CAIRNS, AUSTRALIA: “I’m a Branch Bank Manager in Milanda,”
the woman sitting next to me on my flight to Cairns tells me. “I make $26 per hour. My daughter-in-law, who
is only 21 and who does data entry for the Council (a county) makes $32. My
brother, on the other hand, who works in a coalmine for six months out of the
year, makes $120 thousand a year. My other brother and his wife manage a cattle
station (cattle range) and make at best $58 thousand a year and you have no
idea how difficult that job can be.” “You
must tell me about it,” I say. “Well,
let’s see, my brother’s cattle station is over 100 square kilometers. It takes
two days to cross it on a quad bike. The driveway to their house is 18
kilometers. The nearest town is a 2 ½-hour drive. They make two big grocery
runs a year to Cairns to stock their room-size locker. Of course, that far out,
there’s no school for their daughter so they home school her. It’s a dangerous
life too. Their daughter cannot go outside without a dog to warn her of nearby
snakes. Brown snakes, black snakes, and red belly snakes are among the
deadliest snakes around and if that’s not enough a showback or a paralysis tic
can kill you as quickly. Last year one of their hired hands got bit by a
showback and was dead in thirty minutes. The work is hard too. They have 2,500
head of cattle and three times a year they muster (round-up) and cull them to
be branded and shipped off. A muster takes three to four weeks, during which my
brother will hire freelance cowboys to help out. He pays the cowboys $4,000 a
muster but they have to provide their own horses or quad bikes. Unfortunately, to
the consternation of animal rights advocates; he doesn’t take the cattle to the
stockyards but trucks them to ports to be shipped alive to Indonesia or the
Philippians. I agree with the animal rights advocates that that must be very
traumatic experience for the cattle as up until then they had only known life
on the station. But it’s not my brother’s decision, but that of the owner, who
gets $700 a head this way. It’s a big industry, probably the biggest in
Australia.
