations in its sights. They’re thinking big, for the dream of this new generation is to grow the station beyond its existing boundaries – buy more country to not only future-proof the business, but accommodate an expanding brood. It’s the next exciting chapter, and three born-and-bred station kids are so grateful that their mum stuck around to help them write it. “It’s taken more than 20 years to recover from a devastating blow to a station family and here we are,”Craig says. “We’re all young and ready, we’ve got so many exciting ideas and skills, and we just know what we want to do.”

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H O R I Z O N S

Signs of the times A rich tradition of sign language among the Indigenous people of Arnhem Land is being documented and preserved by linguists and anthropologists.

STORY + PHOTOS DAVID HANCOCK

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s afternoon light skips across the waters of the Arafura Sea bathing the sands of Elcho Island in a golden glow, Doris Yethun Burarrwanga moves lithely over the beach teaching her granddaughters the dance of baru, the saltwater crocodile.

Twelve-year-old Grace Barurrwanga glides with the confidence of a young girl who has participated in many ceremonial events while her cousin, two-year-old Rekisha Gaykamangu, watches with curiosity and wonder, mimicking their movements with childish gusto.

Baru is the main totem of the Gumatj clan of northeastern Arnhem Land and the crocodile dance is performed at major ceremonies. Doris bends over and extends her arms forward and parallel to the beach and dips her hands. This is the ‘sign’ of the baru, woven into dance. They spend 20 minutes dancing before moving on to search for maypal (shellfish) among rocks. Later, the group, including Rakisha’s mother Abby Dhamarrandji, settles around a fire to eat as the sun goes down.

They talk about clan totems, relationships and country in Yolngu Matha, the main language of northeastern Arnhem Land. It is a conversation aimed at Rekisha and Grace to embed Yolngu traditions.

Interestingly, hand signs accompany words and phrases.

For example, the word ‘fire’ (gurtha in Yolngu Matha) is expressed as breath being expelled from the mouth with a hand moving from the lips, ‘water’ (gapu) is depicted as one cheek inflated while being tapped by the index finger. Most words have a corresponding sign and just as words are linked in sentences, hand signals are joined to create complex phrases, capable of expressing the full range of human experience.

Traditionally, Indigenous children of Arnhem Land grew up using this alternate language of hand signals in concert with everyday conversation and, importantly, in situations when cultural protocols demanded it.

“In the past, every Yolngu person whether they could hear or not, used sign [language],” Doris says. “Children grew up understanding hand signs because they see people signing all the time. Signing is used in dancing, in bungul (ceremonies), with hunting and also when there is a need for quietness.” Those times include initiation

and mortuary ceremonies – in some groups, mortuary conventions require periods of public silence that may last for years. There are also certain kinds of avoidance relationships in Indigenous culture where two people are not permitted to communicate directly.

This alternate language is also useful in everyday situations such as when groups of people travel over bumpy or corrugated roads in noisy vehicles, while in boats and light aircraft, and when communicating over distance. Young Yolngu people are also expected to remain quiet out of respect, when visiting sacred sites and in the homelands of other families. Hand signs have always been a preferred method to make secret assignations.

For the small number of deaf and partially deaf people in Indigenous communities, sign language provides a way to easily integrate into society. Doris Burarrwanga’s nephew Michael Ganambarr, who was born deaf, is a talented painter and dancer who participates fully in ceremonial and social activities.

“He knows how to communicate with people,” she says. “The old people taught him by singing and clapping sticks – he can see them and see their actions. He can do the shark, crocodile and kangaroo dance and other important dances. He knows all these [ceremonial] things. He learned by reading lips, watching us closely and through actions. He has not been limited because he uses hand signs very effectively, and we all understand.”

Daisy Wulumu, a bilingual teacher for 33 years, including more than 20 years at Shepherdson College at Galiwin’ku on Elcho Island, the largest settlement in eastern Arnhem Land, learned sign language from an early age. “My uncle was deaf and I watched him and talked to him,” she says.

“As a Yolngu teacher, I find it is a very handy thing to use in the classroom and going out on excursions or at a school camp out bush because I don’t have to yell as much.

Children have fun with Yolngu sign language and I like it because it was taught a long time before I was born. It is a very ancient thing that links us to our ancestors.”

Unfortunately teaching of hand signals dropped away as Indigenous people were moved off their country and into large communities under European control. Mainstream, non-Indigenous education placed

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Abby Dhamarrandji (left) and Doris Burarrwanga (right) teach two-year-old Rekisha Gaykamangu the sign for water (gapu – tapping on an inflated cheek with forefinger); Michael Ganambarr describes the sign for flying fox (warrnyu – two hooked fingers representing the claws of the animal when it hangs from a tree); Grace Burarrwanga learns the sign for the saltwater crocodile (baru) from grandmother Doris while dancing on the beach.

H O R I Z O N S

Doris Burarrwanga and Bentley James discuss different signs in Yolngu Matha, on a verandah at Galiwin’ku.

importance on English, thus eliminating local dialects and discouraging, or banning, hand signs in classrooms.

Other factors include changed living conditions, fewer visits to country and European-style houses with walled rooms, compared to the open-air camps of yesteryear.

According to linguist and anthropologist Dr Bentley James, Indigenous hand signs were not recognised as an alternate language until the mid-to-late 20th century.

Early explorers and anthropologists, such as Baldwin Spencer, noted that Aboriginal people in northern and central Australia used hand signs, but no comprehensive study was made until British academic Adam Kendon published a record of Warlpiri sign language in 1988.

“Starting from the time when I lived at Yuendemu with the Warlpiri people, his [Kendon’s] work gave me a fascination for hand signs that has stayed for a lifetime,” Bentley says. “I have been frantically gathering hand signs in Arnhem Land for the past 25 years.”

Bentley is working closely with Doris Burarrwanga and Professor Dany Adone of the University of Cologne, in Germany, to publish a book of hand signs for the Yolngu and Yan-nhangu languages of coastal and north-eastern Arnhem Land.

Dr James believes there are about 1000 hand signs in the Yolngu sign language, with regional variations. He focused on a portion: some 450 of the most relevant will be

published. “Otherwise you couldn’t carry the book,” he says.

“Linguistically, we have mapped many changes in Yolngu culture through hand signs,” he says. “There is a whole raft of signs that deal with Macassan culture associated with navigation, boats, knives, axes, money, beer and tobacco.

More recently, hand signals have evolved to describe the contemporary world. There are now signs for telephones, televisions, iPads, credit cards, motorcars and school.”

Bentley says Yolngu people have brought imaginative constructions to represent a changing, modern world.

“Signs for television, air conditioning, washing machines and dishwashers are often signified by a rectangular outline; the iconic idea of a box that washes, or a computer – a box that thinks, a camera – a box that looks, a television – a box you look at, an iPad – a box you write into.”

The origins of the three-way collaboration with Doris, Dany and Bentley reaches back 25 years when they met at Galiwin’ku by chance. “None of us imagined we would still be working on this book all these years later,” Bentley says. “Sadly, so many who have helped us in this work have passed away but when it is published, the book will fulfill a desire from all of us to give back to the children of Arnhem Land the priceless inheritance of their alternative sign language. The document will also include a precise ethnographic and linguistic description of enormous interest to academics internationally.”

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N A T U R E

Tree roo rescue Lumholtz tree-kangaroos of the Atherton Tableland found a champion in Karen Coombes.

STORY MANDY McKEESICK

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here is a frenetic scratching from behind a closed door and as it opens three balls of fur erupt to climb curtains, leap onto shoulders and generally run amok. It is feeding time for these juvenile tree-kangaroos but before they settle to be bottle-fed there is plenty of delinquent teenage energy to expend.

Dr Karen Coombes runs the Tree Roo Rescue and Conservation Centre on the Atherton Tableland in Far North Queensland. “This is Ella, Misty and Bear,” she says as the three long-tailed beasts continue to bounce off furniture around her. “They’re a bit naughty. They will jump on you and try to bite, but they’re only playing.”

Ella, Misty and Bear are Lumholtz tree-kangaroos, one of only two species endemic to Australia. The Lumholtz lives in rainforests between Cardwell and the Daintree River but predominantly on the Atherton Tableland. The second species, the Bennett’s tree-kangaroo, lives north of Daintree. Many people have never heard of a kangaroo that climbs trees and Karen often finds herself met with scepticism when she talks of them. “I’ve even been asked if I was using drugs and sitting in the rainforest too much,” she laughs. “But yeah, they do exist.”

Adaptation to life in the canopy means tree-kangaroos have long, well-muscled forearms, short, broad hind feet with pads designed for climbing and a distinctive tail, up to 80 centimetres long, which is used as a counterweight. Males can weigh up to 12.5 kilograms. But life in an increasingly urban environment brings challenges and it is Karen’s mission not only to rescue her beloved tree roos, but to further research the species and educate the community.

Growing up in Sydney in the late 1960s Karen surrounded herself with animals, even riding her horse to school along the city streets. She trained as a veterinarian nurse before moving to Darwin, where she completed a science degree, with an honours project studying freshwater shrimp, and moved into a job with the Northern Territory Museum.

Eventually the heat drove her and husband Neil to the cooler climes of the Atherton Tableland, to a rainforest property and to tree-kangaroos. Karen was besotted.

Surprised by the lack of knowledge on the creatures often spotted in her backyard, Karen embarked upon a PhD. “After counting 30,000 shrimp for my honours project I swore if I ever studied again it would be something bigger and easier to count,” she says. “But I found out tree-

kangaroos are not easy to count. You can walk straight under a tree-kangaroo and not find it. Even with radio collars on, I would spend up to three hours looking for one – and I knew which tree it was up.”

As she studied and became known for her research, people began to bring injured tree-kangaroos to her and, with Neil constructing cages and treatment rooms, the Tree Roo Rescue and Conservation Centre evolved. “I was once told to never set up a sanctuary or a hospital or I would get inundated,” Karen says. “I thought, ‘Don’t be silly. It’s not build it and they will come’. Well, sadly, that does happen.

I don’t understand the reasoning for it, but every time we build more cages we get more animals.”

The centre currently has a hospital building and 12 enclosures, although the house is still used as an intensive care unit and playground for joeys in care. “Poor Neil has to live with tree roos sleeping on his head but he loves them as much I do,” Karen says. “He’s been putting up with them for 20 years. I think he would have kicked me out or left if he was sick of it by now.”

Misty, Ella and Bear represent the challenges faced by Lumholtz tree-kangaroos. Misty’s mother was killed by a car when she was about four months old and only partly furred (called a velvet). “People think they are nocturnal but they are not,” Karen says. “They are what’s called cathemeral, meaning they are active all throughout the day and all throughout the night, but they have little power naps. You need to be looking out for them day and night on the roads anywhere near rainforest.”

Bear’s mother was killed by domestic dogs and Ella was found abandoned in a paddock. Though vehicles and dogs are major threats, it is habitat fragmentation and a changing climate that are having the most impact on tree-kangaroos.

Over the years Karen noticed an increase in the number of tree roos coming into the centre and also an increase in the number of animals with impaired sight. She enlisted the help of a veterinary ophthalmologist who diagnosed the problem as neurological damage leading to blindness.

“What we think is happening is that as the rainforest dries out with hotter seasons, the trees are stressing and releasing toxins as a survival technique. The tree roos are ingesting the toxins, leading to brain damage and blindness,” Karen says. “It’s a complex issue and is going to take people a lot smarter than me to extend the research.”

Karen Coombes with a Lumholtz tree-kangaroo.

P H O T O

E S S A Y

BRUMBY CHASERS PHOTOS GRENVILLE TURNER

There’s a chill in the air but that is not bothering the brumby stalkers. Huddled behind mulga scrub, cameras and binoculars at the ready, they wait patiently for the wild horses to emerge from the bush. A stallion comes into view, raises his head, ears pricked, sensing their presence. He stamps the ground and the mares move behind the bushes.

This is the first day of the 2018 Wild Brumby Tour and already the group has spied a half dozen brumbies grazing near Palm Valley, west of Hermannsburg, NT. The tour is the brainchild of Tasmanian equine-hoof specialists Jeremy Ford and wife Jen Clingly, who have been guiding enthusiasts for more than a decade.

“What inspired us to do the tours was to see the wild horses in their natural habitat and see the capabilities of the natural hoof,” Jen says. “We teach that horses don’t need metal shoes and that their hooves are capable given the right environment, the right movement and the right nutrition.”

Jacky Ynema is a hoof trimmer from Western

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Australia on her fourth tour. “It’s been interesting looking at the horses in a different year,” Jacky says.

“Hopefully there will be more later on.” As it turns out over the next few days, the brumbies are difficult to find. This is not a deterrent to the chasers. In fact it only feeds their enthusiasm.

“We have made our lives around horses,” says Rob Howden, who is with his partner, equine nutritionist Carol Layton. “This is my first trip here to study brumbies and it’s really interesting to see the country and the conditions.”

For Christine Chong, it’s also about the photography.

“You get these amazingly framed shots of wild horses and they seem to be posing in the classic pose you want from a horse, with their ears pricked and heads up, looking straight at the camera.”

The three-day tour starts and finishes in Alice Springs, with stop-offs at Kings Canyon and Watarrka National Park, as well as a visit to the Aboriginal homeland of Christine Braedon and Peter Abbott.

Palm Valley is one of the most dramatic landscapes in this part of Central Australia.

OPPOSITE: A brumby runs wild along the Finke River, near Hermannsburg.

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1. Guide Gavin Lamb talks about the plants along the rim of Kings Canyon.

2. Peter Abbott and Christine Braedon of Karrke Cultural Experience give extraordinary insights into traditional Aboriginal life.

3. Jen Clingly photographs a highlight of the tour, Kings Canyon rim walk.

4. Brumby country near Hermannsburg.

5. Professor of Veterinary Science (The University of Queensland), Chris Pollitt was invited on the tour to discuss the feet of horses and to talk about the history of horses in their natural state.

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1. The 4WD bus crosses the dry riverbed of the Finke River.

2. Brumbies near Hermannsburg.

3. Guide Gavin Lamb prepares lunch.

4. Chris Pollitt and Jeremy Ford examine the remains of a brumby skull.

5. Early morning camp site near the Areyonga turn-off.

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P R O F I L E

Quiet achiever The young manager of CPC’s Bunda and Kirkimbie stations, James Beale, is earning wide respect across the Top End. STORY + PHOTOS KEN EASTWOOD

W

hen James Beale was just 22 years of age, he was appointed manager of CPC’s Kirkimbie station in the north-west of the Northern Territory. Some 2300 square kilometres in size, it carries about 11,000 head of cattle.

Being so young, Jimmy not surprisingly faced a bit of resistance from some of the older blokes who’d been working there, and some of them moved on. But five years down the track, Jimmy certainly holds no grudges. Instead, he maturely and humbly says, “It was probably me learning to deal with them, I think”.

Now 27, Jimmy is not only in charge of Kirkimbie, but also the adjoining 1788sq km Bunda station, which CPC bought in 2015.

Throughout the Top End he’s gaining a reputation as a high-achieving station manager: dynamic, ferociously smart, unwaveringly calm and hardworking. He pilots aeroplanes and helicopters as needed, and rarely seems stumped by anything. In 2017 he and his partner Shannon Chatfield won CPC’s Station of the Year award.

“I’ve never ever seen him stressed out,” says Shannon, 25, who met him on Kirkimbie five years ago. “And he’s the smartest person I know.”

“I’ve worked with Jimmy for about the past three years,” says CPC’s chief executive officer Troy Setter. “He’s a very valuable member of our team, and he’s very innovative. He’s one of our younger managers but certainly has significant maturity and experience compared to many peers of his age.

He’s a good leader – he’s developed some good head stockmen and some of his team have been promoted to other positions, which is a sign of a good leader. He’s also a good thinker and challenges the status quo.”

Jimmy comes from good cattle stock. He and his younger brothers AJ and Cameron grew up on the property their parents run, Dunheved, near Roma in central Queensland, and attended boarding school at Brisbane Boys’ College. In 2008, Jimmy joined CPC as a jackaroo on Nockatunga, in Queensland’s far south-west, and his potential was quickly identified.

He moved up through the ranks on Wrotham Park station and CPC’s agistment properties around Alice Springs, before a transfer to Carlton Hill in the Top End, where he ran the ‘boat camp’ (the live-export camp) before becoming overseer. He moved to Kirkimbie as station manager in 2013.

Fiona Plunkett, who travels around Top End properties in her role as a vocational trainer for Charles Darwin University, says Jimmy is extremely well respected. “He’s a very good operator,” she says.

James Beale, manager of Bunda and Kirkimbie stations, atop one of the new tanks he’s had installed.

Jimmy in the yards with some weaners.

“He’s good with people and he’s a nice fella, and really successful, especially for such a young fella.”

Jimmy is about the only person who doesn’t talk himself up. “I do alright,” he says. He’s quietly spoken, with a droll sense of humour and the ability to take the micky out of others without being cruel. He has a habit of clicking his tongue when he’s thinking – as if to a horse that isn’t there.

And although he never seems to hurry, he gets three times more done in a day than most people. “There’s generally no lack of things to do,” he says. When asked whether the big hammock hanging beside the homestead ever gets any use, he replies, “That’s the dream”.

Troy says Jimmy has been particularly innovative in managing the 22,000 mainly Brahman commercial herd across Bunda and Kirkimbie, and the 2500 head in the stud.

“He’s substantially reduced the production costs per kilo and increased total cattle numbers as well,” Troy says. “He’s trialling drones out there, and different water development projects, and some genetic work – he has a reasonable number of projects on the go.”

Located in the Victoria River District on the edge of the Tanami, with the West Australian/Northern Territory border forming one side of the properties, Bunda and Kirkimbie straddle the Buntine Highway and are a beautiful mix of black soil country, with golden paddocks of Mitchell and Flinders grasses, and red spinifex hills with deep ravines sheltering freshwater crocs and donkeys. They get an average of 650 millimetres rain during the wet, but received substantially less than that this year. “I can’t predict it, so there’s no point worrying about it,” Jimmy says.

The stations turn off about 5000 head a year to other CPC properties. “We’re just a breeder place, so we turn everything off as weaners, generally at 150 kilos,” Jimmy says. “They’ll go to Argyle, Carlton Hill or up to the floodplain out of Darwin.” Older or unproductive cows are sent for live export out of Darwin (1000km away) or Wyndham. “Wyndham’s only 500 kays, but the roads are worse,” he says.

Over the past two years, Jimmy has focused on introducing pure Angus and Ultrablack bulls into the stud.

“Chasing fertility is the main thing,” he says. “Getting your

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cows to get in calf while they’ve got a calf at foot.” A bonus of the black blood is better weight gain. Bulls go in to the paddocks from December to March, and this year the first of the black progeny will get joined. Ideally, all the cows calve at the same time, making the herds easier to manage and helping the cattle gain weight over the wet.

At the moment, Jimmy is trying to understand why around 20 percent of cows that initially test positive to pregnancy come back the following year without a calf at foot. “Is it pests, is it disease, is it something we don’t know about it, or is it genetics? Or is it our management?” he says. “That’s the unknown in it now. It’s just a matter of seeing what’s not working and seeing what we’ve got to fix.”

On a typical day in April, fixing seems to be what Jimmy does particularly well. Although he’s given most of his 14 employees the day off, he doesn’t stop moving. After helping his mechanic brother AJ take a bull bar off a Toyota, he sets about butchering a goat for the whole mob for dinner, patiently showing first-year stationhand Jack Blair how to skin it. “He’s great,” Jimmy says.

“Really smart. He’ll have my job before too long.”

After putting the goat on slow cook, he collects parts for the new boreman to use, and chats to a variety of contractors working on the property. Then it’s off to inspect new additions to the yards that he designed, including gates that can be operated safely from a platform above the stock, and adapting the plans to make the yards more efficient. Meanwhile grader driver Laurie Bickford needs some advice out on a track, but Jimmy stops for a quick yarn with head stockman Andrew ‘Buttsy’ O’Kane, who is preparing for stock camp. Buttsy has been working with Jimmy for two years on Bunda. “I came here to work with him,” Buttsy says. “I went to a CPC conference and he was the first bloke who introduced himself to me, and I decided I wanted to work for him.”

Although he’s in no hurry to move on, there seems little doubt that Jimmy will apply his confidence-building, calm demeanour and astute mind to something else down the track. “I don’t wake up in the morning in order to do the same thing I did yesterday,” he says.

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P E O P L E

Pearl mistress Alison Brown’s love for the Dampier Peninsula hasn’t wavered in 50 years.

STORY + PHOTOS THERESE HALL

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lison Brown was a lanky 19-year-old university student when she first glimpsed her future home on the tip of Western Australia’s Dampier Peninsula 50 years ago. She was visiting Cygnet Bay, the rough camp site home of her fiancé, Bruce Brown, whose father had established a pearling operation there after World War II. “Bruce was quite sure I wouldn’t like the place and that would be the end of that,” she says with a smile.

But Alison surprised him by falling in love with the castaway outpost, a 220-kilometre rough and dusty road journey from Broome. “We arrived after dark and I remember seeing the twinkling of candlelights from the bark huts and the glow of small camp fires down the beach,” she says. It was nothing like the country of her childhood in the state’s Wheatbelt, but it cast a lifetime spell over Alison that holds her here still. “I didn’t mind getting back to basics,” she says. “It was lovely.”

During her tenure, Alison has witnessed the ebbs and flows in the Cygnet Bay business under the influence of three generations of the Brown family. When she arrived in 1969, Bruce’s father Dean was in charge, with Bruce’s brother Lyndon a decade into his pioneering work to culture pearls. Once Lyndon had found the secret of pearl cultivation, she and Bruce shepherded the business through its boom time on the international pearl market in the 1980s and ’90s. After 2008, when the GFC sent pearl sales plummeting, their son James took the helm and transformed Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm into an integrated pearling/tourism business. “Now we’ve got two labour-intensive industries instead of one. Aren’t we lucky?” Alison laughs.

When she married Bruce and moved to Cygnet Bay, Alison continued her history degree by correspondence – no easy feat without a mail service, a telephone or a twoway radio. She tried to help with the pearling work, but after one trip out to the pearling farm, she was told that a pearling seeding raft full of men was no place for a woman.

“It was a male world back then,” she says.

For her first seven years at Cygnet Bay, Alison and Bruce lived in a tiny hut near the beach. Made by hand from the bark of paperbark trees, it had no windows, just shutters to let the breeze blow through. “It was seven years of bliss,” she says. “It didn’t go mouldy in the wet and, because there were no windows, there was no glass to clean.”

They moved into a more substantial house when their two children, Stephanie and James, came along. “Looking back, if we had just put a lean-to on the hut, we may still be in it today,” Alison says.

Some of Alison’s most joyful memories are of the times she spent with the Indigenous women who lived nearby.

The pearl farm is adjacent to the traditional lands of the Bardi people, and several families lived on the property and worked in the business. Bardi women befriended the young white woman. “They were wonderful,” Alison says.

“We had a lot of fun together – they tried to take the micky out of me at every chance.”

When the Bardi men were out at sea collecting pearl shell for weeks at a time with Bruce, the women would wander past and call out to Alison: “We’re going fishing”.

“If I wasn’t doing anything, I’d always join them,” she says.

“I remember thinking – wow, this is my world.”

With the arrival of children and the expansion of the business, life grew increasingly busy. Alison took charge of the book work and ordered supplies for the community and spare parts for the boats. During the post-1980s pearl boom, she often hosted pearl buyers when they visited overnight. For 14 years Cygnet Bay had a primary school on site, attended by James and Stephanie, and the children of the local Indigenous community, Cape Leveque lighthouse keepers and pearl workers. In order to meet the minimum requirements to keep the school open, Alison gave preference to workers with children – “the more the better”.

Alison beams with her love of life on the Kimberley coast. Her son James claims that her passion for the place had a huge impact on him. “She just loved where she was living and that rubbed off on me,” he says. “That kind of ‘There is nowhere else in the world you would want to live if you had the choice’ attitude.”

Today, Alison and Bruce have stepped back from the everyday running of Cygnet Bay Pearl Farm. But they remain deeply interested. “We do all the financial backing,” she says. “We’re both still pretty fit and we’re quite happy to help.” And while her pioneering life on Cygnet Bay was not the life she expected, Alison has never regretted it. In fact, she’s planning to write a book about her experiences when she can make the time. “My mother gave me a shoebox full of all the letters I’d written her – in chronological order,” she says. “So I’ve got plenty of material.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Alison Brown, the understated grande dame of the Kimberley pearl industry; Alison happily spent her first seven years at Cygnet Bay living in a paperbark hut; known as ‘Alison’s strand’, this $330,000 string of rare keshi pearls was collected by the Browns over decades.

Noel Cuffe, Central Australian cattle inspector.

P E O P L E

Yard boss Noel Cuffe is the manager of Australia’s first organic spelling and saleyards.

STORY KERRY SHARP PHOTOS SHANE EECEN

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Kimberley road train is unloading at the Bohning Cattle Yards outside Alice Springs and manager Noel Cuffe is on standby to scrutinise its precious cargo. His job dictates that every beast be meticulously checked in case any are unfit to continue their journey.

“Animal welfare is our prime focus,” says the former New South Wales sheep musterer and now vital cog in upholding Australia’s rigorous, best-practice livestock welfare standards.

“We spell the cattle here for the required hours, determined by how long they’ve been in transit, and their owners entrust us to ensure they’re well-fed and watered and sent off with a clean bill of health. Any animal found with an issue is kept aside and cared for until it’s fit to travel. The buck stops with me as yard manager and if a problem slips through the net and is picked up down the line, I haven’t done my job properly.” That job also involves scanning NLIS (National Livestock Identification System) ear-tags, which give lifetime traceability of cattle transiting through different zones.

Noel has inspected more than 200,000 head of cattle since arriving at Central Australia’s only livestock spelling yards in 2013. The crucial ‘rest stop’ owned by the Northern Territory Cattlemen’s Association (NTCA) sits between stations to the north and north-west, and the final 12–14-hour run into South Australia and beyond.

“We mainly spell cattle in winter,” Noel says. “We handle Top End cattle going to southern meatworks, southern cattle heading north for live export, and a good stream of weaners transferring from West Australian breeder stations to Western Queensland fattening properties all owned by the same companies.”

The 58-year-old rodeo enthusiast and animal lover has journeyed far from his tiny New South Wales hometown of Wanaaring “out the back of Bourke” where his Dad, the local windmill expert, raised four boys after their Mum died. “We had no power or TV but I loved living there,” Noel says. “I’d grab the dogs and .22 rifle and go down the Paroo River shooting wild pigs all day. Kids could do that then. Nobody worried about you.”

Noel boarded in Rockhampton until he turned 13 and, when his mates were just starting high school, he was starting his first full-time job, at a Brewarrina sheep station 93 kilometres from home. “Our budget wouldn’t

stretch to another year of boarding school, so Dad was happy for me to start paying my own way,” Noel says.

“Station owner Rob Kerr was a tough boss who taught me well,” Noel says. “We caught up again recently and laughed about a time he was thrown off his horse. I’d got totally lost while mustering and he came looking for me after my unsaddled horse arrived back at the homestead. I can still see him galloping across the flat, wild red hair and beard streaming behind him and abusing the hell out of me. I grabbed the first thing I could find, a roll of wire, and hurled it in front of his horse – which bucked and sent him flying.

He eventually cooled down and saw the funny side!”

When legally able, Noel got his driving licence and a ute and, with two dogs and a woolpack full of clothes in the back, ventured off to wherever the roads would take him. “My address was c/- Post Office Australia,” he laughs.

“I drove around Australia two-and-a-half times, working from Airlie Beach [Qld] to Jindabyne [NSW] and everywhere in between. I met many good-hearted people in my travels – and a lot of rogues too!”

Noel was shearing in Tottenham, NSW, during the 1983 wide-comb dispute, sparked by farmers keen to lift shearing-shed productivity. The shearers feared an influx of wide-comb-wielding New Zealanders and the union got involved. Noel personally found using wide combs easier and more efficient.

In 1989, Noel became a ringer on the Heytesbury Cattle Company-owned Mount Sanford Station in the Victoria River District. He stayed 15 years – interspersed with a twoyear stint at Brisbane’s Eagle Farm Race Track. “I was in my comfort zone at Mount Sanford. I had my own campdraft horses and dogs and a great relationship with the managers Paul and Jane Stone, who are still good mates,” he says. He finally left in 2010 to manage a Queensland sheep farm.

Two years later, Noel became a Katherine-based coordinator and mentor for the NTCA Indigenous Pastoral (now Real Jobs) Program, which entailed visiting and interviewing the kids on their communities, providing preliminary training and delivering successful candidates to host stations for 12 months’ on-the-job training. “We then monitored them closely,” he says. “Most ringers today have already lived away from home for boarding school or college, but these Indigenous kids have never left

P E O P L E

Noel at the Bohning Cattle Yards.

their communities. They’re excited to be following their grandfathers as stockmen, but most hit a barrier in the first two weeks and want to go home to family and friends – despite the best efforts of many good station owners, managers and head stockmen to help them fit in. We’d place two together to support each other through that barrier.” Noel says it was always rewarding to have station managers invite trainees back for full-time positions.

In 2016, Bohning Cattle Yards became Australia’s first organic spelling and saleyards and it now caters to a burgeoning national demand for organic beef. “We’ve had 18,000 head from one certified Alice Springs station through here in two years, and numbers will grow as more local stations come on line,” Noel says. “Alice Springs is ideally placed to cash in on this trend, because pastoralists here don’t have to spray or dip cattle and don’t have the tick problems that exist further north.”

As the Bohning yards boss, Noel also hosts four or five annual vendor sales and July’s bumper show sale, which lures big-spending buyers and hundreds of interested onlookers. “We yard about 4000 two-tooth weaners and bidding is brisk. It’s a pretty intense day and we work hard to make sure everything is absolutely right,” he says.

In the quiet blistering summer months when the cattle stop coming, the hands-on manager moves into maintenance mode fixing broken railings, fence-posts, gate chains and water troughs around the four hectares of yards. Noel thrives on hard work and wide-open spaces and has only left the yards twice in four years.

“You could say I’m owed a few holidays,” he laughs, “but I’m happy just to stay put.”

Noel lives on site with his New Zealand-born partner Annie Godwin, a highly qualified nurse and midwife working with specialists in remote desert communities.

Outside work, Annie bike rides, swims laps – and is responsible for naming the lively newborns in Noel’s kelpie working-dog kennel. Most pups are snapped up quickly. Eight are permanent residents, including sisters Maisie and Marigold, the main workers since 16-yearold top dog Bongo retired. “They’re real good dogs,” Noel says. “They don’t bite or bark or get under people’s feet and they’re handy back up when we’re loading or moving cattle around.”

Noel says he’s glad he arrived in time to experience the free-wheeling ’60s and dramatic changes across all of life’s facets, including the livestock sector. “In my first stock camp, all we had was an old carbide light. Now there’s hot and cold running water, flushing toilets, fridges, freezers – and choppers for mustering, which have turned 18-hour days into 10-hour days. Workplace standards are much better and stock-camp personnel have changed too.

The old ringers who came back year after year have been replaced by college kids filling in gap years before heading off to become nurses, vets and helicopter pilots.”

When Noel and Annie eventually leave the desert, they’ll head to South Australia, “preferably to a place beside the water, and spacious enough that we can’t throw a rock through our neighbour’s window!”

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Rusty resurrection Jordan Sprigg makes a living out of turning scrap metal, found on the family farm, into amazing animal sculptures.

STORY JILL GRIFFITHS

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fter studying psychology at university, Jordan Sprigg decided to return to the family farm and give himself a year tinkering in the workshop to see if there was any possibility of making a living out of creating sculptures from old bits of rusty metal. Five years on, he’s still tinkering and is building himself an artistic reputation to stand alongside his stunning sculptures.

Jordan grew up on a typical family farm in Narembeen, in the Western Australian Wheatbelt. He headed off to Perth to attend Wesley College for his high school years and it was there that he discovered a joy in working with metal and wood. “In Year 11 at school I built a dragon out of metal,” Jordan says. “At that stage I didn’t think I could make a living from it.”

Wesley College obviously saw some talent in him though, and a few years later, while Jordan was at university, the college commissioned him to build a couple of metal kangaroos for the boarding house. That project went well and started Jordan thinking that maybe he could do something with this idea, so he kept tinkering.

“I was just drawn to scrap metal,” he says. “We had a lot of scrap metal lying around the farm and I just started making stuff out of that. I’m drawn to recycled materials because of the story behind it. The metal could have been sitting on a scrap heap for 50 years. Before that, it may have been in a tool that cleared the land. I like the sentimentality of that.”

Jordan leaves all his pieces rusty and the red-burnished look is a strong characteristic of his work. “Painting the pieces would be a waste,” he says. “It would waste the 50 to 70 years of rust that has built up and the history that goes with it.”

He uses the scrap as it is, so the components remain recognisable. “I like it when an old farmer or a mechanic can recognise the tools – old crescents, hammers, gears and chains,” he says. “When I pick stuff up, I don’t know which piece will go where. I don’t see anything. I just collect a lot of stuff and organise it into heaps.”

Jordan works with a mig welder and builds the sculptures around a frame that he constructs. He works from drawings, but his process is largely intuitive. He grinds bits off and adds bits on as he goes along. He draws his inspiration from

the piece itself as it progresses, but remains sceptical about inspiration. “Inspiration can be fickle,” he says. “Sometimes you can feel inspired and pump out a sculpture really quickly; other times it takes a long time to do nothing.”

He combats this by treating his work like a job. He fronts up at the workshop each morning, puts in a day’s work and leaves again. “But I don’t wake up Monday morning and dread going to work,” he says. “I really enjoy it. I only work on one piece at a time. If I’ve been commissioned to do something, I feel an obligation to my customer to get it done, so I’ll finish it and then move on to something else. A piece is finished when it’s finished; it’s as if the animal tells me when it’s done.

“I work on commissions about half the time and my own projects the rest of the time. Mostly I create animals, because I like doing them and there are so many animals out there.

At this stage there’s not another avenue I want to go down.

I like doing the wild and dangerous animals – sharks and beasts and powerful big horses. I’m drawn to the masculine animals, especially the ones with teeth and claws.”

Jordan’s rendition of a Spanish fighting bull – El Toro – which currently graces the sculpture plinth in front of Jahroc Gallery in Margaret River, WA, is a good example.

Standing 1.8 metres tall and stretching 3.6m long, he’s no small specimen. He’s a big, powerful creature, and his energy and movement are captured in his rusty metal body. This essence of life in the creature is something that sets Jordan’s sculptures apart, according to Jahroc Gallery co-owner Lara Bennett. “He gets the perspective of the animal just right, with each taking on a personality of its own,” Lara says.

Before El Toro, a larger-than-life-size red stag stood in front of the gallery, followed by a horse and an incredible frilled neck lizard. “Jordan’s sculptures create so much interest among customers, tourists and locals,” Lara says.

“They are missed by all when they are sold.”

Other pieces grace public spaces. Jordan’s hometown of Narembeen has several pieces in public areas and he is grateful for the support and encouragement his local community has shown him. He hopes his work brings benefits to the town as well, through people enjoying the pieces on public display and coming to visit his gallery.

Given the calibre of his work, this seems inevitable.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Jordan’s 2.3m high sculpture Red Thunder weights 450kg and is constructed from discarded tools, machinery parts and farm scraps; The Narembeen Hawk has a wingspan of more than 2m; Jordan works on a new creation.

Kim and Phillip Kelly set up Farm Sitters after seeing that farmers needed help.

B U S I N E S S

Respite from the land An innovative business is matching farmers wanting a break with people who want a break on farms.

STORY BRUCE McMAHON PHOTO DAVID KELLY

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helping hand for a farming family looking for a holiday break with the kids has morphed into Farm Sitters, a Queensland-based business taking temporary care of farms across the country, from cattle properties to oyster leases.

It is a rewarding side business for Phillip Kelly, who works with Rabo Bank, and wife Kim, a veterinarian. Both came off the land, both have dirt under their fingernails and both, now living on the outskirts of Dalby on the Darling Downs, have moved around from northern New South Wales to western Queensland. So there is inherent empathy for farming lifestyles and needs, plus job satisfaction in helping people on the land get away for a holiday, or for health or education reasons, or even a honeymoon, as was the case for an oyster farmer on a remote island off Cape York Peninsula.

Kim and Phillip were living in St George, Qld, when friends were keen for a summer holiday with their children before they headed back to boarding school. Phillip’s parents had just sold their property at Yallaroi, NSW, and agreed to help out the Bollon family.

“That continued for a couple of years in the January holidays,” Kim says. “Then they [Phillip’s parents] became too infirm and the natural question was, ‘Do you know anyone else that could come and help us?’ It just grew from there and we saw a real need. There was very much a diminished supply of working people in the bush. There’s a real need for short-term staff on the land, people who know what they’re doing.”

So Farm Sitters was born 14 years ago – an Australia-wide database of rural people looking for a break for holidays, health or educational needs, and those willing to look after properties for a spell. There have been thousands of members over that time, with membership in 2018 at about 804.

Both farmers and sitters pay membership fees and then references are checked while owners are asked about their needs and expectations. Once members, parties can communicate through the database, and property owners can search for suitable helping hands. Kim and Phillip will assist with advice or put out an SOS when an emergency, such as a medical or hospital drama, crops up.

“We’ve never advertised for sitters, they just come,” Kim says. “This is not an avenue we ever thought was going to

be a positive, but people who’ve had to sell their farms, or leave the land for whatever reason, and are scared of retiring into town, have found a new way of life they love, where they can feel valued and use their expertise.”

The caretakers need common sense and experience.

Some city people may walk past a problem, whereas an experienced farm minder would see the problem and fix it. “I often say it comes back to common sense – you don’t have to know how to fix the water pump but you’ve got to know that it’s broken,” Phillip says.

One of the spikes in demand for farm sitters was earlier this century when central Queensland mining was at its peak, when property owners lost station hands and, in some cases, family members to jobs in the mines. Some part-time minders stayed three or four months and became part of the normal running of the property.

“Farm sitting is providing security number one, having someone there for the gardens, cats and dogs, checking on water for the stock,” Phillip says. “And we try to encourage property owners to make a list of those little jobs – the crooked fence post, the gate that’s not swinging right, a bit of painting – and talk to their sitter about those jobs. These people are really keen to help.”

Retired agricultural journalist Jim Griffiths, 69, grew up on western properties through New South Wales and Queensland and now lives in Grenfell, NSW. “I still go and do one week here and two weeks there; I just finished six weeks south-west of St George, a place with cattle, sheep and goats,” Jim says. “I enjoy it. I try and work it in with sightseeing. I usually take my caravan and when you get somewhere, just keep on going and have a week or so touring afterward.” With black kelpie Dozer alongside, Jim is used to handling livestock, and agrees experience and common sense are needed and quick decisions often need to be made.

Farm Sitters has found carers to look after a range of properties – grain, cattle, hobby farms, hydroponic farms and horse studs – allowing owners physical and mental breaks from farm life. Pay depends on a host of factors – from location to hours of work and expectations. The basic sit would pay $40–50 a day.

“There are benefits both ways,” Kim says. “The greatest joy is when we get feedback that property owners are going to visit their sitters because they like them so much.”

B U S I N E S S

Far-out fashion Olivia O’Neill has fashioned her business to suit isolated women.

STORY THERESE HALL

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hen Olivia O’Neill arrived in Birdsville, Qld, 10 years ago as a backpacker from Ireland, she was horrified to find herself far away from the world of fashion. “I’ve always had a weakness for the sales rack,” she laughs. Living in the remote desert outpost – with its complete absence of clothing boutiques – may have led some fashionistas to hotfoot it for the coast, but it provided Olivia with the inspiration for a web-based ‘image consultancy’. “My aim is to give something to the women of the outback who can’t just go into big department stores and shop,” she says.

The result is her business So You Consulting, launched last year when the NBN fired up in Birdsville. It offers a 12-week online course designed to help women identify the colours and styles best suited to their skin tones and body type. “Some women hate shopping – they absolutely detest it,” she says. “That’s because they don’t know what suits them; they don’t know where to start.”

Olivia, who grew up in a small town in the Irish Midlands between Dublin and Galway, has never suffered any adverse reaction to shopping. “I love my clothes and I love my fashion,” she says. “But I’m not a follower of trends; I have my own style.” She grew up in an artistic family and worked in her parent’s bespoke window-dressing business with her interior designer mother and two sisters, one an interior designer and the other an interior architect.

During Ireland’s post-GFC economic slump, Olivia and her then-boyfriend (now husband) Padriac set off on a twoyear adventure in Australia, which included a three-month stint working on Cordillo Downs, one of the Brook family properties, 155 kilometres south-east of Birdsville. After returning to Ireland in 2009, the handy couple – Padriac is a mechanic and helicopter pilot and Olivia has a business degree and experience in office administration – were invited back to work across the company’s 4-million-hectare cattle empire. They lived in Birdsville from 2011 until July 2018, and have three children – Patrick, 7, Kathleen, 5, and Ashling, 3. They’ve since moved even further inland to manage a cattle station in the Northern Territory’s West MacDonnell Ranges, about two hours west of Alice Springs.

The idea for So You Consulting came to Olivia after she attended the 2014 Channel Country Ladies Day at Betoota, 167km east of Birdsville. Every year women leave their families behind to enjoy a girls’ weekend of dancing, socialising, workshops and fun. “There was a workshop on clothes, but it

was a disappointment – it was just to sell clothes,” she says.

“I thought maybe I could help these women.”

When she got home, Olivia researched the field, undertook a UK-based online course and wrote her own program tailored for isolated rural women like herself. The first half of the program focuses on colour and the second half on body shape. “I teach ladies to firstly wear a colour that complements them and then show them what to wear for their shape,” she says. “Then I cover fabrics and accessories, their wardrobe and then I tie it all together at the end.”

She gives her students ample information and, more importantly, presents them with personal challenges, such as having a long look in the mirror and taking selfies while wearing different colours. “It’s very confronting to really look at yourself,” she says. “But if you do it you’ll get to know what colour suits you – and you’ll also get to know yourself.” Olivia believes that a woman’s wardrobe can have a big effect on her confidence. “If you open your wardrobe knowing every piece looks really nice on you, you begin to like your lumps and bumps because they are helping to make your clothes sit and look well.”

On her Instagram account, Olivia describes herself as an “outback Mum hoping to bring some style, tips and tricks to help you look and feel fabulous every day”. But in Birdsville, fashion isn’t a high priority for the town’s 120 residents. “When I moved to Birdsville, I was adamant I would wear dresses, even though I knew the ‘uniform’ was a work shirt and a pair of jeans,” she says. “I feel confident in my dresses. They make me happier.”

When she was working in the Birdsville office of Brook Proprietors, Olivia dressed smartly, and when she had dinner at the famous Birdsville Pub with her young family she made an occasion of it. “The locals got used to me and they didn’t pay any heed,” she laughs. For those who’d rather stay in their jeans and shirts, Olivia implores them to inject some colour. “I wear shirts in turquoise, pink and yellow in the cattle yards,” she says.

“Cattle are colourblind so they don’t mind.”

But, while there may have been few opportunities to dress up in Birdsville, her new home on Derwent station in Central Australia is even less dressy. “Apart from contractors in the mustering season, there’ll just be us,” Olivia says. “But there’s mobile coverage and we’ll only be two hours from Alice Springs, so I’ll be able to keep in touch with all my followers and work with women in the region.”

THERESE HALL

FROM TOP: Olivia O’Neill regularly posts photographs of herself in outback locations to inspire her Instagram followers with fashion ideas; Olivia leads a colour workshop at the Channel Country Ladies Day in 2016 at Betoota.

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W O R K

A STIRLING IDEA Stirling and Kerry Cullenward swapped Merinos for molluscs when they moved from Hay to Merimbula, NSW, to take up oyster farming.

STORY + PHOTOS MARTIN AULDIST

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Stirling Cullenward grows oysters in floating mesh bags.

tirling Cullenward reverses his twin-cab ute down the concrete ramp and launches his 17-foot aluminium punt onto the mirror-like surface of Lake Pambula with a familiarity born of years of practice. As the vessel skims along beneath the towering gum trees lining the bank, he passes several anglers trying their luck among the oyster leases dotted around this scenic estuary. Pambula and nearby Merimbula are among the most popular holiday spots on the New South Wales South Coast. For Stirling, though, this is no day off: he is on his way to work.

Stirling and his wife Kerry, together with daughters Charlotte and Julia, own and operate Stirling Oysters, a thriving aquaculture business that incorporates a five-hectare lease in Lake Merimbula, and more leases in nearby Lake Pambula and Tuross Lake, further to the north.

For a man raised on the western plains of New South Wales, becoming an oyster farmer was an interesting and at times daunting journey. “My brothers and I grew up on Baratta station, north-west of Deniliquin, where our father Tony was the manager,” Stirling says. “Then, in 1986, Dad got a job managing Nap Nap station west of Hay.” In 1992 Stirling completed a degree in agricultural science at Charles Sturt University in Wagga Wagga. He then took on a number of station jobs himself, including managing Romani and Jeraly stations, a combined area of more than 56,000ha, running a herd of 600 breeding beef cows and producing 1000 bales of merino wool annually. Ultimately, though, Stirling’s burning desire to work for himself got the better of him.

“I was interested in aquaculture,” he says. “I saw it as an emerging industry that was affordable to get in to. We couldn’t afford to buy our own sheep station, but we could afford an oyster lease.”

In 2005, Stirling found an oyster lease in Lake Merimbula for sale by a grower who had shifted to Deniliquin. “I jumped in my car, drove to Deni, signed the lease papers, and drove home,” Stirling says. “I like to tell people I bought an oyster lease in Deniliquin.”

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He didn’t believe there was much risk involved. “The industry at the time wasn’t going that well. The guys farming introduced Pacific oysters down south were going okay, but the New South Wales industry, producing native Sydney rock oysters, was stuck in a rut.

“It was cheap enough that if it had gone pear-shaped it wouldn’t have been the end of the world. Back then, leases were selling for $1500 a hectare.”

As it turned out, it didn’t go pear-shaped at all – quite the opposite. From uncertain beginnings, during which Stirling worked for a traditional oyster farmer to make ends meet, Stirling Oysters today produces more than 450,000 Sydney rock oysters each year, selling them live and unshucked to processors supplying high-end restaurants in Sydney. In an indication of the newfound prosperity of the industry, the price of leases has skyrocketed to an incredible $100,000 a hectare.

A secret to Stirling and Kerry’s success was researching the latest production systems. Instead of growing oysters on wooden racks, as had been done for more than 100 years, Stirling ripped out the old infrastructure and started growing his oysters in floating mesh bags. It is a

W O R K

technique that provided huge efficiency gains and which has since become industry best practice.

“We catch most of our oysters from the wild by setting out plastic slats in the intertidal zone, where the fertilised spat settles and attaches,” Stirling says. “Then we detach them by flexing the slats, and grow them out in the bags.

“Once detached, they remain as single oysters until we sell them. That means there’s no need to manually split them at harvest time, like traditional farmers. The gain in efficiency means I can run the whole farm by myself ... traditionally it would have been a four-man operation.”

Stirling is out in his boat every day, bringing oysters in to his shed in Merimbula, and running them through his rotary grader. He sorts them into size groups, then they are re-bagged and taken back to the lake, except for those harvested. The bags also need to be frequently turned on their ropes to prevent bio-fouling on both oysters and bags.

“It takes up to three years for oysters to mature, so we have three age classes in the water at once,” Stirling says.

“We have around two million oysters out there.”

Stirling firmly believes that genetics will also play a big role in the industry’s future, as with other farming enterprises. To this end there are hatcheries that breed and sell spat from genetically superior oysters, which have been selected and bred for desired traits. “I currently source 25 percent of my spat from hatcheries,” Stirling says. “I can see that becoming a much greater percentage. Maybe one day we’ll get all our spat from hatcheries.”

Swapping grey clay for sea spray was a big move for the Cullenwards, but oyster farming requires many of the same skills they developed working on the vast inland stations. As with all agriculture, innovation, resilience, business acumen, an affinity with livestock and the natural world, and an ability to produce high-quality food are all keys to success.

“It’s still farming, it’s just that the stock are smaller,” Stirling says. “I’m confident in the industry because the world needs more and more protein and much of that will come from aquaculture.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Kerry, Charlotte, Julia and Stirling Cullenward; Stirling zooms off to check a lease at Pambula; Sydney rock oyster.

H I S T O R Y

Promised lands A century and a half ago, a group of German settlers upped stumps in the Barossa Valley and travelled by wagon for six weeks to the Riverina, where they settled.

STORY JOHN DUNN PHOTOS JANENE WHITTY

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agons wheeled many of the first settlers to the southern Riverina of New South Wales, and today both wagons and wheels – in cairns, murals, logos and even main street furniture – have become proud and symbolic reminders of a significant internal migration in the late 19th century. Many members of the German community in South Australia’s Barossa Valley decided that their future there was limited and that they should explore opportunities elsewhere.

“About this time New South Wales opened up much of the Riverina for small farm settlement,” says Dirk Spennemann, a cultural heritage academic at the School of Environmental Sciences at Charles Sturt University in Albury. “Farmers could select up to 320 acres [149.7 hectares] of fertile land at a price 10 times lower than the South Australian rate.”

So 56 of them – half of whom were less than 10 years old – made a six-week trek of about 1000 kilometres in their covered wagons in 1868 to land north of Albury.

They stopped initially at what is now known as Jindera, where other German families had previously arrived, before moving on to a nearby area centred around present-day Walla Walla. In the months ahead, both of these towns will begin a series of celebrations to mark the 150th anniversary of that historic journey and German settlement generally. A highlight will be wheels of a different kind – a cavalcade of cars mostly covering the same route.

“The significance of this sesqui-centenary has not been lost on today’s community and re-tracing the original pathway is a feature of several events being organised to honour those early settlers and their determination and foresight,” says Trevor Schroeter, Chairman of the Walla Walla Anniversary Committee.

It will be part of several events that will last into next year to recall the early history of German settlers journeying to Australia. The first shipload arrived in Adelaide in 1838 from Prussia, as it was then. They had come because they opposed changes within the Lutheran

church and wanted to maintain their own theological interpretations. After initially leasing land along the Torrens River, they moved further out into the Barossa.

Numbers grew as more groups arrived from Hamburg, but this caused many to realise that land was becoming both insufficient and costly. Several individual families began looking elsewhere and by the mid-1860s started to move to areas north of Albury. Watching this trend closely was Johann Gottlieb Klemke, a 59-year-old farmer who had four sons and was anxious to give them a chance to develop careers in agriculture. He travelled there and returned to declare that “the soil is rich and capable of producing any crop a farmer could wish to grow”. Klemke decided it was time to change and was quickly joined by other families, which comprised the biggest single group to make the move.

They were members of the Ebenezer and Light Pass Lutheran parishes and set off –“heading for their Garden of Eden,” said the Melbourne’s Leader – on October 16, 1868, in 14 covered wagons carrying their bedding, belongings and an adequate supply of corned beef and sausage, two spring carts, 31 horses, a few milking cows and some hens. Their names – Klemke, Fischer, Wenke, Mickan, Lieschke, Terlich, Hennersdorf, Schmidt and Luhrs – are enshrined in the history of this now thriving rural area between Albury and Wagga.

There is no fully documented record of this journey.

Information on it has come mostly from verbal accounts handed down from the original trek members to their children and grandchildren, which has enabled various writers to piece together accounts of it.

“The route through territory where there were no roads or tracks was not only slow but also very trying,” says Dr Alfred Brauer in his history of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Australia. “There were no inns or eating houses, so they camped in the open air. In the evening a lay reader would read a devotional lesson from the bible.”

Two Walla Walla residents, teacher and historian Leon Wegener and amateur historian Anthony Brinkmann, have compiled their own versions. Brinkmann sets the

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Zion Lutheran Church Walla Walla with Pastor Dan Mueller and a wagon similar to those used in the trek; Jindera celebration organiser Denise Osborne; a painting of the trekkers’ camp.

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COURTESY LEON WEGENER

FROM LEFT: The Klemke Reunion procession in 1976 in Walla Walla; volunteers at Jindera Museum, Elizabeth Bowran (left) and Lee Howard.

scene, describing the wagons of “typical German design, which originated around 2000 years ago in Roman times”.

“The wheels were painted red symbolising blood or fire, thus the holy spirit,” he said. “The body was pale to midblue symbolising love or the color of truth – these colors were early Lutheran interpretations.”

Brinkmann says early travelling was “along a droving easement about half a mile wide. Houses were infrequent and properties were patrolled by shepherds”. He quotes the South Australian Advertiser, which described the group’s camping as “perfect, with wagons in a circle with an opening. The circle was all action but there was no confusion and arrangements for cooking and sleeping were extremely good”.

Wegener has published a book, The Trek, which describes the journey, profiles the participants and portrays Walla Walla as it is today. Noting that the journeys of the early explorers are embedded in Australian history and viewed with awe for their daring and dangerous nature, he comments: “Spare a thought for those who followed in their footsteps. It was not for them to go back to Sydney or Melbourne to report. They came to see and then to settle; there was no turning back … these were the real pioneers.”

Despite many hardships, these migrants derived a considerable amount of pleasure from the trip, according to the Reverend Frederick Blaess in the Lutheran Almanac. “The children enjoyed chasing kangaroos and emus and in some ways the journey took on the nature of a picnic,” he said.

The Murray River was the group’s guiding light, not only because it would take the group to Albury but also

because it enabled carriage of their farming equipment, such as ploughs, strippers and winnowers, which were loaded aboard paddle steamers.

After six weeks, the families reached Jindera, then known as Dight’s Forest. They stayed 10 weeks while the men scouted the area looking for suitable land, which they found 20 kilometres away on the Walla Walla Plain – lovely loamy soil, brown and earthy, and well suited for the sort of grain farming they wanted to do.

Today, a memorial cairn, and the fallen trunk and branches of a shady gum tree under which they sheltered – as well as a descendant planted from its seed – mark the spot where the journey finished. It will also be the destination for the October re-enactment.

The activities begin in Jindera in September, just before those in Walla Walla. “We’re planning a very full weekend that will include a parade along our main street, family entertainment at the recreation reserve, an ecumenical service and the unveiling of a commemorative arch,” organising secretary Denise Osborne says. “We want to remember our heritage and celebrate it as we look forward to our future.”

Jindera is home to an award-winning museum, which preserves much of the life and times of the early days of German settlement there. “Its theme, with a range of clothing, furniture, farm machinery and lots of memorabilia of that era, is to display the living and working conditions of the pioneers,” museum president Margie Wehner says. “We have the original house and store, built by Peter Wagner and Julius Rosner in 1874, and they are authentically fitted out in the style of the

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period and contain popular purchasing items of the day, such as Ensign tea and Drummer Boy custard powder, as well as pewter candlesticks and a cradle brought from Germany.”

Walla Walla is extending its festivities over almost a year, beginning with the cavalcade of cars that will assemble in Ebenezer on October 7 to begin a re-run of the trek.

Already there have been about 80 expressions of interest to make the journey in the footsteps of those first settlers.

The participants will drive through Blanchetown, Morgan, Renmark, Wentworth, Balranald, Deniliquin, Tocumwal and Albury, reaching Walla Walla on October 12. Along the way, there will be history talks and discussions about various aspects of the original journey.

“Throughout 2019, Walla Walla’s sporting and social clubs, schools and businesses will conduct activities with a 150th flavour and theme and they will follow on from the main ones on the Australia Day weekend in January, which will feature historical displays and tours, picnic lunches, family entertainment and a German beer hall,” Trevor says.

At some stage during the year there will also be a special service in Walla Walla’s Zion Lutheran Church, the largest Lutheran church building in the state, which can seat 500. This eye-catching structure, which has a replica of an original wagon in its forecourt, is a symbol of the strength of the religious faith of the district’s pioneers. Its pastor, the Reverend Dr Dan Mueller, has already reminded his congregation of the significance of that epic trip. “Like our forebears who trekked from South Australia with a caravan of wagons, we, too, are pilgrims on a journey,” he says.

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G E A R

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Suitable for ages three and up. From $485 www.caseih.com/anz/en-au/home 5. Jigsaw puzzles Australian designed and made wooden jigsaw puzzles, in 6–176-piece versions. $12.50–$60.95 https://platopuzzles.com.au 6. Peony Merino bassinet blanket 100 x 80cm, designed and made in Australia in the bright colour combinations favoured by Uimi. $149 https://uimi.com.au 7. WattleBaby food Australian fruit and vegies, packed locally in four varieties. No added sugar, salt, artificial flavours, colours or preservatives. $9.95 for six 120-gram packs. www.wattlehealth.com.au

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Three sizes, suitable for ages 3–18 months. $145 www.rmwilliams.com.au 10. Snapper Aquayak kayak 2.7m long and weighing just 17kg, this rugged, onepiece Australian-made kayak is stable, easy to paddle and suitable for kids. A range of bright colours. $499 www.aquayak.com/snapper

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T R A V E L

LAID-BACK ADVENTURING Kimberley Coastal Camp takes ‘getting away from it all’ to a whole new level.

STORY + PHOTOS MARK MULLER

Space, freedom and comfort underpin the vibe of Kimberley Coastal Camp.

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s the chopper skims north from Mitchell Plateau over the vast Kimberley landscape, a sense of excitement grows. Sandstone outcrops, waterways, patches of remnant rainforest, spinifex, paperbark, boabs and kapok trees peel past below as you speed towards the mangrove-lined eastern shore of Admiralty Gulf and the waiting delights of Kimberley Coastal Camp.

Soon enough the camp comes into view, the pilot banks around over the Big House, comes in to land on the shell grit beach and powers down. Then the beaming faces of Andrew ‘Tubs’ White and Jules Van Duuren appear beside the chopper doors and your stay at one of Australia’s most remote, remarkable and laid-back getaways begins.

At first, it’s a whirl of hugs and laughter and handshakes and hellos and goodbyes as incoming guests are welcomed and an outgoing party is farewelled.

With no access by road, this is how most people travel.

First a 65-minute fixed-wing flight from Kununurra to the landing strip at Mitchell Plateau, then another 20 minutes by helicopter to the camp proper. You’d be forgiven for thinking that just getting here is half the fun, but that doesn’t do justice to the amount of fun to be had during your stay. “Laughing is what the camp’s all about,” Tubs says. “We want people to feel comfortable immediately and have a bloody good time.

If we catch a few fish, then all the better!”

Tubs and Jules have been living at Kimberley Coastal Camp (KCC) full-time since 2012, having bought the place (which was established in 1994) in 2010. “At first we had managers here, but then decided to go all out and make this our permanent home,” Tubs says.

The couple had met in Port Hedland, where Jules – a trained chef who spent 17 years working as a musician all over the world – owned a popular cafe and Tubs was running a marine maintenance and construction business. “I’d never worked in hospitality,” he says. “I always thought my personality was too strong to treat guests properly. Jules said, ‘You’ll be fine!’ and here we are.” Jules laughs at this, knowing full-well that Tubs’ character is a vital part of what makes KCC such a success. “He’s amazing,” Jules says. “Tubs was really worried about whether guests would cope with him, but I knew he’d be great.”

“That first year we had nothing,” Tubs says. “We couldn’t afford a $150 pump – I hand-pumped 114,000 litres of fuel. At the end of that year we had an operating account $27.40. And I thought, ‘Well, we’ve made some money!’” Eight years down the track, and business is good. People travel from across Australia and further to relax, explore and experience life at KCC. The days revolve around the Big House. With its vaulted ceilings and open sides, comfortable lounges, long dining table, and bar and kitchen area, this is the space guests meet and mingle, relax, eat and play between expeditions out into the pristine wilderness that surrounds the camp. Whether your desires run to fishing, crabbing, birdwatching, hiking into rock-art sites or lounging in swimming holes, picnicking on deserted islands or simply lying beside the pool reading a book and snoozing, you will be well looked after.

Guest numbers are capped at 16, which is the maximum that can be happily accommodated in the eight private bungalows that are dotted among the sandstone and spinifex landscape around the Big House.

Each bungalow has a grit floor, large, comfortable bed and fan, beautiful linen and fly screen sides that let the fresh air and sounds of the water drift in. Shared showers and toilets are built against a central sandstone cliff face, and are open to the wheeling Kimberley sky.

There are no fixed itineraries at KCC. Instead, guests are given a range of options that take into account the 7.8-metre tides, temperatures and conditions, then a plan is hatched, and adventure begins. “We try and work with a ratio of one guide to two or three guests,” Jules says. “If people want to do something, we’ll do our best to make it happen. We never say no – at worst, we try to say, ‘Yes, but...’”

For Toowoomba’s Cheryl and Grahame Abberton, this flexibility is key to their enjoyment. “I love fishing,” Cheryl says. “I grew up fishing and crabbing and Mum

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The main lodge, hub of camp life; KCC is only accessible by air and sea; amenities and accommodation are stylish, comfortable and relaxed; the warm, friendly energy of hosts Jules Van Duuren and Andrew ‘Tubs’ White sets the tone.

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and Dad were good fisher people on the Gold Coast. I reckon I got about eight species of fish on our first day: barra, mangrove jack, fingermark, bream, queenfish. I hadn’t caught a threadfin salmon before, and I did! There were so many different fish, but I had to put them back,” she says, looking at Tubs with mock indignation. “We already had enough fish for the table so he made me let them all go. And the art! It was fascinating to see those things. I’m a trekker and I like walking through the bush and the scrub, so this ticks a lot of boxes for me.”

Grahame chuckles as he listens to Cheryl. “The fishing is great,” he says. “The company is great. The environment is comfortable – you’re not oppressed by dry air conditioning. It’s just comfortable. It’s natural and comfortable. I even took a day off because I was a bit tired when I first arrived here. I spent the day reading a three-day-old newspaper! Wonderful!”

The food is similarly influenced by the environment, and exquisitely prepared by Jules. “I did my apprenticeship in Sydney, but I learned from Dad and Mum as a kid,” she says. “From the age of seven, Dad was teaching me how to make a bechamel or hollandaise.

Then I was a waitress and then I did my apprenticeship.

“It’s an interesting thing with food. A lot of chefs don’t love it. They lose their passion. But I had that big break when I was singing; 17 years of singing – backing vocals, session work, theatre. By the time I came back to cooking I wasn’t burned out; I could love it.”

That love clearly makes its way to the table at KCC. “It just lends itself here to seafood,” Jules says. “I guess you’d call it modern Australian with Asian and Mediterranean influences. Whatever people catch that day is what we’ll have on the table that night. Quite often we’ll have a picnic out on the islands and so you’ll be eating what you’ve caught 30 minutes ago – you can’t get fresher than that!”

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Freshly caught golden snapper on a bed of polenta with pomegranate, coriander and a warm salad of baby beet, spinach, goat’s cheese feta and sweet carrot.

Tubs takes guests Cheryl and Grahame Abberton walking through the savannah behind the camp to visit stunning rock art sites.

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Hilary and Jennie Carter with a barra they caught casting lures from the beach just beside the camp; swapping yarns around the fire marks the end of another day.

Alice Springs dentist Joanne Richardson and her travelling companion Dr Richard Murias were both drawn by the promise of remote adventure, fine food, interesting art and relaxed comfort. “I was looking at remote accommodation and looking at how to get into this area,” Richard says. “I knew about the Bradshaw Gwion Gwion art – realised that was quite stunning, and I wanted to see waterfalls. We could combine it in one on this trip.

“I think the product they have here sets the scene. If I wanted to go camping on a four-day hike and rough it that’s what I’d do, but I don’t want that here. It’s relaxed but it’s still five-star in terms of the beautiful experiences you have, and the people you’re having them with.”

Jo agrees. “In 62 years on this earth that was one of the best days I’ve ever had!” she says of a day spent walking into the art sites that lie behind the camp. “I’m an explorer. I like to do my own thing. There were four of us on the walk, and there was no pressure. We could lie on our backs and just be.

“Tubs is so good! We had time. He didn’t say what was in the cave, and the four of us found things – we explored. And if we didn’t find it, he’d say, ‘There’s this thing over here’. When we first got up there we wandered around and just took it in. The whole thing was a very relaxed 6.5–7 hours of walking and sitting around looking at art and exploring.”

KCC is open year-round, with activities morphing with the seasons. Barra fishing is best at the end of the wet. Hiking and exploring art sites is generally gentler in the dry, which is also when the humpback whales are migrating. “It’s such an amazing place,” guide Russell Meads says. The former pearl diver usually works as the operations manager for a building company in Broome, but has been sharing his time between that and KCC for the past year. “Last October I came up for a friend’s 50th then came back with my family to act as caretaker in November,” he says. “Now I come and help as a guide when Tubs and Jules need me.

“I know quite a bit of the Kimberley, but hadn’t been in this area. It’s the sort of place you only visit if you’re coming here. It doesn’t get the cruise-ship traffic that can be found elsewhere along the coast and that remoteness is just inspirational,” Russell says.

Sitting around the fire after dinner, listening as Jules strums a guitar and sings to the stars, Tubs reflects on life.

“There are not a lot of people who get what they want or are where they want to be,” he says. “And that’s where we are, and we absolutely love it!”

Rates start at $625 per person, per night. For more information, visit kimberleycoastalcamp.com.au, or phone 0417 902 006.

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T R A V E L

Verdant valley Victoria’s secluded Mitta Valley is riding a wave of food-related tourism to slowly but surely open up this special part of the world.

STORY TERRI COWLEY

J

ohn Scales walks over a particularly verdant patch on his 520-hectare Dartmouth cattle-breeding property at the end of the Mitta Valley in Victoria’s High Country.

“The last couple of years have been pretty sensational,” John says. “This clover is just ridiculous.”

The word ‘end’ is apt, for Dartmouth itself is a dead end in the best way possible. It’s on a nothrough road that leads to the Dartmouth Dam, the largest storage in the Murray River system.

The valley begins on the Omeo Highway near Tallangatta and heads in a south-easterly direction though Eskdale and Mitta Mitta to Dartmouth.

Most travellers continue on from Mitta Mitta to Omeo – the sealing of this section of the highway was completed as recently as 2014. This has opened up tourism in the region to a degree, but peaceful Dartmouth is often passed by, sitting off the main drag to the east on a road going nowhere else.

This doesn’t faze John, nor his cousin Tom Walsh, who lives on a neighbouring, equally lush property.

And those that take the time to go to Dartmouth are rewarded with its beauty and solitude. “It is a beautiful valley; the people are great; it is a great place to farm,” Tom says. “We had a dry period for 8–10 years from 2000, but not a drought.”

John says while he appreciates the isolation, nowadays it’s more about the almost drought-free environment. “We have a very diverse temperate range: –2 to 42 degrees. It’s really good grass; magnificent cattle country,” he says. “But the greatest assets of the Mitta Valley are its people. They’re some of the friendliest on earth, with some of the most warped senses of humour. It’s very progressive.”

This progressiveness means not resting on your

very green laurels. John is part of a group of about 20 Hereford and black Angus farmers who have formed Mitta Valley Beef to sell their succulent, branded meat in pubs and outlets across the region.

The use of the Mitta Valley brand is a plus for both food producers and consumers. The image, quickly realised on arrival, is one of crystal-clear streams offering some of the best trout fishing in the country, green as leprechaun grass, crisp air, rolling hills and few people. It’s one of the reasons Tim Cabelka and his business partner Alec Pennington call one of their mid-strength brews at the newly opened Mitta Brewing Company, Midda Bitta. “It had to be done because of the name,” Tim laughs.

Tim and Alec opened the doors of the brewery last June after settling in the valley with their families six and 10 years ago, respectively. They’ve built everything from the ground up and brew using their home-grown hops. “The beers that we’re producing are well-balanced beers,” Tim says.

“Easy drinking but still interesting. In future, we will play around a bit and use different ingredients and different styles.” They used Tim’s engineering background and Alec’s carpentry and woodworking skills to construct the building.

“There’s a lot of interest out there, especially since the Mitta pub was renovated,” Tim says (issue 97, p140). “We get a lot of daytrippers from AlburyWodonga. People come to a place like this and can see where the beer is being made; the hops growing out the back. It gives people a connection to what they’re consuming, gives it a story.”

The brewery serves basic fare but is building a kitchen to expand on that. “It’s magic; a beautiful part of the world,” Tim says. “You look out the window

RUSSELL KELLY

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Fog hangs above the Mitta Valley; the woodchopping competition at the Mighty Mitta Muster; Tim Cabelka (left) and Alec Pennington with some of their crafted beer at the Mitta Brewing Co.

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Glenn Damm with wagyu weaners on Mittavale.

and see snow-capped Mt Bogong. The community is very supportive and positive.”

There’s a range of accommodation options for visitors to the region, including on cattle property Mittavale, owned by Albury IVF doctor Scott Giltrap, who also co-owns the Mitta pub (which nobody calls by its actual name, the Laurel Hotel).

Farm manager Glenn Damm is tending to Wagyu weaners on the 300ha fattening farm, one of 15 properties owned by the Giltrap family. Glenn is from a dairy farm at Eskdale and spent a few years in Ouyen in the Mallee but hated the dust. “They said, ‘Why would you go back to that boggy, wet place?’ I said, ‘It is better than dust’. When you drive out over Lockharts Gap, you come back into this valley and you think you can breathe again.”

With accommodation on Mittavale, including an historic 1913 homestead, and at a cottage in the Mitta Mitta township, the business – Yalandra Pastoral Co – is also targeting visitors from Albury-Wodonga. A chef regularly comes to Mittavale to do cooking classes in the homestead using local produce.

John Scales and his wife Robyn offer a different type of accommodation at Dartmouth Motor Inn, which they bought along with the Dartmouth pub a few years ago when there wasn’t exactly a rush of buyers.

Robyn is involved in a local tourism group that has produced a fishing brochure for the local dams and

streams as well as one on cycling tracks, including bush tracks for mountain biking. “We are also trying to develop a farmgate trail in the valley,” she says. “Local produce includes beef (obviously), walnuts, the new brewery. We hold Eat Local Sundays, where everyone is encouraged to gather and eat local produce, encouraging people to appreciate the food coming out of the valley and to care for the environment.”

The Witches Garden at Mitta Mitta is one Eat Local Sunday venue. In 1983, Felicity and Lewis McDonald bought the only house for sale in the valley. Lewis used his earthmoving skills to construct an amazing

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garden drawn up by artist Felicity. “Neighbours said we’d ruined a good cow paddock,” Felicity laughs. “They wondered what we were doing at the time; maybe making a BMX track for our kids.”

An accidental picking of poisonous hemlock started Felicity on a journey of discovery about different plants and their history and folklore, and the eventual naming of her garden, tapping into the original Germanic meaning of the word: a woman who heals with plants. “It gave it a focus,” she says. “I decided to collect every plant we could grow here. It was a space to fulfil my need to be creative when I couldn’t paint because I had little kids.”

The result is what is believed to be Australia’s largest cool-climate garden of medicinal plants. Or for most people who visit September–May, a wondrous space to walk along meandering paths and past pretty ponds and, of course, a witch’s cottage. There’s also Riversong House B&B, which offers boutique accommodation.

“If you’ve got a problem, you can walk around the garden and it changes your perspective,” Felicity says.

Now that their children have grown, Felicity is back into her art, and the garden includes a gallery of paintings inspired by animals and landscapes. She recently won the

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The witch’s cottage at the Witches Garden; autumn on the Mitta River. OPPOSITE: Bob Deretic with a display of historic mining equipment.

T R A V E L

Somewhere under the rainbow ... the renovated Mitta pub is a magnet for visitors and locals alike.

Man from Snowy River Bush Festival painting prize.

History enthusiast Russell Kelly uses art of a different kind to express his love of his environment.

Retiring here 25 years ago, he and wife Robyn run the aerodrome. He’s produced several books on the valley, using many aerial pictures he’s taken while flying his Mooney aircraft. You’ll find his stunning postcards of valley vistas at local retail outlets.

According to Russell, the view from his cockpit has changed quite a lot over time. The dairy industry, which started in the valley in 1900, has dropped off, particularly in the past five years, due to the Murray Goulburn milk-price crisis. “It’s now mainly mixed farming and we’re starting to see the first signs of hobby farming,” he says. “Tourism is now the main interest, and beef farming. The underpinning of tourism is based on the pure, green beautiful valley.

There’s the new food aspect; the Mitta pub has become a destination for people to come to for a meal.”

Bob Deretic is from Albury-Wodonga, but he’s an honorary local. He has one of about 40 permanent sites at the caravan park, owned by the community, and a great place for visitors to stay, being at the centre of things and right by the pretty Mitta River, a salve for swimmers in summer. It’s also near the site of the Mighty Mitta Muster, which takes place on the Victorian long weekend in March and includes lots of old-fashioned country fun, from woodchopping and a

stockman’s challenge, car and bike events and markets.

Bob first came to the area in 1972 as a 17 year old to work on the construction of the Dartmouth Dam. As a surveyor’s assistant, he was one of the first on to the site.

“It was great fishing and I could indulge my fossicking and bottle-collecting hobbies,” Bob says. “There is no water here I have not fished.”

Bob finished working on the dam in October 1981, making him one of the few to be there from the beginning to the end of the massive project. The population of Dartmouth at its height was 3500 people, including 1700 workers. Today, there are just 45 permanent residents. The spectacular dam is a drawcard for fishing, boating and history enthusiasts.

At capacity, it holds 4 million megalitres – seven times the capacity of Sydney Harbour.

“The valley just becomes a part of you,” Bob says, although he did have to adjust to fly-fishing methods.

“I had heard about the trout. I asked somebody about it and they said talk to John Scales. I thought I would be sitting on the bank with a line in the river. The first thing he did was hop in the river. I thought he’d fallen in. It went from there. I was hooked.”

Bob spends about four months of the year in Mitta.

“It’s the solitude, the fishing, the bush, the streams,” he says.” This place is about the things I enjoy doing, and it’s all here for me.”

M O T O R I N G

Hilux heroes Three new accessorised models from Toyota feed increasing demand for premium dual-cab utes.

STORY PETER PAP

T

he top-of-the-range Toyota HiLux SR5 accounts for a quarter of the company’s ute sales in Australia. Despite this, the average HiLux buyer spends more than $2000 on accessories. And so Toyota has decided to expand its range and offer three new models – not accessorised special editions, but fully fledged new models – specifically for Australia’s environment. The key objectives are to increase protection, functionality and recovery. This will ripple out globally: Toyota believes if it survives in Australia, it will survive anywhere.

Developed by Toyota’s Melbourne-based engineering and design team, the items are fully integrated and engineered into the vehicle, certified to Australian design rules standards, and come with a full factory warranty. The utes build on the ‘unbreakable’ reputation of HiLux and have a tougher and more menacing look. The add-ons are highquality items supplied by local companies ARB, ERG, Frontline Australasia and Narva.

The top-of-the-line Rugged X (pictured centre) is based on the SR5. It has a winchcompatible heavy-duty steel front bar with integrated bash plate made of high tensile steel, and is completely compatible with all safety systems and airbags. It offers better approach angles, especially in the corners. It gains 207 kilograms and the same stiffer springs offered on Toyota’s bullbar optioned utes. There’s a 120-watt LED light bar integrated into the front bar – reducing the likelihood of damage – plus there’s spread-beam driving lights

to the sides. There’s a heavy-duty steel rear bar with large step, and integrated tow bar with 3500kg braked towing capacity for the manual and 3200kg for the auto.

There are front and rear bright red recovery hooks in 20-millimetre steel plate with high tensile bolts, smaller 17-inch alloys with A/T tyres, side rock rails that can support a fully laden vehicle while protecting the sills and underbody, a snorkel, a sports bar with multiple tie-down points able to handle a 75kg vertical load and secure 200kg on the floor, tub liner with tailgate protection, matt black tail lamp surrounds, dark grey HiLux badges and Rugged X decals. The interior has black perforated leather-accented seats, metallic black ornamentation, black roof headliner, front and rear all-weather floor mats, a new design instrument cluster with white illumination and orange needles.

The Rugged (pictured right) is similar to the Rugged X, but is based on the Hilux SR. It has a more traditional steel bullbar better suited to the hazards of country driving. The Rogue (pictured left) is the stylish one of the lot and more suited to the urban environment.

It is based on the SR5 and developed in conjunction with Toyota’s Thailand team for the global market. It has 18-inch alloys with H/T tyres, heated seats, the same interior as the Rugged X, new front and rear bumpers with a larger frontal area giving the ute a more planted and meaner look, sports bar, marine-grade carpet, and hard tonneau fully

integrated with the central locking system.

All three models share the same mechanical specifications as the SR5 or SR models on which they are based and are powered by the same 2.8-litre turbodiesel engine. Toyota predicts Rugged X and Rugged will account for 60–70 percent of sales, and Rogue 30–40%. All three have a 5-star ANCAP rating with 6-month/10,000km service intervals.

These utes are in a tough market in which buyers expect them to do a hell of lot – like a Swiss army knife. They may not be the most powerful utes on the market, but when you look at the compromises they have to make and how well they perform as a total package, they are a great choice. They drive well on all surfaces and terrain, and are very capable off-road. The rock rails work well, as does the fantastic LED light bar. The hard tonneau (somewhat surprisingly) kept dust out of the tray throughout an extensive test drive in the Flinders Ranges, SA. Finding and fitting after-market items that look good and work well together while not compromising safety, is not easy. Toyota has therefore done a great job in offering these choices to the higher end of the market.

Rugged X is priced at $61,690 for the manual and $63,690 for the auto 6-speed. Rugged is $54,990 for the manual and $56,990 for auto 6-speed. Rogue is $61,690 auto only. Add on-road costs to all prices. For more information go to www.toyota.com.au.

T O W N

Michelago, NSW, 2620 Little Michelago in the Monaro, NSW, has seen its population boom as people seek a quiet, community-focused life.

STORY + PHOTOS GRAHAM GITTINS

F

eminist, journalist and former senior public servant Marie Coleman visited the small village of Michelago, NSW, for the public school’s 150th anniversary earlier this year. Marie had attended the school during World War II, when there were long-drop loos out the back, no electricity and students rode horses and bicycles to class. “Despite having a fireplace in the one-teacher, single classroom, the winter was bitterly cold,” Marie says. That original classroom is now the administration office for the school.

“The platform signs were taken down on the railway station, so if the Japanese got here, they wouldn’t be able to work out where they were,” Marie recalls.

Now with a population of 600, Michelago is located 800 metres above sea level in a valley between the Tinderry and Clear ranges, on the Monaro Highway between Canberra and Cooma. The school has two teachers and 38 students, and principal Clare Plummer says a third classroom and teacher may be needed soon to cope with growing student numbers.

The school began in 1868, a time when bushranger brothers Thomas and John Clarke terrorised Monaro farmers, traders, and residents by raiding mail coaches and local businesses. They held up the town’s Hibernian Hotel and, with other gang members, drank the village dry before riding off to their hide-out in the Tinderry ranges.

In 1887, extra prosperity was brought to Michelago as the new railway line terminated there. The line was later

extended to Cooma and then to Bombala. In 1989 the railway service between Queanbeyan and Cooma was closed – a major blow to the residents of Michelago – but a historic railway bridge on the southern side of the village remains. Two churches, the Catholic St Patricks and Anglican St Thomas, look after some of the spiritual needs of the population, with the clergy travelling from either Cooma or Queanbeyan to conduct fortnightly services. The town also boasts a motel, service station, police station, rural fire brigade, cricket club and pony club, but no pub. Instead, the general store is the town hub, offering all the usual grocery, hardware, rural supplies and great hamburgers.

The former owner of the general store, Cheryl Kenyon, moved to Michelago in 1979 from Loxton on the South Australian–Victorian border, and says she has seen many changes in the village since then. “When we arrived, the population was about 200. Now it has grown to more than 600,” she says. “It is a wonderful village, a real community.

People are always willing to help with fundraising for the fire brigade, the school or the churches. A lot people move out for a few years and then move back when their children grow up.”

Cheryl sold the store three years ago to Sally Connelly but isn’t moving away any time soon. “I really love living in the village,” she says. “There is always something going on to keep people occupied, happy and healthy. We have a monthly granny’s group morning tea and we go up to the railway station and give it a tidy up, cut the grass, take the weeds out.”

Sally says that because the shop is the central hub of the community, parents will even direct their children to come to the store if they are running late to collect them from school. “I also have to know what local customers favourite beer, cigarettes and coffee are, so when they come in, they just ask for a slab of beer or carton of smokes,” Sally says.

Due to its proximity to Canberra, Michelago is becoming a desirable tree-change town as new subdivisions and hobby farms come onto the market. Cheryl says that land prices “have gone through the roof ” around the village as a result.

One of the town’s biggest quirks is that the signs aren’t consistent in spelling the town name, which is believed to have come from an Indigenous word for lightning.

Michelago is spelt with an ‘h’ on the signpost on the northern side of town, but when you come into town from the other direction it’s spelt Micelago. The official name, according to GeoScience Australia, is Michelago.

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: The railway line has been closed since 1989; scbool principal Clare Plummer; students perform a maypole dance during the 150th anniversary celebrations; strange spellings abound; Sally Connelly, owner of the general store.

P U B

The right brew A once derelict general store has become a unique watering hole for the Victorian timber town of Forrest.

STORY + PHOTOS NATHAN DYER

A

line of muddy mountain bikes rest against the verandah posts of the Forrest Brewery and the chatter of happy riders fills the autumn air. Behind the bar, Matt Bradshaw pours a pint of ‘Pobblebonk’, a provincial-style seasonal beer named after a frog and brewed using local strawberry clover honey. “It’s named after a frog because it’s our French beer,” Matt laughs, flicking the tap off.

Located 85 kilometres south-west of Geelong and 40km north of Apollo Bay, Forrest Brewery is at the heart of a tourism revival for the former timber town of 170 people hidden in the Otway Ranges. “The town’s last timber mill closed three days after I moved in,” Matt explains, sipping a beer and recalling his journey from telecommunications technician to craft brewer.

Hailing from Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, Matt completed an apprenticeship with Telstra after finishing school, took a redundancy package aged 23, and spent the next decade travelling the world, eventually returning to start his first business, a pedal-powered smoothie venture servicing the eastern state’s summer music festivals. “That idea came about from a combination of doing lots of cycling and what I’d seen in South-East Asia, with people doing everything by hand, like grinding knives with bicycle power,” Matt says. “All my friends told me I was insane, but it turned out well.”

For a decade he worked festivals down south during the summer, the dry-season markets in Darwin and enjoyed a stint with Territory safari legend Joe Wilson as cook and general hand taking tourists into Arnhem Land. Then, in 2002, while renting in Torquay, Matt decided he needed a base and discovered Forrest’s crumbling former general store on a fishing trip with his brother. “We drove past and I saw ‘For Sale’ spray-painted on the front window,” Matt says. “The floors were missing and half the roof was gone, but I bought it, gathered all my stuff from friends and family’s places, and moved into the little cottage next door.”

As he set about renovating, Matt had the idea of a brewery. To learn more, he started helping other small brewers and completed a short course at Ballarat. In 2008, the Victorian government chose Forrest as the site for a 65km network of mountain-bike trails, and the following year the brewery idea gained real traction when Matt’s sister Sharon quit her corporate publishing job to join the venture.

When a second-hand brewery was sourced from Melbourne, the venture was almost a reality. But not everyone thought it was a good idea. “My 75-year-old uncle who’d been in the beer business his whole life rang and told me, ‘Don’t do it, it’s crazy, craft beer is never going to go anywhere,’” Matt recalls.

Fast-forward eight years and Forrest Brewery has ridden the dual wave of Australia’s booming craft beer and mountain-biking industries. “The past five years it’s really taken off,” Matt says. He is head brewer and Sharon general manager. “I’m the ideas person and she’s the brains,” he jokes.

Sharon says she does not miss her former corporate life.

“You do work a lot harder for yourself, but it’s a whole lot more rewarding in the end,” she says. “And it’s great to see how people respond to the brewery.”

Open seven days for breakfast and lunch, and for dinner Thursday to Saturday, the brewery employs 15 people. The 600-litre brew house produces four year-round beers – the Forrest Pale Ale, Silvertop, Irish Red and Stout – which are on tap and available to take away, as well as a stable of seasonal beers and one-offs, such as the Roadknight Wet Hop Lager, brewed using hops grown on Matt’s own farm, where he lives with his wife and two children. The hops have been cultivated from wild rootstock remnant of an industry that disappeared in the 1950s. “We could have bought a generic variety of hops and grown them, but we wanted to grow something with local heritage,” Matt says.

That focus on local produce extends to the kitchen, where the menu includes locally sourced lamb and seafood, such as Portarlington mussels cooked in beer, butter, bacon and fresh herbs, and lamb ribs with beer grain dukkah, carrot and ginger puree, pickled fennel and pomegranate sticky sauce. The specials board regularly features beef from Matt’s own herd. “I’d like to think we’re a fair step above the average pub grub and that we complement our beers with really good food,” Matt says.

Outside, local farmers Miles and Annie Hazel are enjoying a beer in the autumn sun. “We’ve just been for a beautiful bike ride and knowing the brewery is here, well, it’s like a little oasis,” Annie says, smiling into the sun. “It’s the light at the end of the tunnel,” Miles adds. “You go and do your work-out, the bush is fantastic, it’s a cracking day, and then there’s that ale on the horizon.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: An autumn sun sets over Forrest Brewery; co-owners, siblings Sharon and Matt Bradshaw; the rustic interior; ocean trout tataki.

G A R D E N S

Eden on the Warrego Cunnamulla’s spiced-up campground is a traveller’s haven, featuring a profusion of herbs with which visitors are welcome to cook.

STORY BRUCE McMAHON PHOTOS DAVID KELLY

T

ourist park operator Judy Roberts knows how to spice up a western wanderer’s overnighter – plant vegie and herb gardens beside caravan sites; spinach, rosemary, coriander, chives and more, right outside the door, providing extra flavours for the evening meal.

Judy’s Warrego Riverside Tourist Park is one of three caravan and camping spots in south-west Queensland’s Cunnamulla. The park, perched alongside the Warrego River, lays claim to being the only outback park with water frontage. That location, the herbs and fruit trees, landscaped van sites and fire pits down by the river combine to make this a unique stopover.

Raised in New South Wales’ Northern Rivers, Judy is now in her late 60s. She trained as a hairdresser, is the widow of a veterinarian-cum-grazier, mother to three and grandmother to 10. She had often contemplated becoming a tourism operator and running a caravan park. When she drove onto the bare block on Weir Road, about 3.5 kilometres from Cunnamulla, Judy knew this was the place.

Opened in early 2012, the Riverside Tourist Park is now a 13-hectare outback oasis, thanks to Judy’s planning, propagating and nurturing of herbs, shrubs and trees. She’s long been used to carving life out of the ground, right back to her grandmother’s garden on a Nimbin dairy farm. And she loves the business of tourism and people. These loves prompted her to add extra touches, such as patches of herbs.

“It’s nice if they want to have a cook up, you know,” Judy says. Alongside van sites she plants basil, parsley, spinach, rosemary, mint, marjoram and masses of chives. There is usually some dill and coriander, and all the sites have a pomegranate tree. Of the 38 powered sites, 20 have herb gardens and 18 have lawns. Each drive-through caravan site is screened from neighbours’ vans by native shrubbery.

“It’s a big job; some people don’t appreciate a garden and walk all over it; you’re up against all those things,” Judy says.

“You start going with fruits and tomatoes, and you might get old mate who comes down and fills a bucket; thinks it’s his God-given right to take a bucket-load instead of two or three.

I am up against that. It’s not always easy.”

Kangaroos and possums are also known to cause issues, chewing through lawns and shrubs and fruits. But despite

that, Judy says she cannot believe there is no big market garden in the Cunnamulla district. The climate, lack of disease and access to water means fruit trees such as citrus and olives thrive. If the Warrego Riverside Tourist Park had not taken root, an orchard was Judy’s fallback position.

There was a swag of work to transform the bare block into a lush western estate, beginning with 700 trees planted around the perimeter. The soil was ‘black glug’, Judy says, and needed loads of sand to counter the river country clay.

But it was a flat piece of land, with power available and town water plus irrigation rights to the Warrego River.

She took on shareholders plus a number of jobs around the town to help get the riverside project moving, including time working with Paroo Shire’s parks and gardens department. “I really enjoyed that [working on the council] and I did a propagation course there, though I had a pretty rough idea of how to do it all anyway. So that saved us thousands and thousands; it’s very expensive to buy plants and these were then already adjusted to life out here.”

Judy soon turned her chook run into a nursery, with around 1000 plants in pots to be planted out – trees and shrubs and some 200 rose bushes which, while a touch labour-intensive, love the Cunnamulla climate. There are 30–40 different varieties of plants here, some native to the region, others a little out of place. The weeping myall is a favourite, as are jacarandas, citrus trees and olives. There are saltbush havens for finches and wrens to roost and nest in safety, and then there’s the Drunken Parrot Tree, with a circus of crimson-winged parrots falling over themselves to get at its fermented-nectar flowers. “And because I’m a coastal person I like to push the boundaries and I’ve got a few coastal-type trees, like frangipanis, growing here, 1000 kilometres from the beach,” Judy says.

She is grateful for the irrigation licence, and many of the plants are watered via a drip system. Judy’s brothers built the office and amenities block in a rustic, corrugated-ironand-timber style to complement the western location.

These attractive Cunnamulla tourist facilities are rated five out of five on the Trip Advisor website, travellers much taken by the gardens, the amenities and the river frontage.

“I don’t sell sausages down here,” Judy says. “I sell sites.

It’s got to be nice.”

CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Judy Roberts inspects a weeping myall in flower; kangaroos add character, but are not always welcome; the property name pays homage to Judy’s childhood in Nimbin; a section of the Cunnamulla park’s extensive landscape plantings; the park office, designed and built with western heritage in mind.

R.M.WILLIAMS STORES SOUTH AUSTRALIA ADELAIDE, 5 Percy Street, Prospect (08) 8269 3752 6 Gawler Place (08) 8232 3611 MYER ADELAIDE CITY, Myer Menswear Concession Store, 22 Rundle Mall (08) 8205 9261 QUEENSLAND BRISBANE, Shop 105A, Wintergarden Shopping Centre, Queen Street Mall (07) 3229 7724 Shop 185, Myer Centre Brisbane, 91 Queen Street (07) 3211 1244 BRISBANE AIRPORT, Shop 303, Level 3 (airside) Brisbane Airport International Terminal, Airport Drive (07) 3860 6511 BROADBEACH, Pacific Fair, Shop 2703A, Level 1, Hooker Boulevarde (07) 5572 4389 CHERMSIDE, Shop 380a, Westfield Chermside, 395 Hamilton Road (07) 3350 2699 CAIRNS, 84a, Level 1, Cairns Central Shopping Centre, cnr McLeod and Spence streets (07) 4051 7000 CALOUNDRA, Shop 1, 40 Bulcock Street (07) 5438 9140 GLADSTONE, Shop 2/93 Goondon Street (07) 4972 8267 INDOOROOPILLY, Shop 2065, 322 Magill Road (07) 3378 1121 LONGREACH, 106B Eagle Street (07) 4658 1400 MYER CARINDALE, Menswear/ womenswear, Westfield Carindale, 1151 Creek Road (07) 3843 7267 MACKAY, Shop 2437, Caneland Central, cnr Victoria Street and Mangrove Road (07) 4953 0375 MAROOCHYDORE, Shop GD227, Level 1, Sunshine Plaza, Horton Parade (07) 5479 5874

MOUNT GRAVATT, Shop 2328, Westfield Garden City, cnr Logan and Kessels roads (07) 3343 2193 TOOWOOMBA, 8 Carrington Road (07) 4634 4336 Shop 1064, Grand Central, Cnr Margaret and Dent streets (07) 4599 9125 MYER TOOWOOMBA, Menswear, Grand Central, cnr Margaret and Dent streets (07) 4690 3133 MYER TOWNSVILLE, Menswear, Stockland, 310–330 Ross River Road (07) 4796 6111 NEW SOUTH WALES SYDNEY, 389 George St (02) 9262 2228 Westfield Shop 4020A, Level 4, 188 Pitt St (02) 9223 7978 MYER CITY, 436 George Street (02) 9223 0830 QVB, Shop G–06, Queen Victoria Building, 455 George St (02) 9261 5972 ALBURY, Myer Menswear Concession Store, Myer Albury Centrepoint, 525 David Road, (02) 6042 2297 BONDI JUNCTION, Shop 4037, Level 4, Westfield Bondi, 500 Oxford Street (02) 9369 3519 CASTLE HILL, Shop 526, Level 3, Castle Towers, 8–14 Castle Street (02) 8850 3133 CHATSWOOD, Shop GO52, Ground Floor, Chatswood Chase, Victoria Avenue (02) 9411 4388 MASCOT, Shop LR-14, Terminal 1, Sydney International Airport, Airport Drive (02) 9317 5716 MIRANDA, Shop 2187, 600 The Kingsway (02) 9531 0215

NARELLAN, 326 Camden Valley Way (02) 4647 9061 ST IVES, Shop 29, Memorial Level, St Ives Shopping Village, 166 Mona Vale Road (02) 9440 7990 KOTARA, Shop 1004, Westfield Kotara, cnr Park Avenue and Northcott Drive, Kotara (02) 4957 9144 LEURA, 83 Railway Parade 1800 339 532 SHELLHARBOUR, Shop T1032, Stockland Shellharbour, Lake Entrance Road (02) 4297 2856 TAMWORTH, 403 Peel Street, cnr Fitzroy Street (02) 6761 2877 WAGGA WAGGA, 65 Baylis Street (02) 6921 0788 WARRINGAH MALL Shop 1021, GF 145 Old Pittwater Road Westfield Brookvale (02) 9938 5502 VICTORIA MELBOURNE, Shop 237, Level 1, 300 Lonsdale Street (03) 9663 7126 180 Collins Street (03) 9662 9126 Lower Collins St 330 Collins Street (03) 9600 4741 Melbourne Emporium, Level 1, 295 Lonsdale Street (03) 9663 9205 CHADSTONE, Shop 353, Chadstone Shopping Centre, 1341 Dandenong Road (03) 9563 3803 CHELTENHAM, Shop 2005,

Level 2 Westfield Southland, 1239 Nepean Highway (03) 9583 6443 DONCASTER, Shop G91, Westfield Doncaster, 619 Doncaster Road (03) 9840 1833 GEELONG, Shop 1174, Westfield Bay City, Malop Street (03) 5222 3079 MYER BALLARAT, Sturt Street, Ballarat (03) 5320 6264 RINGWOOD, Shop 2104, Eastland Shopping Centre, 171–175 Maroondah Highway (03) 9008 6029 WESTERN AUSTRALIA PERTH, Carillion City, Hay Street Mall (08) 9321 7786 CLAREMONT, Shop 209, Level 2, Claremont Quarter, cnr St. Quentin Avenue and Bayview Terrace (08) 9284 4634 JOONDALUP, Shop T279, Lakeside Joondalup Shopping Centre, 420 Joondalup Drive (08) 9300 2590 NORTHERN TERRITORY DARWIN, M13 S1–19 The Mall Darwin (08) 8981 1222 AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY CANBERRA, D27, Canberra Centre, Bunda Street (02) 6257 6668 NEW ZEALAND AUCKLAND, 8 Customs Street (+64 4) 9300 6304 WELLINGTON, 75 Willis Street (+64 4) 499 5407

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AUSTIN, TEXAS, Domain Northside, 11701 Domain Boulevard, Suite 124 (+512) 719 7070 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, Westfield Century City, 10250 Santa Monica Boulevard, Space 1915 (+310) 286 9001 NEW YORK, 152 Spring Street (+212) 219 3619 UNITED KINGDOM LONDON, 102 New Bond Street (44 207) 629 6222 Westfield London, Unit 2032, Ariel Way ,W12 7GF (+44) 0208 740 4747 SOHO, 43 Berwick St, Soho London (+44) 207287 0714 CLEARANCE STORES SOUTH AUSTRALIA, South Australia Clearance Store, 121 Frost Road, Salisbury (08) 8259 1090 Harbour Town Shop T122, 727 Tapleys Hill Rd West Beach (08) 8353 8031 QUEENSLAND, R.M.Williams Clearance Store, Shop C74, Harbour Town, cnr of Gold Coast Highway and Oxley Drive, Biggera Waters (07) 5537 9300 VICTORIA, Essendon Clearance Store, Shop G-003 100 Bulla Rd, Essendon Fields (03) 9937 7504 AUSTRALIAN CAPITAL TERRITORY, Canberra Clearance Store, Shop 118, Canberra Outlet Centre, 337 Canberra Ave, Fyshwick (02) 6112 6390 NEW SOUTH WALES Shop 3–13, DFO Homebush, 3-5 Underwood Rd,Homebush (02) 9746 0420

R.M.WILLIAMS STOCKISTS SOUTH AUSTRALIA MCLAREN VALE. The Bloke Shop, Shop 1/203 Main Road (08) 8323 8299 MOUNT BARKER. Mount Barker Clothing, 21 Gawler Street (08) 8391 0559 MOUNT GAMBIER. Country Attitude, 3a Commercial Street, West Mount Gambier (08) 8724 9006 ORROROO. The Store on Second, 24 Second Street (08) 8658 1030 PARAFIELD. Allingtons, Unit 5, Lot 8, Main North Road, Parafield Retail Centre (08) 8182 1333 RENMARK. Yates Menswear, 127 Murray Avenue (08) 8586 6121 VICTOR HARBOR. Mr Menswear, 23 Ocean Street (08) 8552 2356 QUEENSLAND ASPLEY. Greg Grant Saddlery, 1293 Gympie Road (07) 3263 2069 BROWNS PLAINS. Shire Saddleworld Brisbane, Shop G4, 123 Browns Plains Road (07) 3800 6748 BUDERIM. Threads 4556, Shop 8, The Hub, 45 Burnett Street (07) 5476 7686 CLERMONT. Shop 38, 38 Capella Street (07) 4983 2020 DALBY. Countrywide Saddlery, 46 Drayton Street (07) 4662 5665 Golders, 70 Cunningham Street (07) 4662 4911 EMERALD. Eaglesham’s Menswear, 58 Clermont Street (07) 4982 1104 GOOMERI. Goomeri Emporium, cnr Moore and Jones streets (07) 4168 4433 GOONDIWINDI. Arthur Schofield & Co, 64 Marshall Street (07) 4671 1461 LOGANHOLME. Aitken’s Saddlery, Unit 6/1 Bryants Road (07) 3209 7506 MACKAY. LittleBit Country, 5 Broadsound Road (07) 4952 4969

MACKAY. P. Comino & Sons, 14–16 Sydney Street (07) 4957 4370 MONTVILLE. Goundrey Menswear, Shop 2 Mayfield, 127–133 Main Street (07) 5442 9200 ROCKHAMPTON. Georges Rockhampton, 88 William Street (07) 4922 5152 ROMA. Brennors, 79–83 McDowell Street (07) 4622 1699 Golders, 71 McDowall Street (07) 4622 1611 TOOWOOMBA. Hannas Drapery, 563 Ruthven Street (07) 4632 2099 Mike Williams Country Clothing, 45 Russell Street (07) 4639 1510 TOWNSVILLE. Donohues, 230 Charters Towers Road (07) 4775 5144 John Melick & Co, 481 Flinders Street (07) 4771 2292 NEW SOUTH WALES ALBURY. Anthony’s Shoe Repairs, 2/441 Dean Street (02) 6021 8060 Jack’s Country Clothing, 476 Dean Street (02) 6021 5706 ARMIDALE. Concepts of Armidale, 172 Beardy Street (02) 6771 1877 BATHURST. Bathurst Workwear, cnr William and Russell streets (02) 6331 9244 Blowes Clothing, 64 William Street (02) 6331 4122 Frank Smith Shoe Repairs, 71 Keppel Street (02) 6331 7544 BERRIGAN. The Peppertree Variety Store, 32-34 Chanter Street (03) 5885 2475 BOWRAL. The Countryman, 346 Bong Bong Street (02) 4861 3818 BROKEN HILL. Outback Whips & Leather, 350 Argent Street (08) 8087 8887 CASINO. Fitzmacs Pty Ltd, 82 Walker Street (02) 6662 2131 COBARGO. South Coast Leather, Shop 1, 68 Princess Highway (02) 6493 6655

COOTAMUNDRA. Kevin Deep’s Clothing & Footwear, 159 Parker Street (02) 6942 1465 COWRA. Bushmans Boots and All, 52 Kendall Street (02) 6341 1299 DENMAN. Denman Dapkos, 38 Ogilvie Street (02) 6547 2204 DUBBO. Blowes Clothing, 121 Macquarie Street (02) 6882 8205 FORBES. Allure on Main, 54 Rankin Street (02) 6851 4778 GUNNEDAH. Purseglove’s Menswear, 205 Conadilly Street (02) 6742 6742 MERIMBULA. Coast Country Merimbula, 13 Market Street (02) 6495 3166 MOREE. Assef’s, 139–143 Balo Street (02) 6752 1833 MUDGEE. Blowes Clothing, 18–20 Church Street (02) 6372 1024 MURWILLUMBAH. Murwillumbah Work ’n’ Country Gear, 74 Main Street (02) 6672 6283 ORANGE. Blowes Clothing, 204 Summer Street (02) 6362 8866 QUEANBEYAN. Hiscocks Saddlery & Clothing, 167 Crawford Road (02) 6297 1578 ST MARYS. Blue Ribbon Saddlery Shop 3, Corner Great Western Highway and Queen Street (02) 9623 4679 TAMWORTH, Purseglove’s Clothing, 352 Peel Street (02) 6766 2625 TAREE. Yarad’s, 195 Victoria Street (02) 6552 3299 WAGGA WAGGA. Booted Out, 189A Baylis Street, (02) 6921 0466 VICTORIA ARARAT. Carroll’s Saddlery, 244 Barkley Street (03) 5352 3758 BALLARAT. Messer & Opie, 17–19 Bridge Mall (03) 5331 1811 BEECHWORTH. Beechworth Classic Apparel, 71 Ford Street (03) 5728 1022 CHIRNSIDE PARK. Saddle Up, Shop 6, Chirnside Homemaker

Centre, 282 Maroondah Highway (03) 9727 4000 ECHUCA. Drovers Saddlery, 207 Darling Street (03) 5482 6288 HEALSVILLE. Country Smart, 191 Maroondah Highway (03) 5962 1008 HORSHAM. Lattanzio’s, 50 Wilson Street (03) 5382 1769 HURSTBRIDGE. Workin’ Clobber, Shop 1/920 Main Road (03) 9718 2564 LEONGATHA. Great Southern Saddlery, 1 Blair Street, (03) 5662 2615 MANSFIELD. Mansfield High Country Apparel, 93 High Street (03) 5775 2212 MILDURA. Wallers Bushman’s Outfitters, 80 Pine Avenue (03) 5023 2846 STAWELL. Clarks Furniture, 161 Main Street (03) 5358 3942 WARRAGUL. Port Phillip Manufacturing Co, 1A Barkly Street (03) 5623 4369 WARRNAMBOOL. Country Attitude, 105 Leibig Street (03) 5561 6028 WESTERN AUSTRALIA BUNBURY. Horseland Bunbury, 2/12 Sandridge Road (08) 9721 8850 GERALDTON. Rogue Pony, 167 North West Coastal Highway (08) 9965 5570 NORTHERN TERRITORY ALICE SPRINGS. Outbush Alice Springs, 46 Todd Mall (08) 8953 0222 DARWIN. Delaney’s Produce Store, Shop 2, 20 Knuckey Street (08) 8981 8144 TASMANIA HOBART. Allgoods, 93 Harrington Street (03) 6236 9969 Les Lees, 109 Liverpool Street (03) 6234 4488 LAUNCESTON. Allgoods Pty Ltd,

71-79 York Street (03) 6331 3644 SCOTTSDALE. D & Me Fashion, 33 King Street (03) 6352 2919 WYNYARD. Domus, 68 Goldie Street (03) 6442 1535 CANADA TORONTO. The Australian Boot Company Ltd, 2644 Yonge Street (1) 416 488 9488 The Australian Boot Company Ltd, 791 Queen Street (1) 416 514 2411 VANCOUVER. The Australian Boot Company Ltd, 1968 West Fourth Avenue (1) 604 738 2668 NEW ZEALAND ARROWTOWN. The Golden Fleece, 23 Buckingham Street (3) 442 1205 BIRKENHEAD. Yarntons, 18–22 Mokoia Road (9) 418 4011 HASTINGS. Thomson’s Suits, 355 Heretaunga Street West (6) 878 9740 HASTINGS. Forbes & Co. 111 Maraekakaho Road, Stortford Lodge (6) 878 7830 MASTERTON. Bullick Blackmore, 201 Queen Street (6) 377 5239 QUEENSTOWN. Anderson Outfitters, 69 Beach Street (3) 442 7054 ROTORUA. The Outdoorsman Headquarters, 6 Tarawera Road (7) 345 9333 SOUTH DUNEDIN. Alex Campbell, 187 King Edward Street (3) 455 3280 TAUPO. Albert Pointon Menswear, 13 Heu Heu Street (7) 378 7325 SOUTH AFRICA JOHANNESBURG. Emu Creek Trading, Fourways Garden, Cnr Bush Willow and Uranium Street SWITZERLAND RAPPERSWIL. Hombi Trading, Mullum Australia Halsgasse 29, (41) 55211 2262

R . M . W I L L I A M S

The exterior of Assef ’s, including the f irst-floor Art Deco facade, and little Billy Assef inside the R.M.Williams section of the store.

Moree mainstay R.M.Williams stockist Assef’s has been selling clothing in the main street of Moree, NSW, for eight decades.

S

easons come and seasons go in Moree, NSW, with fortunes closely tied to rainfall, but a fixture that has remained constant in the main street – at least for the past 80 years – is Assef ’s clothing shop. Daniel Assef is the fourth generation of his family to run the business.

“We’re still pretty old-fashioned in the way we do things,” Daniel says. “We have an awful lot of stock and a lot of staff. Our customers like shopping here. We’ve always had competition; the internet is just another thing.”

Daniel was studying at university in Sydney eight years ago when his father Paul, who was running the business at the time, passed away unexpectedly at just 53. Daniel, now 28, came back to help out and has been running things for the past five years. “I was studying teaching, but I always knew I’d come back,” he says. He’d been helping out in the shop every holidays since he was 12.

Daniel’s paternal lineage in Australia goes back to Anthony Assef, who arrived in Australia from Lebanon in 1923 and soon after opened the first Assef ’s at Quirindi.

His daughter Freda and her husband Charlie Serhan took over a shop in Heber Street, Moree, known as Macey’s, in 1938. Then in 1940 the Assef family acquired the present site of the business in Balo Street and an Art Deco building was erected and opened towards the end of 1940. Part of the facade of that original design is well-preserved.

This building was the inspiration of

Anthony’s son John, who had to convince his father to establish the business during the difficult early days of war. Despite manpower shortages, clothes rationing, lack of transport and other wartime problems, it was opened as planned before Christmas.

It was a success from the beginning, due to the hard work and persistence of all concerned. In the early days, Moree was a small, isolated town served by gravel and black-soil roads and the railway. The banks, churches, hotels and a memorial hall dominated the streetscape.

John, with help from his wife Mona, set out to improve and add to the comfort and appearance of the store during the ensuing years. For example, air-conditioning was introduced in what is believed to be a first at the time among rural stores in Australia.

Many new labels in clothing, footwear, country gear and fashions were introduced to Moree. The family also purchased the building next door, creating a modern arcade, upstairs offices and flats.

In 1995, with his son Paul at the helm, John retired. Major renovations were done in 2006 to create the current ‘surf-shop’ decor.

About this time employee Alf Scott retired after serving an amazing 57 years. Paul’s wife, Keryn, continues to help manage today.

“I like the business, the clothing and the people side,” Daniel says. “Ninety percent of my job is walking around and talking to people. We’re still doing much the same thing

we’ve been doing for 80 years.” The business is very much based on personal service rather than the internet sales route so many businesses are taking.

Recently, the R.M.Williams section of the store was completely refitted to update its look. Assef ’s has been a loyal stockist of R.M.Williams products for about 50 years. Daniel says the new R.M.Williams decor added “a modern, urban fit-out in our country store”. While at its core a menswear shop, Assef ’s covers everything from surf wear, sportswear, children’s wear, women’s wear, lingerie, workwear and suits, as well as homewares. Among all this, the classic R.M.Williams boots, shirts, jeans and belts remain popular.

A first-floor room that’s been used as a storeroom for the past 30 years is currently being converted into a ballet studio for Daniel’s wife Chelsie to teach in. “We’re just trying to provide as much as we can for the town,” Daniel says. “We’re doing our best to help people buy what they want to buy in Moree; to give the customers what they could buy in the city.”

If the enthusiasm of the newest member of the family is anything to go by, Assef ’s will be around for a long time yet. Fifteenmonth-old Billy loves being at the shop with his dad Daniel, especially when sporting his custom-made overalls, converted from an old pair of his grandfather Bruce’s R.M.Williams jeans.

Finding their whey Diane Rae and her family have created a niche for themselves in the Australian cheese market, pioneering their own dairy sheep breed.

STORY + PHOTOS NATHAN DYER

D I N I N G

ABOVE: Diane Rae (right) with daughter Nicole Gilliver and son Ryan Hartshorn.

OPPOSITE: A bottle of the uniquely Tasmanian Hartshorn sheep whey vodka.

O

n a mild summer morning in southern Tasmania, Diane Rae is welcoming a busload of tourists to the outdoor deck of Grandvewe Cheeses.

As the visitors sit down to platters of sheep-milk cheeses overlooking the purple hues of Birchs Bay, Diane tells the story behind one of Tasmania’s most unique boutique food producers.

Located 40 kilometres south of Hobart, Grandvewe is the result of almost two decades of sheep dairy pioneering

by Diane, her daughter Nicole Gilliver and son Ryan Hartshorn. Although the dairy started producing cheese in 2002, the journey began well before that, says the former Brisbane insurance broker and financial planner.

“It was about 1990 when I decided that everything I was doing work-wise was based on either greed or fear,” Diane says. “It didn’t matter how much money I made for clients as a financial planner, it was never enough, and in insurance it was all about, ‘What if you die? What if your wife dies? What if you lose your income?’” Diane says.

“I decided I didn’t want to go on like that, so I sold my business and thought, ‘What am I going to do now?’”

A stint running sustainable living festivals convinced her

to leave the city and look for a more meaningful life in the bush. “I really got the bug of sustainable living and growing your own food,” Diane says. Soon after she purchased 8 hectares in Maleny, 95km north of Brisbane, growing market vegetables and establishing a home-delivery service and later producing cheeses from her small herd of Dexter cows. The road to Grandvewe was set.

A visit to Tasmania in 2001 completed the picture. “I came down here for a holiday and really had an epiphany; it was like coming home,” Diane says. A year later, Diane and her then partner moved to the Apple Isle, purchased 20ha at Birchs Bay and planted a vineyard, with the plan to build a winery. In search of a cashflow while the vineyard established, Diane came up with the idea of dairy sheep.

Drawing on her own cheese-making experience, work as a ‘relief milker’ around Maleny, and university studies, Diane learnt everything she could about the industry. “It wasn’t totally new to me, but what was new was using a sheep, and not a cow,” she laughs.

Today, the grapes are gone and Grandvewe Cheeses is one of Australia’s leading sheep cheese producers, It has its own breed – the Grandvewe Dairy Sheep, a cross of East Friesian and Bedouin Awassi developed by Diane to

D I N I N G

Diane Rae with Grandvewe’s dairy sheep.

create a high producing, strong dairy breed. The business employs 13 staff, along with the trio’s partners, and milks about 300 ewes daily. The product range includes a dozen cheeses, ranging from soft, through to hard and blues. In addition to the Birchs Bay farm gate, which welcomes 40,000 visitors annually, the business has a retail outlet at Hobart’s Brooke Street Pier and a regular stall at the Salamanca Markets. Diane, Nicole and Ryan also travel regularly to food and wine shows across Australia.

Nicole, a qualified cheesemaker and judge, heads up the cheese side of the business and Ryan is the ideas man behind Hartshorn Distillery, which makes boutique vodka and gin from the dairy’s main waste product, whey. “A lot of people ask, ‘How can you work with family?’ but for me the joy has been watching Nicole and Ryan grow into business people,” Diane says. “They’re now both highly competent entrepreneurial business people. The three of us have different ways of looking at things and when we get together the problem-solving is quite astounding.”

Although nowadays she leaves the milking to others, focusing on marketing and genetic improvement of the Grandvewe flock, Diane remains closely involved in the day-to-day running of the dairy, regularly helping out in the cheese factory and packing room. “Because we’re a small business and we’re a very vertically tiered business, we literally do everything skill-wise from paddock through to plate to tourism, so it’s very fragmented, but it also means

we get to do a whole lot of different things,” she says.

Product development is also a key focus, demonstrated

by Diane and Nicole’s latest creation, a cheese called The Gin Herbalist, made using the spent herbs from Ryan’s distillery. “The botanicals used in the gin-making process are all Australian natives – lemon myrtle, aniseed myrtle, pepperberry – so we now have a cheese that is matured with the spent botanicals from the gin on the outside and over its life the subtle aromas of the gin and the botanicals actually percolate through the case of the cheese.” The mother-daughter partnership is also looking at using oak barrels from the distillery to produce a smoked cheese.

“The wood we’ll use for the smoking process will be the wood from those spent oak barrels,” Diane says.

After 16 years entertaining tourists, Diane says the face-to-face interaction remains crucial for the business.

“People come here to hear our story; they want to see, feel and touch the farmer, and that’s why we’re hands-on,” she says. “It’s about relating to people one-on-one. That way people understand who we are and they have an emotional investment in the product.”

As for her island home, Diane says there’s no place like Tasmania. “Because when you live in absolute beauty 24 hours a day it can do nothing but affect who you are and how you view life,” she says, smiling, as Nicole makes cheese next door and Ryan distills spirits in the basement.

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B U S H

K I D S

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Bush kids WINNER 1. Carter, my 11-month-old baby, loves getting among all the farm and horse action – from feeding the horses to jumping on their backs and kicking his legs like crazy.

He even tries mimicking their noises.

Kaitlyn Hart, Heyfield, Vic

3. This is what happens when a three year old gets a calf for his birthday from his Nonno.

These are my nephews Mack, 3, and Fenton, 1. The little heifer is now named Sydney. She will join the milkers.

Ally Pena, Mooroopna, Vic

2. Lucy isn’t afraid of hard work or fully grown ewes. After a hard day in the shed, she just wanted to chill out with Frank the kelpie.

Erin McGann, Wyangala, NSW

4. Aspiring bull rider Banjo Messina, 4, is either playing cowboys, bull riding or playing farms and tractors. All day, every day.

Joe Messina, Inverloch, Vic

5. Mostyn is happy because it is just so much fun helping his dad and grandpa get the crops in.

Tess Vogt, Kapunda, SA

WIN A TOY JOHN DEERE MINI DIGGER Email a short story (up to 200 words) about the bush kids in your life, with a photo, to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au or write to Bush Kids, R.M.Williams Publishing, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015 (please don’t post digital prints – email them instead). Your image may be used to promote OUTBACK on social media. The best entry wins a John Deere Mini Digger, valued at $152.95.

M A I L B O X E S

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S I G N S

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Mailboxes & signs WINNER 1. When we relocated to Goomeri five years ago, the mailbox was a common rectangular type that did not suit our rural environment. My other half came up with this – a mailbox with moving parts. The piston and flywheel turn, and on the back you can adjust the ripper up and down, just for fun. The finishing touch was to mount it onto a discarded Southern Cross fueltank stand, with a plough disk bearing our names made from iron rod. Then he welded two pony shoes together to make the house number 3.

Kathy Koina, Goomeri, Qld

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2. My newest letterbox is made from a 20-litre oil container. It replaces a previous PVC oil container with spout, which after some years proved a target for passing drunken revellers. Living in the ’burbs isn’t as good as the bush for many reasons, but there are still some interesting letterboxes.

Lionel Swift, Oak Park, Vic 3. I saw this letterbox on travels in Victoria near Rushworth, Vic. Debbie Howden, Bundaberg, Qld 4. Three generations of Sheltons are waiting for the new edition of OUTBACK magazine to arrive in their beautiful letterbox: a flywheel and crankshaft of a refrigeration compressor from the 1920s.

Sue Shelton, Pakenham Upper, Vic

WIN A $100 R.M.WILLIAMS VOUCHER Email a short story (up to 200 words) about a mailbox or sign (yours or someone else’s) with a photo to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au or mail to Mailboxes & Signs, R.M.Williams Publishing, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015 (please email digital images – don’t print them out). Your image may be used to promote OUTBACK on social media. The winning entrant will receive a $100 R.M.Williams voucher.

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D O G S

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Dogs WINNER 1. When my daughter and her dog Mo came home to our small farm in the Adelaide Hills, from a station north of Cloncurry, Qld, Mo was a bit confused. He was allowed to sleep inside, had the freedom of not being tied up, and there were beaches and a resident toy poodle.

But when the quad started up, he was back in his element.

Jo Alexander, Clarendon, SA 2. Mischief-makers Jax the Jack Russell and Barb the sheep dog are in the buggy getting ready to do some work in the yards.

Millie Blight, Womboota, NSW 3. Eddie made sure his mate Darcie stayed sun-smart on a very hot Australia Day in the Clare Valley, SA. Leah Rasheed, Clare, SA 4. This is my two-year-old son Max lovingly kissing our old girl Roxy.

Roxy was a rescue dog and you could not find a more devoted dog.

Deidre Heagney, Mungindi, NSW 5. Jack, an 18-month-old collie with a love for cattle work, is an energetic, cuddly puppy who works well with other dogs.

Meg Cherrie, Roma, Qld 6. Our border collie Jack drives the break.

Matilda Kelly and Sam Taylor, Gulargambone, NSW 7. Only 10 months old, Tully kept up sheep for the crutching trailer at Tiarra Station, near Ivanhoe, NSW, back in January last year. He kept it up all day, and then slept from the minute we knocked off to the minute he had to get up and do it all again the next day.

Kaycie Cochrane, Selvy, Vic

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GUARD YOUR DOG Email a short story (up to 200 words) about a working dog, with a photo, to publishing@rmwilliams. com.au or write to R.M.Williams Publishing, Dogs, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015 (please don’t print out digital images). Your image may be used to promote OUTBACK on social media. The best submission will receive a year’s supply of NexGard® – beef-flavoured chews that kill both ticks and fleas – for one dog, valued at over $182, from Merial and your Local Bloke at CRT.

www.crt.com.au

HELPING YOU GROW

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At CRT we understand fleas and ticks are more than a nuisance for dogs.

Fleas can cause skin irritation and ticks can cause severe illness and even death in some dogs.

NEXGARD ÂŽ is a tasty beef-flavoured chew that kills fleas and ticks including deadly paralysis ticks* for a full month allowing your working dog to carry on working hard for you!

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*See NEXGARD product label for full claim details.

www.crt.com.au

ALEX KWONG PHOTOGRAPHY

B U S H

W E D D I N G S

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Bush weddings WINNER 1. Hannah and I were married in October last year on my parents’ property Glengowan, on the Murray River at Woods Point, SA. The ceremony was held on the bank of a wetland and, like most of our guests, we camped the night along the edge of the river. The night before the wedding, my groomsman and I stayed on an old wooden riverboat called the Galilee, which was built in 1966 with prizemoney the owner received from winning the Melbourne Cup that year. I wore a pair of R.M.Williams boots my mother bought me when I was 13 years old.

Jock Foster, Woods Point, SA 2. Damien and I got married in March this year in a very intimate ceremony at the Overlander Homestead in Roma, Qld. My husband was dressed in R.M.Williams clothing right down to his boots.

Katie McHugh, Roma, Qld

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3. Taylah Weekley and I were married at the end of October last year, in the Murray River town of Koondrook, where she grew up. What started out as a wet morning turned into a perfect day.

Charles Shaw, Wagga Wagga, NSW 4. After being apart for 24 years, Joseph and I found each other and fell in love all over again, and had a beautiful farm wedding in 2015 shared with some gorgeous heifers, family and close friends in Tatura East, Vic. Ally Pena, Mooroopna, Vic 4

WIN AN R.M.WILLIAMS GIFT VOUCHER Email a short story (up to 200 words) about your bush wedding (it doesn’t have to be recent) with a photo to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au or send mail to Bush Weddings, R.M.Williams Publishing, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015 (please email digital images – don’t print them out). Please ensure you have copyright, or provide us with the photographer’s name.Your image may be used to promote OUTBACK on social media.

The winning entrant in each issue will receive a $100 R.M.Williams gift voucher.

B O O T S

Boots WINNER 1. When I was a girl I grew up on a station called Wooltana, near Marree, SA, which my dad managed for 25 years. We left the bush only once a year for a threeweek holiday in Adelaide, so it was hard to shop. One day, when I was 12, a mobile outfitter called Mr Lister came to visit. He carried a range of RMs, but he didn’t have my size and I cried. Two months later, Dad took us to 5 Percy Street in Adelaide, which was a tin shed back then. It was my lucky day, because Dad bought me not only my very own pair of boots, but also a brand-new Syd Hill Youth Poley saddle. I am nearly 60 now, still ride in the boots and remember the day like it was yesterday.

Christine Bain, Bangalow, NSW

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2. My stressed-look R.M.Williams boots are barely four years old and at that beautiful stage of life when they’re like a second skin.

They’ve carried me through Longreach, Winton and Brisbane, and the streets of Hollywood, Las Vegas and New York.

Apparently, however, they’re no match for a three-year-old Doberman.

John Spence, Brisbane, Qld 3. These boots are around 14 years old and they have had many purposes. I have a fear of yabbies, so my son put some in my boots.

Mark Scifleet, Binnaway, NSW 4. My pa bought these R.M.Williams boots back in the ’60s. He used to wear them only when he wore his ‘dress leg’. (He lost his leg when he was 16 in a train accident.) I inherited them, and after a couple of resoles, they are still going strong.

Jessica Bailey, Meadows, SA 5. My RMs are approximately 30 years old.

At first, they were my dress boots and then became my horse-riding boots. I am 73 years young and still use them every day riding my racehorse. I have a six-year-old pair of Craftsman dress boots, but feel reluctant to use them for riding, as my feet get a bit wet when washing down the horse. I have been wearing RMs since I first met RM at the Percy Street workshop in 1958. As a young buck, I always had Cuban heel boots, trying to impress the girls.

Trevor White, Mount Gambier, SA

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WIN A NEW PAIR OF BOOTS Email a short story (up to 200 words) about your R.M.Williams boots, with a photo, to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au or send mail to R.M.Williams Publishing, Boots, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015 (please email – don’t print out – digital images).

Your image may be used to promote R.M.Williams and/or OUTBACK on social media. The winner in each issue will receive a new pair of boots.

W A T C H

40th Sheepvention

AUG 6–7, Hamilton, Vic Ram sale, sheep show, inventions, farm dogs and wool-handling competitions, fashion parade, special dinner and live music. $20 at the gate.

Hamilton P&A Society (03) 5572 2563 www.hamiltonshowgrounds.com.au

60th Mt Isa Mines Rodeo

AUG 9–12, Mount Isa, Qld Entertainment includes Jimmy Barnes, Shannon Noll, The McClymonts, The Wolfe Brothers and four days of rodeo action.

(07) 4743 2706 www.isarodeo.com.au

Bendigo Writers Festival

AUG 10–12, Bendigo, Vic Share in the love of writing and books at this festival that began in 2012. Writers this year include Bruce Pascoe, Sarah Macdonald and Richard Denniss.

Festival director Rosemary Sorensen voxbendigo@gmail.com http://bendigowritersfestival.com.au

Eyre Peninsula Field Days

AUG 14–16, Cleve, SA Check out the latest agricultural equipment and technology, as well as demonstrations and exhibits of modern homewares and crafts.

Secretary Julie Marsh (08) 8628 2219 http://eyrepeninsulafielddays.com.au

O U T

F O R . . .

Historic Leyburn Sprints

AUG 18–19, Leyburn, Qld Named last year as the CAMS Queensland motor sports event of the year, the community-run sprints attract more than 200 historic, classic and performance cars and up to 15,000 spectators who watch them compete on a closed street course in the tiny Darling Downs town.

President Tricia Chant 0407 035 200 www.leyburnmotorsprints.com.au

Commonwealth Bank AgQuip

AUG 21–23, Gunnedah, NSW Attracting more than 100,000 visitors each year, this huge event showcases some 3000 products and services aimed at farming professionals. Free admission, gates open at 9am.

Fairfax Rural Events (02) 6768 5800 www.facebook.com/agquip

Gympie Music Muster

AUG 23–26, Amamoor State Forest, Qld Country, country rock, blues, roots and bluegrass performed by more than 100 artists, including Lee Kernaghan, Troy Cassar-Daley, Beccy Cole, Ian Moss and John Williamson. Includes Muster Talent Search and the Emerging Talent Showcase, along with harmonica, guitar and ukulele workshops.

(07) 4622 2099 www.muster.com.au

Freedom Day Festival

AUG 24–26, Katherine, NT Commemorating the Wave Hill walkoff, this festival’s philosophy is “blackfella, whitefella unite as one”. Sports carnival, guided tours, art exhibition and concerts.

0406 224 866 www.freedomday.com.au

Cunnamulla Fella Festival

AUG 24–26, Cunnamulla, Qld Bushman’s challenges, triathlon, motorbike and horse events, rodeo and a seniors bull ride.

(07) 4655 8470 Cunnamullafellafestival.com.au

QCWA Boulia Branch Spring Fair AUG 25, Boulia, Qld There’s no country show in Boulia, so this is the chance for locals to shine at cake-cooking and other show-style competitions. All funds raised go to the RFDS. Shire Hall, 9am–1pm.

Secretary Linda Welldon 0408 188 897 www.facebook.com/qcwaboulia

Shinju Matsuri

AUG 25–SEP 2, Broome, WA Pearl meat cook-off, yum cha, floating lanterns and the exquisite long-table dinner on Cable Beach. www.shinjumatsuri.com.au

Birdsville Races

AUG 31–SEP 1, Birdsville, Qld They don’t get much more famous than this event, which has been running for 136 years. Trackside hospitality options include a gourmet outback feast. events@birdsvilleraces.com www.birdsvilleraces.com

White Night Bendigo

SEP 1, Bendigo, Vic Inspired by the international Nuit Blanche movement, this one-night event includes light installations, exhibitions, street performances, film, music, dance and interactive displays. 7pm–2am. https://whitenight.com.au

Regional Women’s Exhibition

SEP 1–NOV 30, Mornington, Vic Features the works of five talented women living in regional Australia: Carly Le Cerf, Helen McCullagh, Wendy McDonald, Sophie Perez and Winnie Sampi.

Esther Gyorki 0403 558 048 Southernbuoystudios.com.au Farm dog competition at Sheepvention, Hamilton, Vic.

Floating lanterns at Shinju Matsuri, Broome, WA.

Outback Family Race Day

SEP 2, Port Augusta, SA Quality thoroughbred racing. Kids under 18 free, and treated to jumping castle, face-painting and entertainment.

0447 105 545 www.theracessa.com.au/events

Farming and Grazing for Profit School

SEP 5–11, Katanning, WA Australia’s leading agricultural management school comes to Katanning.

1800 356 004 www.rcsaustralia.com.au

Miles Back to the Bush

SEP 6–9, Miles, Qld Wildflowers, antiques, farm and fishing tours, tractor pull, vintage aircraft and more.

Festival president Rachel Kerwick 0427 545 902 www.backtothebushfestival.com.au

Bronco Branding National Finals

SEP 15, Alice Springs, NT After successful finals at Undoolya in previous years, Alice Springs is poised to hold the national championships.

Robbie Schmidt 0427 809 082 https://broncobrandingsa.com.au/alicesprings-bronco-branding/

Kendall National Violin Competition

SEP 15, Kendall, NSW Listen to some of the country’s most outstanding musicians at the 20th anniversary of this festival.

Fran Bec (02) 6582 0868 www.kendallviolin.org.au

Toowoomba Carnival of Flowers

SEP 21–30, Toowoomba, Qld More than 176,000 seedlings and bulbs will be planted for this riot of colour, flavour and music.

131 872 www.tcof.com.au

A Day on the Bay

SEP 22–23, Coffin Bay, SA A food and wine event that showcases local oysters, among other produce.

Coffin Bay Tourist Association (08) 8685 4170 http://coffinbay.net/a-day-on-the-bay

Noonamah Tavern Rodeo

SEP 22, Noonamah, NT Another series of wild rides at this Top End icon.

(08) 8988 1054 www.facebook.com/NoonamahTavern

OUTBACK keeps people up to date on a daily basis through its social-media websites.

To follow OUTBACK on Facebook, go to facebook.com/OUTBACKmagazine; on Twitter, go to twitter.com/outbackmagazine; on Instagram, follow @rmwilliamsoutbackmagazine.

To have your event considered for listing in our Watch Out For… pages and website, email publishing@rmwilliams.com.au. Deadline for listings in the next issue is August 15, 2018.

Not all events can be published.

O U T B A C K

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Crossword Welcome to the 53rd OUTBACK crossword. For the solution, see the next edition or go to www.outbackmag.com.au.

ACROSS 1. Innamincka Hotel has installed one of the country’s largest off-the-grid ... ventures 4. Male pigs castrated early in life 6. One of the three lakes in which Stirling Oysters operates its thriving aquaculture business on the south coast of New South Wales 9. Meat-value and breeding-quality competition held at agricultural shows throughout Australia, ... and Hook 10. Jimmy Beale and his partner Shannon Chatfield won the Consolidated Pastoral Company’s 2017 ... of the Year award 11. Devices attached to a saddle to support a rider’s feet 15. Travelling workshop launched by R.M.Williams at the Sydney Royal Easter Show earlier this year (3,3) 16. Renowned chef Jimmy Campbell has swapped working for top-ranking restaurant company ... to cook up a storm at Cavendish’s sole hotel in Victoria’s southern Grampians 18. State-of-the-art vessel introduced by Huon Aquaculture to reduce ocean traffic in the wild waters of Tasmania 20. Grandvewe Cheeses, south of Hobart, is one of Australia’s leading producers of ... dairy products (5,4) 22. Pears, apples and quinces all belong to this fruit family 24. Technology being developed to perform many of the dirty, dull and dangerous tasks on farms 25. The ... Milk Co-operative provides an alternative for dairy farmers in northeastern Victoria to get their milk to market 27. Novel by Shirley Patton, set in Kalgoorlie, WA, The ... We Keep 28. Desirable tree-change destination between Canberra and Cooma, known for its inconsistent spelling on signs at opposite ends of town 34. Optus has helped remote communities stay connected with a satellite small-cell service under the Federal Government’s Mobile ... Program 35. Book published by Leon Wegener that describes the journey of early German settlers to the area around present-day Walla Walla (3,4) 39. Location for shooting this year’s R.M.Williams autumn/winter catalogue 41. Australian writer and bush poet Henry ... once said, “If you know Bourke, you know Australia” 43. Last year, alone, 75,000 people were reached by mental-health initiative The ... Project

46. The part of the shearing shed where sheep are shorn 48. Internationally recognised horse-industry qualification, Marcus Oldham’s ...

Management Diploma 49. Bea Litchfield of pastoral company Hazeldean is capitalising on ... media to elevate the family business 50. The Australian Grains ... contains seed and germ plasm as an insurance policy against climatic catastrophe

DOWN 2. Tim Gentle is using virtual ... to educate school children about where food comes from 3. Species of tree-kangaroo found mainly on the Atherton Tableland, for which Karen Coombes set up the Tree Roo Rescue and Conservation Centre 5. Term used for mollusc larvae sold by hatcheries to oyster farmers, who then grow the oysters to maturity 7. The ... Highway is a 581km stretch of road in Western Australia and the Northern Territory that runs through Killarney, Riveren and Bunda stations 8. The 2018 E.S. ... Award, named after a Northern Territory pioneer aviator, was won by medical student Jess Coolwell 10. Terrestrial crustaceans also known as pill bugs or woodlice 12. Landscape of dense grass and scattered trees that stretches across northern Australia from Broome to Townsville, tropical ...

13. The upper part of the stamen of a flower in which pollen is produced 14. Feed for livestock, usually coarsely chopped hay or straw 16. Motorbike obstacle course event held annually at William Creek, SA 17. Saltbush and ... are hardy native shrubs planted by Western Australia’s Garry Page in a bid to halt the salt’s march across his family’s farmland 19. Green Grove Organics is the first producer of organic ... in the Southern Hemisphere 21. Industry utilising a growing number of Australian native plants 23. The ... Fence is the longest of its kind, spanning over 5000km from Jimbour on the Darling Downs to the Great Australian Bight near Nundroo 25. While most people opt for the common rectangular style, you can find some

ABOVE: Solution to Crossword no.52.

clever examples of this device from which you may collect your edition of OUTBACK magazine 26. The first two installations for the ... Rail Trail were unveiled at Marree during the famous Camel Cup in July 29. Broome’s Cable Beach was the location for this year’s annual Shinju Matsuri ...

Dinner (4,5) 30. Tales of expeditions in his paddle wheeler and a selection of Rex Ellis’s other anecdotes can be found in his 10th book, ... Dreaming 31. Geelong-born doctor, journalist, bushman and adventurer, George Ernest ‘Chinese’ ...

32. Originating in the US, this humped cattle species has been bred in north Australia to withstand its harsh environmental conditions 33. Moonta gave Australia the popular bakery treat, the Cornish ...

36. The Insect ... Association of Australia promotes the farming of insects for livestock feed or human food 37. Queensland festival held annually in August, Gympie Music ...

38. Brown Brothers were one of the first in the wine industry to move to Tasmania in response to ... change 40. Road trip incorporating the iconic Birdsville, Strzelecki and Oodnadatta tracks, The Outback ...

42. Broadband internet service that delivers high-speed internet via wireless to rural properties in Queensland’s Richmond Shire (2-3) 44. Largest superfine wool-growing property in the world, according to T.A.Field Estates chairman Michael Field, ... Station 45. A special piece of pottery created by John Dermer may be referred to as a ‘... pot’ 46. Online prenatal course set up for remote rural and regional women and men, Birth ...

47. Anti-flood embankment also known as a levee

B O O K S

Outsiders on the inside

Growing up country

Set in stone

During the two world wars, civilians from enemy nations, even if born here, were distrusted by our government, and so were locked up in internment camps across Australia.

As well as these civilians, captured members of enemy forces were held in prisoner of war (POW) camps. Captured Lives: Australia’s Wartime Internment Camps is published by the National Library of Australia and covers more than 30 of the main internment and POW camps spread across the nation during the two wars. Many of these camps were, of course, situated in rural Australia. While the bloody breakout of Japanese prisoners from Cowra is well-known, Captured Lives sheds light on many other stories. The richly illustrated book includes more than 40 text boxes that focus on particular events and various internees and prisoners. Among them, for example, Germanborn Edmund Resch, a naturalised Australian and resident for more than 50 years whose name lives on through his work as a brewer: Resch’s beer first being made in Wilcannia.

Resch was interred in 1917 at the of 70.

Elsewhere we read of the escapades of Italian POW Edgardo Simoni, also known as ‘the fox’. Simoni was captured at Bardia in North Africa and transported to the Murchison camp in Victoria. He escaped from three POW camps – at one time evading capture for almost a year while working in Melbourne selling cosmetics door to door.

Author Peter Monteath is Professor of History at Flinders University and has published a number of books about Australian and European history.The book makes excellent use of art, maps, historical photography and modern design to bring to life a wide variety of people, many of whom made lasting contributions to Australia.

A deep sense of family, community and country permeate this beautifully produced book by OUTBACK contributor and bestselling author of Mailman of the Birdsville Track, Kristin Weidenbach. Growing Up Moonta is told via the reminiscences of Weidenbach’s father, Neil, and celebrates life in the South Australian copper-mining town of Moonta. Many of the book’s stories come from the 1930s and ’40s, and take readers “to a time not so long ago, but a way of life long passed; a place redolent with nostalgia that lives on in the stories of our parents and grandparents,” Kristin says.

Her father’s humour, intelligence and warmth permeate stories of boys growing into men lumping bags of wheat and tending engines in the town power houses, motorcycle adventures, and travelling salesmen hawking dressmakers’ pins and bottles of antiseptic salve.

Kristin says the book has a unique narrative nonfiction structure, being a combination of social history, memoir and aspects of more traditional Australian pioneering history. Her goal was to braid together all the funny stories and quirky anecdotes about the people of the town.

She wanted to convey the warmth and neighbourly connections, each with their own peculiarities and identities, common all over Australia in country towns of that era.It is therefore an intimate and perceptive portrait of Moonta and its people, but one that has resonance beyond the boundaries of one town.

If you are interested in the story of Australia, of the warp and weft of community, and the quirks and characters that underpin a uniquely country sensibility, Growing Up Moonta is an excellent book to add to your collection.

The Arnhem Land Plateau in the Northern Territory is a 32,000-square-kilometre expanse of ancient sandstone home to massive rivers, deep gorges, unique flora and fauna and, for at least 65,000 years, the Bininj Aboriginal people.

Darwin-based photographer and OUTBACK contributor David Hancock has a deep love and affinity for the region. This book is the culmination of more than 10 years of work for David, whose appreciation of the ancient landscapes and for the people who live there is evident in every frame.

During many years of respectful exploration and friendship, he has garnered privileged access to one of the most remarkable places and cultures on earth. Kuwarddewardde takes the reader on an enthralling journey through living history to share rare insights into the people, language, art and the land that binds it all together.

David documents the community and work carried out by the Bininj in their dayto-day lives, and shares a rich understanding of the way in which history and the future are strengthened by a real veneration and engagement with the environment. From the seasonal land-management practices providing new revenue streams through carbon sequestration to intimate portraits of family and community, we are shown a world seldom seen by outside eyes.

David trained as a journalist before taking up the camera, and that comes through in his informative and engaging text. His writing covers geology, botany, anthropology, history and more, providing a background to the images that rounds out the work, and adds to the aesthetic substance.

As a study of art, Kuwarddewardde is worth having. As a portrayal and celebration of life, it is of even greater worth.

Growing Up Moonta Kristin Weidenbach $34.99 www.kristinweidenbach.com

Kuwarddewardde: The Stone Country David Hancock $60 www.davidhancockphoto.com.au

Captured Lives: Australia’s Wartime Internment Camps Peter Monteath $39.99 www.nla.gov.au

Unbreakable bonds It merely takes a few words for the reader of The Far-back Country to realise this book is not your run-of-the-mill rural novel. Author Kate Lyons has had her short fiction and poetry published in a range of Australian literary journals and her first novel The Water Underneath was short-listed for numerous awards, including The Australian/Vogel’s Literary Award. So, it’s perhaps no surprise that the pages flourish with beautifully vivid descriptions and cleverly drawn characters: “There was dusk, a ruffled blue moment when earth released its grip on the heat. There was sunrise, that same heat blooming from a low spine of hills. There were stars wheeling frozen round the hinge of his firelight, the only certain thing. Even the hardest hottest day out here held the ghost of a curve to it, in the long glitter of a week.”

Anyone who’s spent time in the bush will know what she means and yet she conjures an original perspective on something so familiar, without purple prose.

The central character of the book is Ray McCullough who, in 1979 at the age of 14, ran away from his home on a western New South Wales sheep property following a violent confrontation with his dad, Jim. He left behind his mum, Delly, and his sisters, Ursula and Tilda.

Now 41, Ray works as an itinerant cook and labourer across the remote outback. A practical man interested in history and the landscape, Ray leads a solitary life, convinced he has inherited his father’s streak of violence, spending his life running away from memories of family and home.

When the body of a man believed to be Ray is found in a country pub, Ursula thinks she can finally lay to rest the search that has defined most of her adult life. She collects the man’s belongings and follows the tracks he left, each leading her closer to unravelling this mystery.

Kate Lyons was born in Broken Hill, NSW, and has an affinity and fascination with the desert landscape of the far west.

Growing up, she was struck by the number of ‘lost boys’ – teenagers who left home to go shearing or labouring or who just left, never to be heard of again. Her writing also led her to current research on men’s mental health problems in rural Australia.

This is a well-written and compelling novel about family and home, set against the landscape we know and love.

The Far-back Country Kate Lyons $29.99 www.allenandunwin.com

WIN OUTBACK has five copies of The Farback Country to give away, courtesy of Allen and Unwin. To win one, tell us the name of a place you've been to that could well be described as 'far-back country' and why this would be so.

Email your answer with your full name and address, and ‘Book competition’ in the subject line to publishing@ rmwilliams.com.au, or write to ‘OUTBACK Competition’, PO Box 7015, Alexandria, NSW, 2015. Competition closes September 1, 2018.

Winners of last issue’s book competition were Maureen Adams, Frankland River, WA; Judy Campbell, Ascot Vale, Vic; Kylie Crossley, Craigie, WA; Helen Gregor, Junee, NSW; and Heather Willis, Cooma, NSW. They each win a copy of The Secrets We Keep by Shirley Patton.

Her dreams for tomorrow are our focus today Choose Clayfield College Boarding and let her light shine

CO-ED: PRE-PREP - YEAR 6 GIRLS ONLY: YEARS 7 - 12 GIRLS BOARDING: YEARS 5 - 12 A School of the Presbyterian and Methodist Schools Association. Cricos Code: 00493G

www.clayfield.qld.edu.au

07 3262 0262

enrol@clayfield.qld.edu.au

23 Gregory Street Clayfield QLD 4011

P O E T R Y

The old wood stove IAN ATTENBOROUGH

We have an old wood stove at home, it’s really worth a look – The stories that it can tell read like a history book.

It held a place of honour in Mum’s kitchen, where it stood, Its flue shot up through the roof, the firebox full of wood.

I eyed the old wood stove off and the memories came back, Of sitting ’round that fire listening to yarns from Mum and Dad. Me mind went back to growing up in times that seemed so rough, But I think they were only training us, as life can be so tough.

It boiled the water for the tea and cooked Mum’s Sunday roast, And made the best red-hot coals we kids used to make toast.

It made the best soups and stews, boiled water for a bath, Made the cattle irons red-hot to brand the milker’s calf.

I realised then the stove must stay – the memories that it held – To pass on to my children the stories Dad could tell.

On winter’s nights when cold came in, Mum made her special brew, Leftovers from the kero fridge – we looked forward to that stew.

“Stoke up the stove,” me dad would say, “it might just keep us warm.”

Although outside a chill wind blew, we felt safe from raging storm.

Around the fire the yarns he told, our eyes a shining bright, Of bucking bulls and droving trips, cattle rushes in the night.

He told the tales of stockmen, of drought and flooding rain, Of chasing cleanskin scrubbers, and the cutting of the cane.

The fire burnt down to ashes, we kids were off to bed, To dream the dreams of the western plains, of sunsets glowing red.

As time went by the power came, the stove went to the shed, To become a home for wildlife – rats and mice made it their bed.

It lay forgotten in the shed, collecting years of dust, Covered up by boxes, and a little bit of rust.

Mum got a new electric stove, but it didn’t seem quite right.

I missed the nights around the stove, lit by a hurricane light.

We oiled and scrubbed and polished, and it now holds pride of place Out the back with the barbecue it stands, no frills, no lace.

On barbie nights we fire it up and we all just sit around, I tell the old-time stories, the kids listen without a sound.

I tell the tales of cattle kings, Sid Kidman comes to mind, Of droving down the Birdsville Track, where water was hard to find.

I tell of days of gold rushes, of a bushranger named Ned, ’Til drooping eyes and nodding heads signal it’s time for bed.

I’m retired and getting old now, I’ve been down life’s memory lane, My kids have all grown up and left, but the old stove still remains.

It gives a joy to this old bloke, when the grandkids come around, For we stoke up the old wood stove, and the stories just abound.

I look into their eyes a shining, and I see what they might fancy, To go droving down the Cooper with a stockman, name of Clancy.

The fire burns down and the night turns cool, I send them off to bed To dream the dreams that I once dreamt, them sunsets glowing red.

The years flew by and in a flash, I had children of my own.

My childhood lay forgotten, life ruled by work and phone, ’Til one day, while cleaning, we dragged the old stove out, Brushed off a few old cobwebs. Cleaned up, it looked quite stout.

WIN AN R.M.WILLIAMS GIFT VOUCHER This page is open for you to contribute original poems with an Australian focus. The published poet will receive a $100 R.M.Williams gift voucher to put towards something in the R.M.Williams range. Email poems to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au or post to Poetry, R.M.Williams Publishing, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015.

T R A V E L / G E N E R A L

FREE YOUR WILD SIDE

REYNELLA KOSCIUSKO RIDES SNOWY MOUNTAINS HORSE TREKKING KOSCIUSZKO N AT I O N A L PA R K

Ride ‘Man from Snowy River’ country “...the grandaddy of all riding establishments.”

Julie Miller, Travel, Sun-Herald

C LOT H IN G &

S H E A R IN G S

U P P LI E S

Ride with the pioneers, now celebrating 48 years experience!

4 fro to 6 m n en ight dO h ct orse to en trek dA s pr il

REYNELLA KOSCIUSKO RIDES Adaminaby NSW 2629 Call 1800 029 909 or (02) 6454 2386 Fax (02) 6454 2530 reynella@activ8.net.au www.reynellarides.com.au www.facebook.com/reynellarides

Visit

• SHEARING TROUSERS, NAVY OR BLACK, MADE TO MEASURE. • SINGLETS, LONGTAIL. • WORK JUMPERS. • SHEARING TOOLS.

5 Phillip Street, Streaky Bay, SA 5680 PH: (08) 8626 1285 / 0428 862 612 www.courela.com.au info@courela.com.au

CHARLEVILLE

with its outback Stars and Secrets, shhhh....

✔ Observatory Sessions

✔ Sun Viewing Sessions

✔ Top Secret WWII Tour

✔ Astronomy by Day

✔ Introduction to the Night Sky For more information about these Charleville Experiences, simply call the Charleville Cosmos Centre and Observatory on (07) 4654 7771.

Choose between “Boeing Stearman”, “T6 Texan”, or the mighty “L39 Albatross” jet then choose your adventure.

l Gorge Adventure

(Boeing Stearman, T6 Texan)

l Aerobatics Adventure

(Boeing Stearman, T6 Texan or L39 Albatross)

l Gorge/Aerobatics

Adventure (Boeing Stearman, T6 Texan)

Fleet Warbirds

Fleet Helicopters - Armidale Airport PO Box 453, Armidale NSW 2350 Phone: +61 2 6772 2348 Fax: +61 2 6772 7654 Email: mail@fleethelicopters.com.au

www.fleetadventures.com.au

Salty Bore?

If you have a salty bore, you’re half way there. Don’t waste your investment. Install a Salt Free Desalination Unit and enjoy the greenest gardens in town.

Drip feed your trees, water your stock, fill your pool, wash your car and grow vegies. Our unit will increase the value of your property.

SDesalination units now available SIdeal for remote bore locations SAustralian Made SServicing Units Australia Wide S8000 to more than 200,000 litres per day FREE INSTALLATION & ANTI SCALE when you mention this Outback magazine ad!

FINANCE AVAILABLE TO APPROVED CUSTOMERS

Charleville Visitor Information www.experiencecharleville.com.au PHOTO CREDIT: TOURISM & EVENTS QLD

MOBILE 0410 579 651 EMAIL sales@saltfree.com.au

www.saltfree.com.au

D AU ESA S T LI R A NA L I TI A ON

R E C R U I T M E N T

C O N N E LLAN AI R WAYS TR UST The Connellan Airways Trust was established to assist the people who reside in the remote areas of outback Australia with financial support for any worthwhile project, particularly involving education, communication, transport and health services.

The trust welcomes enquiries from all those who may be eligible for assistance. If you think you may be eligible, you are encouraged to contact:

A N D

T R A I N I N G

FLIGHT TRAINING SCHOOL Fleet Helicopters “Train here...fly anywhere” “Training bush pilots for over a decade”

Anna Brown

RECRUITMENT FOR RURAL & REGIONAL AUSTRALIA Anna Brown Recruitment Agency is the solution to all your employment needs.

I know what you want when it comes to filling jobs or finding you a job. I source employees Australia-wide to fill your job requirements using my extensive network of cattle & sheep stations and Agricultural Education Organisations.

Executive Officer of the Trust Kaye Clapin Free Call: 1800 733 810 Email: info@connellanairwaystrust.org.au Address: PO Box 749 Williamstown SA 5351 Website: www.connellanairwaystrust.org.au

Private Helicopter Licence Commercial Helicopter Licence Training including: R22, R44, B206B/L, Huey (UH-1H), Sling, Low Level, Flight Review High Altitude Flying (>3500 ft.)

Participate in Routine Maintenance In-house Approved Testing Officer Armidale Airport PO Box 453, Armidale, NSW 2350 Australia Ph +61 2 6772 2348 Fax +61 2 6772 7654 www.fleethelicopters.com.au mail@fleethelicopters.com.au

I have over 16 years experience in the Rural Industry as an Employee, Employer and Recruiter.

Some of the many positions available include: Administration staff, Gardeners, Jackaroos/ Jillaroos/Stationhands, Governesses, Cooks, Overseers, Grader Drivers, Plant Operators, Domestic staff, Bore runners, Head Stockmen, Property managers.

AB

Mobile Phone Fax Email Post

0427 644 527 02 6331 4922 02 6331 5612 anna@annabrown.com.au PO Box 548 Bathurst NSW 2795

www.annabrownrecruitment.com

THE NORTH AUSTRALIAN

PASTORAL COMPANY APPLY NOW TO JOIN US! WHY NAPCO?

« Australian Owned & Operated. Est. 1877 « Seventeen Stations/Outstations and an Award Winning Feedlot « Internationally recognised Composite Breeding Program & Elite Bull Breeding Program « Fulltime Permanent Positions with Holiday Pay & Job security « Private Air-conditioned Accommodation on Stations « Couple/Family accommodation available for some positions

POSITIONS WITH NAPCO INCLUDE

« Station Hands (Ringers, Stockmen, Jillaroos, Jackaroos) « Station Cooks, Home Tutors/Governesses, Gardeners, Domestic Cleaners « Bore Runners, Grader Drivers/Machine Operators, Road Train Drivers « Managers, Overseers, Head Stockpersons, Leading Hands « Clerical and Professional roles To apply for available positions, or register your interest for future positions, please complete an online application via our website www.napco.com.au

Website: www.napco.com.au Email: info@napco.com.au Phone: 07 3221 2266 To speak to someone outside business hours please call us on 0429 399 630 Find us on Facebook!

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES: BRONTE SMITH

PH: 0414 383 619

EMAIL: SMITHBK@BIGPOND.NET.AU

R E C R U I T M E N T

ARE YOU A PROPERTY OWNER IN NEED OF

A BREAK?

Farm Sitters Australia offers honest and reliable caretakers to provide security, maintenance and peace of mind while you are away from your property.

Established in 2004, we have successfully connected hundreds of property owners with suitably experienced sitters.

You can leave your farm knowing that your precious assets are secure and being cared for.

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T R A I N I N G

STAFF RECRUITMENT

WESTERN GRAZING QUEENSLAND AND NT

Western Grazing is a well-known family owned beef producer in Australia with cattle properties spread across Queensland and Northern Territory providing employment to more than 70 employees.

Western Grazing owns one of the largest herd of Brahman Cross Cattle and continues to broaden the market appeal with cross breeding programs.

Western Grazing takes pride in providing great employment and training opportunities across all its aspects of operation.

POSITIONS AVAILABLE IN 2018 n Head Stockmen n Gardeners n Pilots n Boreman n Plant Operators n Cooks & Domestic Staff n Stationhands and Junior Stationhands (must have horse riding experience) Post or email application letters & resumes to:

Find a farmsitter, find a property and read testimonials on our website!

P.O. Box 3481, BURLEIGH HEADS, QLD 4220 recruitment@westerngrazing.com.au

www.farmsitters.com.au info@ farmsitters.com.au (07) 4669 6686

“A wonderful service to the farming community” -South Australia, 2017

For more information visit our website

WWW.WESTERNGRAZING.COM.AU

JOin AuStrAliA’S lArGESt FAMily OwnED CAttlE COMPAny where head office is still in the bush.

The McDonald family offers exciting career opportunities for experienced stationhands across our 11 cattle stations, feedlot and irrigation farm in Queensland. We provide training and development, great station facilities, internal promotions and transfers between properties.

Applications are welcome for the following positions: • Experienced Helicopter Pilots • Experienced Head Stockmen • Cooks and Domestic Staff • Stationhands • Feedlot Staff • Machinery Operators • Governesses • Gardeners • Boremen Contact us today: Apply online at www.mdh.net.au email jobs@mdh.net.au or phone (07) 4745 3434

Georgina Pastoral Company and Hughes Pastoral Company are family owned enterprises operating diverse beef cattle portfolios in the Northern Territory and Queensland.

We are currently recruiting jackaroos, jillaroos and all maintenance staff for the 2019 season.

Phone: 07 4748 4877 Email: recruitment@georginapastoral.com.au

R E C R U I T M E N T

A N D

T R A I N I N G

TAKE THE LEAD

Australia’s largest privately owned beef cattle company offering: Your pathway to rewarding careers, extensive training opportunities plus certification, internal transfer program across diverse CPC property locations, and a unique lifestyle.

400,000 cattleWWW.PASTORAL.COM capacity | 16 properties | 5.5 million hectares | 2 feedlots Apply now

Not just jobs.

We do careers.

Grow yours with us, from paddock to plate.

Australian Country Choice (ACC) is a proudly Australian owned and family operated industry leader. Together with Australian Cattle and Beef Holdings (ACBH), we are the world’s largest, vertically integrated, beef supply chain.

Our operations encompass large scale breeding, backgrounding and feedlotting across 34 properties Queensland wide, stretching over 5.3 million acres and carrying 270,000 head of cattle. Our ongoing investment and commitment to continuous improvement delivers pasture, crop and infrastructure development programs to optimise production, improve sustainability and maintain supply to ACC feedlots.

If you’re seeking to build your agribusiness career with an industry leader, in a challenging, rewarding role with long term stability, apply now by emailing your resume to recruitment@accbeef.net.au or recruitment@acbh.net.au

accbeef.net . au

ADVERTISING ENQUIRIES: BRONTE SMITH

PH: 0414 383 619

EMAIL: SMITHBK@BIGPOND.NET.AU

R E C R U I T M E N T

A N D

T R A I N I N G

LOOKING FOR A REWARDING CAREER? Excellent Working Conditions

Stanbroke is a vertically integrated agricultural business that operates and manages extensive cattle breeding properties in Northern Queensland, a feedlot in Chinchilla and a state-ofthe-art processing facility in the Lockyer Valley.

We regularly recruit candidates in the following areas: Head Stock Persons | Jackaroos & Jillaroos | Station Cooks Handymen | Bore Runners | Grader Drivers

GAIN REWARDING EXPERIENCES

CONTACT US Phone: (07) 4697 6188 Email: hrproperties@stanbroke.com Apply online: www.stanbroke.com/employment/

STANBROKE.COM Development & Training Opportunities

camp under stars that seem to stretch forever At the Australian Agricultural Company, we’ve been passionately perfecting the Art of Australian Beef since 1824. start building your career with us. www.aaco.com.au

L A U G H - L I N E S

Fast food Sarah O’Neill lived near Halls Creek, WA, and maintained a large flock of goats and chooks. A traveller visited, and joined Sarah for a pannikin of tea. He said he was in awe of the speed of her hens, some of which had overtaken his horse as he rode up. “Yeah,” she said, “they are really fast because they each have three legs.”

“Three legs? Wow. How did you get chickens with three legs?” he asked.

“I originally fed them chemicals and medicines, then used the ones with three legs for breeding,” she said. “I figured that a chook with three drumsticks would be worth more.”

The visitor agreed with her assessment and commended her enterprise.

“What do they taste like?” he asked.

“Blowed if I know,” she replied. “I can’t catch them.”

Doug Collins, Katherine, NT MILKING THE SYSTEM My father had to leave very early in the morning for work, so it was left to me and my brother Rob to finish the milking of 50 cows before school. Dear old Mum would poke her nose in just as we had completed placing the milk on the truck and were washing the machine. Every time she would say, “You never clean up or get the same amount of milk as your father”.

As lads, we felt pretty worthless hearing that every day. So Rob said, “Let’s try a new plan”.

Water from the River Murray had recently been connected to our farm, so very carefully we added a little extra water

each morning. Soon we had so much milk, and well above Dad’s best efforts. Mum was so amazed and lost for words.

At the end of the year Dad purchased a brand new 1958 F.C. Holden, and Mum bought a large, pink hat that women of that era wore on special occasions.

With a smile on his face, Rob turned to me and said, “Not bad for Murray water, eh Brent”.

Brenton Stevens, Wilmington, SA FLYING BY THE SEAT OF YOUR PANTS On a flight from Kununurra to Broome, when the plane reached its cruising altitude, the captain announced: “Ladies and gentlemen. This is your captain.

Welcome to flight 293. The weather ahead is looking good, so we should have a fairly smooth and easy flight into Broome. Sit back and relax, and OH MY GOD!” Silence followed, and panicked faces were seen throughout the cabin, with passengers gripping their armrests.

Some moments later, the captain came back on the intercom.

“Ladies and gentlemen, I’m sorry about that. While I was on the intercom a flight attendant accidentally spilt a cup of hot coffee on my lap. You should see the front of my trousers.”

“Well,” called out one passenger, “you should see the back of mine!”

Peter Sinclair, Nambucca Heads, NSW IDENTIFYING THE CAWS Out near Wheelabarrowback, 200 crows were found dead on the highway. National Parks and Wildlife officers originally thought it might be Russian bird flu, but they quickly determined that they were all killed by vehicle strike – 98 percent by trucks, and 2% by cars.

An ornithologist quickly worked out why. When crows eat roadkill, they have a lookout in a nearby tree to warn them of approaching traffic. But while all crows can say “car”, none can say “truck”.

Dave Hickson, Mornington, Vic

WIN AN ARB STORM BAG WORTH $99 Email your yarns, jokes and funny stories to publishing@rmwilliams.com.au or send them to Laugh-lines, R.M.Williams Publishing, PO Box 7015, Alexandria NSW 2015.

The winning entrant will receive this Oxford weave fabric and rubber storm bag, which has heat-sealed seams, a polyurethane coating and roll top to protect your gear in any weather. www.arb.com.au

www.arb.com.au

INNOVATION, NOT PERSPIRATION! INTRODUCING THE NEW GESSNER HEAVY-DUTY PASTURE RENOVATOR

HEAVY ON THE DETAIL

LIGHT ON THE LAND Once in a generation, a new tractor range sets a higher benchmark for competitors to aspire to. In the 270-300hp sector, that tractor range is now the Optum Continuously Variable Transmission - CVT. With a low weight, high power design blending compact dimensions and fuel-saving EfficientPower technologies, plus additional features including reactive steering, front axle suspension and a range of AFS precision farming solutions, Optum CVT offers the most comprehensive package in its class.