On Monday we left Hervey Bay and headed up the coast to the town of 1770, where we picked up ten people before moving inland to Kroombit cattle station. This was to be our first experience of the Outback and its culture, which is so very different from the commercial coastal towns. After a fairly long drive, we reached the station in the late afternoon, where we would also stay the night.
Australia is the world's largest exporter of beef and its cattle stations are what makes that possible. To compensate for the often less than ideal land, these farms need to be enormous and the average size of a station is a million acres. Many stations just leave their stock to run wild for most of the year, mustering them into a holding area to sort them and move them off once a year. To round up all this cattle, they have to use helicopters and teams of station hands on the ground on motorbikes. Not all of the cattle can be rounded up every time, so you get some animals which won't see a human being or even a fence for months or years at a time.
At Kroombit, one of the activities we got to have a go at was goat mustering on horseback. I hadn't ever riden a horse before and mustering seemeed to be more worthwhile than a simple ride, so I signed up and had a go at it. About eight of us headed out into the paddocks, guided by one of the station hands, looking for goats. Once we found them, we had to ride our horses around them so that they were always in front of us and we could then move them down the hill towards their pen. It was a lot of fun and even though I seemed to have the laziest horse in the world, we got the job done just as the sun set.
Now that we had the goats secured, we were given the chance to take part in a goat rodeo, which involved three of us running around an enclosure to catch and brand it (although not with a hot iron, just a cold one). Goats aren't the most agile animals, so it was fairly easy to corner them but it was enjoyable nonetheless.
After dinner we were invited to try a bucking bronco, which is one of those mechanical games where you have to sit on the 'bull'for the longest amount of time before you're thrown off. Most of the time they start really slowly and build up to higher speeds, but as we found out this one seemed to be set to 'hard' so almost everyone was thrown off within about two seconds. It was entertaining nonetheless and a good end to an enjoyable day.
