Cattle Farm

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We found a new job on a cattle farm in Queensland, but this was 1400kms away from our most recent location. However, there wasn’t a lot of choice; there was no work in NSW because there was so much rainfall and we had nothing better to do so decided to take 3 days and drive through real inland Australia and try our hand at mustering.
The road trip was OK. Pretty boring and a lot of nothing to see. There were cases where we would drive for 2 hours and then get excited because there was a town listed on the road map. Arrived at the “town” and it was literally just a petrol pump!! As we head further inland, we are starting to really notice an increase in the number of flies. They are everywhere, and swarm all over you. Yuck yuck yuck!

The cattle farm was 100kms from the local town and 20kms down a red dirt track and we were staying in a separate house from the main farm which was nice. We started work, but there wasn’t a lot to do with cattle. The occasional drive around the 21,000acre property to check the cattle’s drinking water etc. but that was about it. Mainly, Michael and I were assigned the task of pulling down an old house so that new foundations and a new house could be built in place. The work was quite hard – pulling up 5,000 bricks one by one from the patio area, removing doors and windows individually etc. Not exactly the work we had hoped to be doing on a cattle farm. Especially since we had spent the past 4 months renovating a house – we were a bit fed up of housey work! We stuck the work out for just over a week but then we were offered another job back in NSW that was double the money. At this point, the rain started to come again and so we were unable to work. As it rained, the dirt road we had come in on was washed away, and even though we had decided to leave we were quite “stranded”.

We waited a few days, and when the road was eventually passable, we ploughed our way through mud and water to get out. Michael had to keep getting out of the car and wading through rivers etc to check the depth of them to ensure the car would make it. Luckily the car was fantastic and made it all the way through the dirt road and then proceeded to take us on our next 1700km journey!!

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