Life on an Australian Cattle Station

Well we've been working on a cattle station for three and a half weeks now and I feel like we're starting to get the hang of it so I will now relate to you what our basic daily activities are. Before we begin there are some terms you will need to know so we don't lose each other. Australian cattle farmers are very set in the names that they have arbitrarily handed to many of the implements that you, I, and most of the rest of the world have common terms for. I will relate some of them to you now, note that not all of these terms will be used in the blog but are placed here to give you a general sense of confusion and belittlement.

Station- ranch

Shifter- adjustable wrench

Spanner- regular wrench
Stilson- pipe wrench

Toyota- land cruiser pickup or troop carrier model

Truck- large flatbed

Bike- dirt bike/motorcycle

Push Bike- bike

Smoko- break

Lucien- alfalfa hay

Killer- cow brought in and slaughtered for personal consumption

Grog- alcohol

Quad Bike- 4-wheeler

Fair Dinkum- usually said under the breath as an afterthought but actually means “REALLY?!?.”

Camp Draft- a drafting competition at which one camps and often drinks exorbitant amounts of grog

Shed- garage

Holiday- vacation

Bore- well hole drilled for the purpose of getting at water.

Bore Runner- someone who goes out to a particular bore and turns the water on or off.

Turkey's Nest- large storage area for water at a geographic high point. Covered by a tarp to decrease evaporation

View from the Gold Show Turkey's Nest. Note my office sitting in the foreground 

When we got here there were two British backpackers living working with us. We quickly found out that this was because we were replacing them and had to learn their duties as best we could in a week. You will see a large number of British backpackers working on farms such as this because they can get a second year added to their visa by working for three months in the agricultural sector of the Australian economy. There are other nationalities that can earn this “second year visa” as well but for Americans it is unattainable. We had decided to take this particular job for two reasons. The first was that, as Americans of the 90s, we had grown up watching Steve Irwin and Rescuers Down under as well as the Crocodile Dundee franchise. For our generation this paints life in the Outback in a very romanticized light and I personally wish to check this sentiment for accuracy. The second reason that we chose this job is that we were broke. On second thought the reasons for our being here should probably switched if you enjoy reading in order of necessity.

Our employers are Allan and Brooke. Allan usually takes me out on the farm with him for general maintenance purposes during the day and Ellen stays at the house and does domestic duties during the day.

Good, now that you've continued reading after your inevitable spell gripping your ribcage and rolling on the floor at the thought of Ellen cleaning and doing laundry all day, you can appreciate the fact that she doesn't seem to mind it too much that I'm off galavanting around the farm doing cool manly stuff most of the time.

We also hang out with the three kids, Grace, Luke, and Ben who are 10, 8, and 5 respectively. The kids are our major source of companionship during our leisure time which usually commences around 5 PM. Usually they get out their pushbikes and we ride around in front of the shed practicing our mountain biking fundamentals. They are all incredibly intelligent and active so we get along great. Often times they help us decipher the sea of Australian slang in which we are wading around and assist us in showing us the ways Allan and Brook like for things to get done.

Allan's parents also live in a separate house about 100 meters from the main farm house. Their names are Pete and Joan. We haven't seen much of them because they've been away on holiday since the day we got here. They seem pleasant enough and Allan's dad has a little Cessna airplane that lives over in the hanger. Craig Ferguson will be sitting there wondering what model but, sorry Craig, I'm feeling too lazy to get off my butt and check so you'll have to be content with single engine Cessna.

My parents will be happy with this because we have a very unique and wonderful way of dealing with emergency response over here. They are called the Royal Flying Doctor Service and they're the eye in the sky that watches over all the good little girls and boys as they go about on their horses, bikes, and heavy machinery. I'm not going to insult the intelligence of my entire family and pretend that working on a farm isn't a little dangerous at times. Since we have the Cessna, we also have a quarter-mile-long runway that begins about 30 meters from where I'm sitting. I certainly hope (but doubt) that neither Ellen nor I will ever have to use the RFDS but, the fact that they are there is nothing short of heroic. If you're looking to give a donation to a good NPO that really makes the deciding difference in the life or death of many rural Australians, the RFDS is a good one.

As cattle stations go we are on a small one. Being only a cozy 80,000 acres, Hillside doesn't rank highly in the size department for an Australian cattle station. Our neighbors to the East own about a million acres here and a couple million over in the Northern Territory. They also have a couple of choppers which balances our plane out nicely.

So now you're asking “where exactly is here?” Hillside is situated 30 km North of the town of Cloncurry on the Burke Developmental Road. Once you turn off the highway we are about 15 km back a dirt road. Our station is unique among cattle stations in that, like it's name suggests, we have hills. For me this is a bonus since I always feel a little uneasy in terrain where I can't see some promontory or another. I think this comes from being brought up in South West Virginia but who's counting?

Most of the land I've had a chance to see goes in a circle around a mountain to the west of the house. A lot of what I do is bore running. This gives me a chance to see a good chunk of the farm on any given day. Often this includes doing minor repairs to pump systems and keeping an eye on the hardware. During these forays into the Outback I often run into interesting animals. I rarely go out without spotting a Red Kangaroo. Every once in a while I'll see an emu and one time, on the way back from town, Ellen and I spotted a couple of dingos. Seeing all the wild life around here is definitely one of the perks of the job. Mostly what I see, however, are cows.

Most of the cows we have here are brahma cows. Every now and then you see a black or red angus but mostly it's the brahma. This lean towards a less desirable breed is because the brahma cows are the only ones who can stand up to the extreme heat usual to North West Queensland. In the summer it can often get into temperatures in excess of 40 degrees centigrade. Angus just can't stand up to that kind of heat. For that matter neither can humans, all of the vehicles around here are very well air conditioned. Even the oldest Toyota has a working A/C and when one of them brakes it is fixed very quickly. This seems to have slackened since it has started getting cold recently but Allan is still fairly emphatic that he wouldn't suffer an air conditioner to be broken for long.

The vehicles, for all you petrol heads out there, are numerous and enjoyably stereotypically Australian. The Toyota Land Cruiser in all it's variants are used religiously in this part of the world. Every now and then you come across some poor soul driving a Nissan Patrol but they are generally derided for their abysmal decision making skills. The Land Cruiser comes in two basic variants in this area, ute and troopie. The latter is called this because it is the long framed troop carrier model that is held in almost god-like regard by Australians and 4wd junkies from any other country. We have both variants of Toyota here. The ute has the old flat six and the troopie has the new V8. Having driven both I can honestly say that it is driving on a whole other level. Things that jeeps and broncos would have a hard time with the Toyota just eats for lunch. Most of the time you don't even need to use 4wd although it's a good idea since the person who destroys a road gets to fix it around here.

- Brief interjection from Ellen regarding the Troopie. Before coming to Australia and throughout this whole trip Dan has been talking about almost no other vehicle than the Troopie, and I just kept giving him the you are being an idiot look. Now that I have driven it a little around the station I understand his obsession with the vehicle and agree that it would be really awesome if we could find a way to get one and send it home.

How does one fix a road? We also posses a Caterpillar front-end loader. To go with it we have the fork lift, bucket and blade attachments. We use the loader for clearing roads, picking up stuff, getting herniated disks etc. It's a very useful tool but it's not the most comfortable of rides. Allan often jokes that it is a Perk-a-pillar since it actually has a Perkins engine in it which suggests that it was made in Britain. I haven't asked him how he divined this fact seeing as all the writing on the thing is in Japanese but we'll give him the benefit of the doubt. If something needs to be pushed over, lifted up, or forced back into place the loader is generally the tool for the job.

Dan unloading hay from a road train into the barn

If you don't need to carry a load but you need to get somewhere remote quickly, the bikes are the best choice. They'll go pretty much anywhere in first gear and if they get stuck you can pick them up and move them or jounce them around until they're un-stuck. Usually if Allan and his dad Pete are using their Toyotas, I will get stuck on one of these to do what I have to do for the day. When I go out on the bike I always take a radio, water, and my hat. It's not the most comfortable ride but they are quite fun.

Now that I've mentioned water, it seems appropriate that I should mention that everything we do here revolves around it. Ninety percent of the jobs I do involve moving water from one place to another. There are big tanks everywhere to store it after we bore it up from the ground and troughs that distribute it to the cattle. Often times our job involves fixing a tank or filling a Turkey's Nest. If we don't keep a constant eye on it cattle will die. A person can really see how a bunch of Australian films rely so heavily on water as a theme. It is the most important thing out here. I suppose it is at home too but we've grown so accustomed to having plenty of it that we forget that some people don't have enough. If you forget to drink enough during the day you'll find out about it the next day. You know how when you were in college you got that feeling that you might have drank a bit too much vodka at that party last night? It's like that, no bueno.

During one of our weekends we went to a camp draft with the family. This is basically just a drafting competition at which one camps. To get there we drove north for about two hours and stopped along the side of the road at a little crossroads called Burke and Wills. The only thing at Burke and Wills is a road house and this little site for the annual camp draft. Station owners had turned up from all over and were competing on horseback.

For those of you who don't know, drafting is a competition in which a person on a horse tries to drive cattle around course. It is very difficult and highly dependant on the cow that they cut out from the herd in the beginning of their run.

We were just spectators at this event but I wanted to mention it because during the camp draft something hilarious and quintessentially Australian happened. After the adult competition but before the kids came out to have a go there was a thing called a lolly drop. Now I can see this happening from the inside of an arena where some guy with candy could get at a catwalk properly distribute it to the kids but the Australians had another trick up their sleeve. All the kids ran out into the riding ring as a small helicopter swooped in and started dropping candy on them! The guy couldn't have been 50 feet off the deck in one of the small helicopters that is typically used for mustering over here. Eventually he dropped all his bags of lollys and swooped away as startlingly as he had showed up. I believe that this properly represents that the true Outback spirit is alive and well. If a man in a helicopter can't hover at a completely unsafe distance above a bunch of kids for the purpose of throwing candy at them, things are in a sad way indeed.

Lolly Drop at the Burke and Wills Crossroad Camp Draft

On the whole though, Ellen and I are doing very well out here. I've been riding my mountain bike a lot on the dirt roads around the station and Ellen has been doing a lot of running. The sunsets are pretty and the sunrises are even better. There are two tiny dogs named Bruce and Charlie who are very good natured and love to go on runs with us. We see kangaroos every day and we are in better shape since we've more or less cut out beer due to it's debilitating price. All in all we're quite happy.

Now if you'll excuse me, there is an eight-year-old that is asking very politely if he can ride my bike so I have to go put the seat down for him.

Keep on Truckin Friends! But please... keep it to a maximum of four trailers, otherwise you'll look like an idiot trying to navigate around town.  

The Top End

Well I know it's been a little while since I've written. A lot has happened since Alice Springs so I will try to outline how we got to where we are now. Exactly where we are now is Hillside Station just North of Cloncurry in Northwest Queensland. How we came to be here is a bit of a tale so I'll just start from the beginning.

Ellen and I came across a marker on the highway shortly after leaving Alice Springs. As we pulled over we noticed the flies were especially terrible in this area. We jumped out of the car just long enough to realize that we had crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. We had now gone Troppo. According to the only part of the sign I read, before being driven temporarily insane by the flies, going Troppo means that you've gone crazy due to being in the Tropics. It may not have actually been the tropics that did it to me but I was certainly crazy from the flies. We jumped in the car and continued towards Darwin.

We continued up the Stewart Highway for what seemed like an eternity when I realized that there were trees around us. This wasn't the barren desert we had been in for days. I must have zoned out in the passenger seat for an indeterminate amount of time because when I looked up, low and behold there were clouds as well! Imagine my surprise at that. Here we were driving across the interior of Australia and all of a sudden there were clouds. It was the biggest thing to happen in days.

About an hour after we got into the cloud zone we came across a most welcome historic landmark. I saw the sign and let out a shriek of delight. We had stumbled across the Daly Waters Pub. Well, actually, we had stumbled across the community of Daly Waters but the sole existence of this wayward municipality seems to be to house this most historic pub. The Stewart tree was there as well but since they didn't serve beer we were not nearly as interested. I told Ellen that I was going to have a pint no matter what the cost so we turned off the road and drove the kilometer or so to get there.

Walking through the door we were greeted by a more or less run of the mill outback pub. The beer was over priced and the conversation was dominated by grey nomads in the usual pissing contest, this being how far they had driven or, my personal favorite, the remote road competition. One of them commented that we took the “easy way” to get there by coming via Adelaide instead of Perth. I met this annoying bit of tom foolery the same way I always do, with a smile and another sip of beer. Still, it was nice to have a cold beverage given that we had been drinking only hot water for days. After a brief respite we were back on the road. *

Later that day we came across something truly breath taking. Some French people had told us a few days before that there was a swimming hole at Bitter Springs near Mataranka. They had also said that it was truly exceptional. As we cruised through I saw the sign. It was about five in the evening and I had been sweating all day so I decided to stop the car and have a dip. You know how when you were a kid you always yearned for a hotel that had those little lazy rivers with inner tubes along with the pool? This was like that but for real. The water was crystal clear and very cool as it had just come up out of a spring. The national park service had installed steps that led down into the water to a depth of about chest height. The water was over my head around the middle of the stream. This realization took some trial and error to figure out because the water was clear enough that I couldn't judge depth. There was quite a flow to the which took me through a dense fern forest. At the other end there was an identical set of steps to get out. It was most certainly the most beautiful swimming hole I've ever encountered. Ellen didn't choose to get in because somehow she was cold and didn't feel like swimming but she agreed that it was lovely. If you're ever in the Mataranka area you must certainly visit Bitter Springs, to pass it would be folly.

Stopping that night I realized that the clouds I had been seeing were a harbinger of something truly horrible. The humidity in Alice Springs when we had left two mornings before had been 23%. Here, just south of Katherine, it was a balmy 75% and stopping meant that we would loose the cooling breeze from the car. As I cooked dinner I realized that the water that had so recently been in the clouds was now sticking to my skin. I think I acted as a personal condenser for at least five rather large cumulonimbus clouds.

I consider myself a fairly tough individual (Eric Stanley will, at this point, be chuckling to himself and thinking of about half a million different bits of repartee that he would unleash on me were I in his company upon uttering such an obviously ludicrous remark) but I draw the line at night time humidity. I can't stand it. If it must be hot and miserable during the day then it stands to reason that the night time should be a respite. The only choice was to get into the wine and wait it out to go to bed. We had a lovely conversation with a biker from Melbourne who was riding the Stewart Highway. At that point I realized that I didn't have a leg to stand on, ceased complaining and crawled contently into my camper.

The next day we arrived in Darwin. I will say this up front, I didn't like it. It is my belief that every city has a vibe. Melbourne, VIC feels trendy and upbeat, almost excited. New Orleans, LA feels like the sound coming out of the trumpet in your favorite jazz song. Darwin, NT feels like it wants to sink it's fangs in you and wring you dry leaving you a lifeless heap on the side of the street. It should be noted that I get a similar feeling when in Atlanta GA, but I digress. The hostels there were like giant barracks and the ones that weren't felt oppressed and big brotherish. The first hostel we stayed at queued the soundtrack to Grease at 10 PM right as we were trying to nod off. The second told us that there were cameras EVERYWHERE and that we shouldn't use the kitchen for fear of dirtying dishes. We stayed there a few days and saw the sights trying to find the good part but I was just not impressed.

All this being said, the museum and Charles Darwin Park are very fine indeed. Since Bryson touches on the museum I will briefly give an account of the park. As we turned off Tiger Brennan Road to get into Charles Darwin Park I began to think that we'd come across something hideous. From the road it looks very mundane. As we wound our way through the tropical forest we started to come across huge earthen mounds. These turned out to be bunkers left over from the Second World War. Someone had turned one of these into a display of the story of Darwin's role in the conflict. Darwin was at the frontier in Australia in that time period and was, therefore, very poorly supplied in the article of weapons when the war broke out. The city was rather poorly defended and all the munitions for the fleet operating in the area were kept on a ship in the harbor. The bunkers were built to store explosives when it was realized that storing them where they could be torpedoed or easily bombed was dumb.

The old bunker was lined with anecdotal accounts of people's experiences during the war along with the typical government messages put out for civil defense that we are all so familiar with. My personal favorite was a newspaper story put up with the display called “The Naked Gun.” This told the story of a soldier who was showering at the time of the first air raid on Darwin. Grabbing his towel he ran to his gun emplacement where his loader was waiting for him. Upon realizing that he couldn't train his gun high enough for an areal attack, he stood up and rested his gun on the shoulder of his loader. The brave defender fired on the Japanese bombers while being strafed and harassed by enemy fighters. In the end he managed to shoot down a Val dive bomber (this according to the picture). It was only after the battle that he realized he had lost his towel. Only in Australia folks.

Still it wasn't enough that there were cool anecdotes about WWII and museums with giant stuffed crocodiles. I only met one friendly local while I was there and he was from England. I'm sorry if I have offended any territorians but thems the breaks.

So that's how we decided to leave Darwin. Too many meat head backpackers and not enough culture to justify staying. We set out back down the Stewart Highway not wanting to end up trapped for months there trying to earn some money. By this point our funds from Lake Pedder were running low so finding work somewhere was imperative. We decided that the East Coast was the place where all the people were and therefore all the jobs were.

At this point I will make it quite clear that, since we had left Hobart, our car had been making a strange noise from the passenger side front wheel. At the time I was convinced that it was from the drivers side but, of course, I was incorrect in my diagnosis. We wrote it off to a bushing and kept going. While crossing the Barkley Tablelands we had to do some less than smooth driving to avoid road trains. Upon our arrival at the Barkley Homestead we realized that the noise had become much louder and more pronounced. I checked the drivers side wheel thinking that it was the source of the noise but seeing nothing wrong we decided to press on towards Mt. Isa in Queensland. This was another 500 kilometers but the car wasn't acting especially funny so we figured that we could nurse it there and figure it out.

Stopping at a servo in Mt. Isa I pulled the wheel off and a significant portion of the axel came with it. For all this time we had been driving a ticking time bomb! We didn't know it at the time but the wheel was a hairs breadth from coming off. Goodbye to the last bit of money from Lake Pedder.

Still, it wasn't all bad. We found a backpackers and hunkered down to spend some time in The Isa. Mt. Isa is a mining town that is on the wrong end of the mining boom. Jobs are going and houses are impossible to sell. Here's a tip for those of you working in the mining industry, rent don't buy, these things never last. Still we were astonished to find that the people on this side of the boarder were extremely friendly. In the Northern Territory it seems like everyone is just putting up with you hoping you will go away shortly. In Mt. Isa we felt like we were genuinely welcome. We figured that since we were out of money we would stop and try to find jobs there.

For the next couple of days we wandered around looking for some hospitality or retail work generally to no avail while our car was being repaired. The day we got the car back we scored some jobs delivering phone books to the good people of Mt. Isa. This was quite a stroke of luck given we were now borrowing from our US funds. It was also an interesting look into the lifestyle of a paperboy. I never realized how many people own evil dogs. The number of dogs who want to rip you limb from limb as you deliver useful information to the homes of the working class is simply staggering.

A couple of mornings into our new employment I just looked at Gumtree (Australian for craigslist) on a whim. Not five minutes before, someone had posted a job over in Cloncurry, about 150 km to the west, for a couple out on a cattle station. This was a the quintessential Australian opportunity. Working with graziers on an outback cattle farm. This coupled with the fact that the station wasn't too far from Cloncurry was a perfect match. We agreed to deliver the Cloncurry phone books as well in exchange for a night in a hotel added on to our pay and headed over that way.

After delivering the Cloncurry phonebooks we rolled out to our new home on Hillside Station. The proprietors of the hostel in Mt. Isa had told us that the people who owned Hillside were lovely which bolstered our confidence they having been helicopter musterers who had worked at Hillside some years before.

Now we're here, there is an airplane sitting in the hanger across the driveway and a couple of Landcruisers that we can take out on the station to complete our business. On Monday we are taking a loader and some diesel fuel out to a remote part of the 80,000 acre property to help some geologists who are surveying the area. I'll write another blog post when I figure out some more of our duties on the station and give a general account of station life in the next blog but for now I'm gonna pass out. Tomorrow is Ellen's birthday so I've got to get my rest for partying (and by that I mean butchering a cow).

Keep On Truckin!

*we only had a very small amount of beer due to the crippling price and waited quite a long time before driving.

P.S. Sorry for the lack of pictures. Our internet is very limited and I can't afford to put any up at the moment. I will try to get some in next time we're in town.