Notes on some time spent traveling: Burleigh

Burleigh Station, Richmond, Queensland

This is about 1000 head of cattle headed to the yards where some will be separated from their testicles and all will be branded. I was lucky enough while on Australia to get to ride in helicopters a couple of times. A lot of people pay money to ride around the Outback on horses and four wheelers. I got paid to do it.

While traveling with the convoy I met a group of cattlemen from Queensland that were traveling together.  I sat down with them for lunch one afternoon while on the road and they asked me what I was going to do after I left Canberra.  Again I didn’t have a good plan and made a joke about which one of them was going to give me a job on one of their places.  I wasn’t serious and hadn’t planned on working any more and didn’t think anything about it.  On the last day of the protest one of them told me there was a job for me with a guy named Allister and that I’d be wise to take it.  I spoke to Allister and he said I was welcome to ride back with him to Queensland and work on his station. Alright, I grabbed my bags and off I went, to someplace that I don’t know where it was with people that I didn’t really know who they were..  There were for of them in a Ford extended cab that was pulling a 20 foot gooseneck trailer.  Wasn’t much room in the truck for a  skinny, long-haired hitch hiker who talked funny.  So I spent most of the 36 hour drive from Canberra to central Queensland asleep in the gooseneck.  It was still pretty great.  I was headed to Burleigh Station, some 400,000 acres north of Richmond.  I signed on for a month.  They were mustering cattle every week so there was plenty of work.  I befriended a Norwegian carpenter who had arrived at the station two months earlier and who’s contract would be up the same time as mine.  I was a short month but epic none the less.  There were 20,000 head of cattle on this property and a good two hours from boundary to boundary.  We would spend the weeks castrating and branding calves, driving cattle on horseback and fixing windmills.  One morning we spent 4 hours cutting up horse meat to use for dingo bait.  You soak the meat in a bucket of 1080 poison, then Allister flies his plane around the property while someone drops the bait from an open window in the back of the plane.  That was something new.

Burleigh homestead. Again, notice the nothing in the distance.

 

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