The sun doesn’t rise at Barkly Downs so much as seep - slowly and sideways - into a sky that’s already too big for its boots. At Number Six Yards, light hasn’t yet spilled over the horizon, but the day has started without it.
Weaners murmur in the half-dark, as silhouetted station hands march from vehicle to animal and back again. “I haven’t ridden much before,” says 23-year-old Alice from New Zealand, as she tightens the girth on a stock horse. It’s her second week on the job and she’s full of questions, but there’s no time to linger.
The station spans 942,500 hectares near Mount Isa in northwest Queensland, wedged against the Northern Territory border. From above, it looks like a straw-coloured sea - flat and featureless. That’s the nature of downs country: too harsh for trees, but ideal for native grasses like Mitchell and Flinders, which cattle thrive on. It’s a landscape that asks for little but gives just enough.
On the ground, it feels like nothingness to the shimmering horizon, until you realise those vast paddocks are the engine room of the world’s largest family-owned vertically integrated beef empire, Australian Country Choice (ACC).
Around 50,000 hardy, high-performing cows are joined with Ultrablack bulls to produce calves that are trucked south to ACC’s own backgrounding properties and feedlots, then processed at its plant in Brisbane.
Somewhere in Barkly’s Turpentine paddock, manager Rob McAuliffe drifts through a sandy road, gunning it to avoid getting dry-bogged. It’s a rare stretch of red dotted with ghost gums and spinifex, and cattle are out there amongst it - somewhere. “I try to allow three days every week to get around the whole place,” he says, just as his two-way crackles to life.
“A spot tracker’s been powered on around Whistler’s paddock,” Rob’s wife
Megan broadcasts from the homestead office, and curiosity pings back and forth across the radio until they track down the culprit. It’s Toby, a bore-runner working alone, who flicked on his emergency alarm as a precaution, exactly as he’s supposed to. Everyone stands down.
Running a station this size is like playing a high-stakes game of chess. From feed management and cattle movements, to infrastructure upgrades and data collection - all must all align several moves ahead. But for Rob, the most meaningful part is guiding the young crew that arrives each season.
“I just listen to what they want,” he says, “and help them discover what they’re good at, then build on that.” Many are fresh out of high school and from places with more cafes than cattle. Their initiation is rarely without friction. “There’s quite a lot of looking in a mirror and finding some home truths about themselves, but once they get it, it’s about maintaining momentum.”
They’re drawn by something they can’t always articulate. For some, it’s adventure or the promise of a start in agriculture; for others, it’s a change of scenery. But all of them go home changed, if they go home at all.
“I just loved being here too much,” says 20-year-old Sam from Bondi who started a medical degree, but deferred for a semester to detour via Barkly. “The work was too good, the people were too good, I couldn’t leave.” That was three years ago, and now he runs a stock camp.
There are 26 staff, a number that swells and contracts throughout the year as contractors drift in and out - including station hands, bore runners, machine operators, diesel fitters, and chopper pilots. Like bees to a hive, they return to the homestead complex each evening where the social club hums despite its strict four-drink limit.
In the camp kitchen, cook Mikaela drops a kilo of butter into an oversized glass mixing bowl. “I’m making garlic scrolls, and cheese and bacon focaccia,” she says, pointing to mounds of dough bigger than saddles - smoko for the crew for the next two days.
“They eat a lot,” she says deadpan, “but they’ve got metabolisms we’d all be jealous of.” A former restaurant owner in Sydney, she doesn’t flinch at making roast beef with all the trimmings for 30, or a hundred perfect pastries from supplies that arrive once a fortnight.
It’s a pressure-cooked existence that’s like living on a submarine, so no one stays forever. But ACC considers it a win to keep good workers in the fold somewhere down the supply chain, even at the head office in Brisbane. “It’s a job that’s genuinely important for the planet,” says CEO Anthony Lee. “We’re feeding people, and no matter what people say about agriculture - without it, there is no life.”
Back at Number Six Yards, gates swing open and young cattle spill out. Sam and his crew tail them down a laneway and into the paddock at a gentle pace. There are no whoops or wails, just the thunder of a thousand hooves. Quiet handling is part of the culture here - teaching cattle and people to move with calm confidence. It’s a steadying process, and one that everyone is learning.
