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Name: Lucy Feltham
Gap Year Project: Australia Outback Ranch
I emerged from my Outback Ranch Training week with all the skills of a fully-fledged cowgirl and was looking forward to starting my work placement.
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My placement was at a cattle station called Flora Valley, which is in the Northern Territory, close to the WA border.
The property is 33,000 square kilometres and has 35,000 head of Brahman Cattle. I flew to Darwin and then got another plane to Kunnanurra where my boss's wife picked me up and drove me to the cattle station.
When I first arrived I was the only girl amongst 15 cowboys, which was a bit daunting! I had a room with a bed and a wooden shelf in it along with loads of lizards and goodness knows what else.
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My time at the station was the best of my life. I worked there for just over three months. I was given two horses for the duration of my work both of which I had to shoe myself after a lesson in shoeing! I could ride these horses whenever I liked - once drunken bareback riding at 3 in the morning! They were my mustering horses; the station had about 50 horses, maybe more, and they were mostly quarter horses (beautiful horses!).
I spent most days out mustering where we would take out around 5 horses and a couple of motor bikes and walk, on average, 1500 cattle for about 20 kms a time. Whilst walking the cattle we would sing and play games to entertain ourselves, occasionally having to gallop after a straying cow or jumping off to tie up a slow calf and carry them over our saddles. The rest of the time would be yard work which involved branding and castrating the calves and processing, injecting and trucking the cattle. We went out to camp on the other side of the property from the homestead for a couple of weeks during which we slept in swags laid out on the ground under the stars, that was an awesome experience.
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On our days off we would either go to the creek and have a swim with the 'freshies' and a BBQ or bring in some Mickey bulls and ride them in the yards with buck straps and chaps - proper rodeo style! I also went to a rodeo for a long weekend and met loads of cowboys. We danced, drank, sang, rode horses and took part in 'camp draughts' - riding competitions that involve chasing steers and heifers around a course.
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I also got to have a go at flying a chopper. We had choppers in to do the mustering of the bigger paddocks and I got to go flying with the pilots and they let me have a go! They all used to show off doing loop the loops and diving down to tip over dingoes with the landing bars of the chopper!
All in all my time at Flora was fantastic. It was VERY hard work, we worked from 5am to 8pm 6 or 7 days a week and the heat (40 degrees plus!) was hard to cope with at first. It was definitely worth it, I couldn't have asked for anything better from my experience. |
I cannot think of a better way I could have spent my gap year.
 Further information on the Outback Ranch Programme Australia
Return to Australasia Travel Stories
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