As I promised, here is a photo of some of our mustering team.
First is Virginia, more commonly known here as ‘France’. Yes, you guessed it; she’s a French girl traveling the world. She’s full of great energy and will help out wherever it is needed, including horse riding, working the cattle in the yards and even cooking up dinner some nights!
Then we have Sharita on her horse Goblin. Sharita is a Dutch girl who didn’t know much about cattle at all when she arrived in Australia, but she could ride a horse and could work as hard as anyone in the team. She is now a great help around the place, whether it’s mending a tyre, working with cattle or knocking in fence posts.
Next we have Moneeka. She was with us last year and is one of our best, she is holding Sweeney, who she broke in herself, Moneeka is an excellent stockperson with both her horses and cattle.
Katherine is sitting up on Banjo, she is a second year vet student who is working for us for two weeks on work experience to enable her to have first-hand experience with animals. She has learnt a huge amount in that time and likes it so much that she is going to spend the rest of her six week break helping out.
We spend a lot of time training the team to make sure they handle stock correctly. These girls care about the cattle’s welfare and work hard to keep up a high standard of stockmanship.
For some this job is the start of a stimulating career in the cattle industry, for others a once in a lifetime experience while they travel the world.
But the most important part about mustering for me is bringing in the income to support the livelihoods of my family and all the people I have written. As I said before, the mustering season is when we bring in our cattle to sell to the live export trade. Without the cattle trade to Indonesia and the Middle East there would simply be no money to be made.
Thanks for reading my blog and I’ll write again in a while.