Working on an Australian Outback Cattle Station

Working on an Australian outback cattle station isn’t easy.

In 2010 my friend Erik and I drove to Mt. Isa, Australia to watch the rodeo. We didn’t care about the rodeo really, but we thought it would be a good chance to meet a real cattle station manager and convince them to give us a job on the station. It worked, but it was going to hurt.

Nick and Ian - Outback Muster Team
Notice the black wrist guard. I’m pretty sure I broke my wrist out there… but we never got it x-rayed so no-one will ever know.

How to Find a Cattle Station Job

There are smarter ways to find cattle station work than what we did. Use Gumtree.com.au for classified job postings. If I were to do it over again, I would take advantage of the government offices and employment agencies. Australia has great social services so there are lots of opportunities to get support from government when seeking a position. I bet there is always a station job somewhere in Australia. Most Australians don’t want to do this kind of work. It’s filthy, hot, remote and low paying.

It is an amazing adventure.

My Outback Australian Cattle Saddle

Planning an Outback Adventure

The intelligent and planning types will use classifieds and government help. That’s not what we did.

Our plan involved getting a camper-van and driving deep into the outback. If I were to do it again, I would get a station wagon (Ford Falcon or a Holden Commodore Wagon) in one of the main cities. You can get a reliable one for about $3,000 AUD. Those vehicles are great to sleep in. That helps you avoid spending a fortune on accommodation while you look for work.

Oban Cattle Station - The Furthermost Water Trough

If you drive out there, you can always just stop at the local pub. Honestly, I think that might be a great way to find a job quickly. Pubs are the hubs for everyone in the community and if you’re willing to talk to strangers, chances are someone will point you in the right direction quickly.

How we Became Station Hands

We were in Brisbane when we learned that the Mt. Isa Rodeo was scheduled in a few days.  We drove out there to meet station owners. We weren’t certain that this was a good idea, but we just wanted to get out of town.

Driving from Brisbane to Mt. Isa is not an easy thing. Australia is bloody huge, mate. We drove really slow at night because kangaroos are everywhere and they like to jump into your headlights. Seriously, don’t even drive at night there. The roads are littered with dead kangaroos who are mowed down my unstoppable road-trains at night. The road-trains don’t slow down for you either. It’s a really, crazy drive.

Oban Station Outback Workshop

The rodeo wasn’t a great place to meet station owners. Many real station owners don’t even care about the rodeo and those that do attend are often surrounded with friends who they don’t see often. Not a lot of station managers had any interest in talking with us.

My friend Erik found a list of all the stations in the Mt. Isa area and just started cold calling all of them. That is what worked for us. Matt McDonald called us back, we met him at McDonald’s and followed him out to the station. It felt like he was driving 300 kilometers an hour. This guy was the real deal. A true badass cattle station manager.

Cattle station work is hard but mostly boring.

Australian Muster Horse in Cattle Yards

The Boring Cattle Station Jobs

Most of our days are boring. The most common days are full of salt lick runs, bore maintenance and/or caring for machinery/property.

Salt Lick Runs

A salt lick run is a job in which you load a ute (a really tough small truck for all my Americans) with twenty 60 lbs. white plastic bags of salt lick. Then you spend just about the whole day distributing these bags of salt to the cattle in all the separate paddocks.

Because the paddocks are so big, this is a job for 2 people working all day. You spend the whole day driving 120 km an hour on dirt roads. When you arrive to the next paddock, you have 2 jobs. One, Check the water bores to ensure they are working properly. Two, pull out a bag of lick, cut it in half with a big knife and pour all the salt into old tires so that the cattle can come and eat it.

You do this to about 10 paddocks and spend most of the day driving. This was one of my favorite jobs.

My Australian Muster Horse - NickBore Maintenance

Bore maintenance is another fun job because of the surprises we get when we come upon a bore that hasn’t seen a human soul for a few weeks.

Duties include things like:

  • Fueling the diesel generators up to pump water from the ground
  • Checking the oil in the diesel engines that pump water from ground when the water levels get low
  • Scraping the algae and cattle debris from the cattle’s water troughs
  • Devising mechanical solutions to anything that broke recently
  • Fishing dead kangaroos and pigs out of the big ponds that feed the bores

Yes, the last one is disgusting. I remember using a long pole to try to lift a dead kangaroos and pigs from the water. The animals jump in the water to drink and cool down, but can’t climb out.

They drown slowly, but as their bodies decompose, they float back up to the surface. We need to take them out, otherwise the cattle will get sick from drinking dead kangaroo/pig tea.

I distinctly remember pulling up a long dead kangaroo and watching it fall to pieces. Because it fell into so many pieces, there was no way we could fish them all out. The smell was overpowering. Perhaps the most disgusting thing I’ve ever done in my life.

Caring for Machinery/Property

We change a lot of oil, pour a lot of concrete, organize lots of building materials and straighten out a lot of fences.

Australian Cattle Station Saddle Shed

Fencing can be fun because you can make a lot of progress and spend the day outside working with a variety of cool tools. Barb wire strainers and post driving tools are a good way to mix it up.

We learned to weld and we learned how to fix things in ways we never thought of before. In general, if something is broken, you can just hit it with the ute and everything will sort it’s self out.

Much of cattle station work is about waiting. We spent a lot of days doing busy work just to keep paid and on station. Essentially, sometimes you just need to chill out and wait for something more important to come along. The real adventure is when the important stuff comes along.

The Exciting Cattle Station Jobs

The exciting jobs made the adventure one of most memorable of my life. Exciting jobs include meat runs, cattle yard work and most notably, big cattle musters.

Meat Runs

On a remote cattle station, we don’t buy beef from the supermarket.

How to Butcher a Cow in the Australian Outback

About once a month we go out with a rife, a clean tarp and a collection of knives and tools for sharpening them. One unlucky old steer becomes our protein for the next few months.

This was one of our favorite things to do. I think everyone that eats meat should be required to kill an animal and turn it into dinner. If these pictures gross you out and you’re not a vegetarian, you’re probably living in a fantasy world.

Butchery on Outback Cattle Station

Learning to cut up an animal and eat them is an important part of life. This was one of our favorite days on the cattle station. We killed the animal, cut it to useful pieces and brought those pieces back to process. At the end of the day we had all the meat we could eat for the next month.

Musters and Yard Work

That road train (pictured below) is full of cattle. We spent half the day loading the cattle in that double decker road-train. To get the cattle there, we had a team of 5 on horseback, 2 on dirt-bikes and a guy in a helicopter to bring all the cattle in from the outskirts of the paddocks.

Outback Australian Cattle Station Work - Road TrainOn the first day we brought them in from the huge paddocks to the small yards. Yards are steel cages which allow us to push individual cattle through series of smaller and smaller yard sections. At the end of the last yard is the ‘run’.

The ‘run’ is a narrow steel alley which only allows a single steer at a time to move down the lane. At the end of the lane is a ‘crush’.

Cattle Yards and a Road Train - Australian Cattle Station

The ‘crush’ is operated by a person who waits for the cattle to stick their head through. That person then slams it shut so we can catch the animal by the neck. We can weight them, inject them with hormones, neuter them or cut their horns off while they are stuck in the crush.

We loaded something like 7,000 cattle into road-trains like you see above. The road-trains would leave our station and drive the cattle to Darwin, Australia. From Darwin, the trailers are loaded onto a large ship and brought to places all over South East Asia for sale as live animals.

It’s a pretty bonkers operation.

Working on an Australian Outback Cattle Station – The End

Working on an Australian Outback Cattle StationAfter the musters, we are filthy. This gives you an idea for how gross it gets.

Here is a podcast from the past. Erik and I sit down to discuss the adventure:


Please feel free to leave a comment below with any questions or comments on this article. I would love to hear from you.

Erik Snare: How We Got Work on an Outback Cattle Station

If you’re planning on working on an Outback Cattle Station, you’re going to be in for something that very few people on this earth ever experience. Most Australians never traveler more than 100 kilometers away from the coast.

Think about that.

If that excites you, you’re going to enjoy this conversation.

Erik and I met on the Gold Coast in Australia and drove 2,000+ kilometers into the outback. Our goal was to attend the Mt. Isa Rodeo and meet some cattle people. We thought they would want to give us a job.

It was a silly plan. The Rodeo claimed to be the largest in the Southern Hemisphere. When we got there, we realized it was smaller than the Reno Rodeo.

We did end up finding a job. It took longer than expected, but the adventure was one that we both cherish to this day.

I hope you enjoy this episode, and I hope it helps you find that station hand position if that’s what you’re shooting for.

“Even if I get stranded out there & I die out there, it’d be a better life experience than what I’m doing right now.” – Erik Snare (Tweet It)

Outback Cattle Station Topics:

Have you ever dreamed of working on a Outback Cattle Station in Australia?

On this episode of the Love Affair Travel Podcast, I talk with my cattle station companion, Erik Snare about the process of selling all his things, leaving his job in the United States and moving deep into the outback to join me in the hunt for a Jackaroo position on a 500,000 acre cattle station.

While I was in South Africa, Erik and I spoke over Skype about how awesome it would be to work as station hands on an Outback Cattle Station. We came to the conclusion that this would be an excellent career path and decided to make it happen.

I met Erik at the Robina Train Station on the Gold Coast of Australia in my struggling 1984 Mitsubishis Express. We drove for five or six days to the Mt. Isa Rodeo in order to find some work in the most exciting way we could imagine.

Believe it or not, this hair-brained strategy worked out and we had an amazing time. At the end of it all, we came out with a hand full of cash and (for more valuably) a wealth of experiences.

In this Episode You will Learn:

  • To avoid the hamburgers and increasing waistline of a desk jockey job
  • How much money Erik had when moving to Australia
  • How long it took from landing in Australia to getting a job
  • That driving in Australia is actually really, REALLY a big deal.
  • What it’s like finding work at the Mt. Isa Rodeo
  • The best way to find employment on a cattle station in northern Queensland, Australia
  • What it was like working as station hands in the Outback
  • How much a Station Hand (Jackaroo) position pays in Australia
  • The intensity of doing dangerous cattle mustering work
  • How learning to canter is like kissing a woman for the first time

Music Credits:

Take Action:

Wandering Earl: Kidnappings, Entrepreneurship, the Taliban and 14 Years on the Road

Image Property of Wandering Earl

He likes to travel to the least visited places on earth.

His first trip was 14 years ago in South East Asia.

It was only supposed to last for 3 months.

Today he is still on the road going as strong as ever.

He’s a hero in the long term travel space.

Please welcome, Wandering Earl.

“The overwhelming number of people on this planet are nice, good people.” – Wandering Earl  (Tweet It)

Travel Topics:

  • How a short trip to South East Asia turned into a 14 year travel lifestyle
  • How blogging helped to focus Earl’s travel driven entrepreneurship
  • Why desperation is a useful tool for a travel lifestyle
  • The tools Earl used to build his first business on the road (hint: pens and paper)
  • How to start a language training business in any (non-english speaking) country in the world
  • Earl’s stories of traveling in Pakistan, Yemen and getting blitzed with the Taliban
  • How Earl was kidnapped in Bangladesh
  • We go on a tangent on how to learn to surf in Mexico or Australia
  • All about Romania and how it is the friendliest country in the world
  • Comparing the cost of living in Australia with that of Romania
  • The opportunity for a Working Holiday in Australia for those under 30
  • Advice for those that want to live a permanent travel lifestyle
  • Developing an open minded approach to making money while traveling
  • Independent traveling with the support of small groups
  • All the other Lovely Stuff

Lovely Links:

Website | Twitter | Facebook

Music Credit:

Take Action:

Now it’s your chance! Share this show on twitter.

Everything you need to know about the Australia Working Holiday Visa

Have you ever had a job on a cruise ship?

Do you find interesting ways to maintain your travel lifestyle?

Become a Jackaroo

Six Steps to finding Cattle Station Work in the Australian Outback

This is a quick guide to getting yourself into an amazing and dangerously adventurous position where you can make money and have a wild time.  The Australian Outback is big and scary so I really only recommend this path to really hardy people.  You need to have a lot of common sense and guts to make it as a jackaroo (or inexperienced Australian station hand).

  1. Get yourself a passport.
  2. Get a working holiday visa in Australia by filling out the online application. It costs about $200 USD. Mine took 3 working days to have it issued. The Australian Immigration office will send you a e-mail with a visa number on it. Then you have the green light to go work in Australia. It’s really easy for American citizens.
  3. Fly to Australia. Use kayak.com or studenttraveluniverse.com (I got a cheap student ticket after already having graduated 2 years ago.)
  4. Travel to a very isolated area in the outback. Mt. Isa, Queensland will be your quintessential wild Australian outback mining/cattle town. I recommend the Mt. Isa area if you really want an adventure.
  5. Go to the information center and ask for a list of cattle stations in the area.
    1. Cold call all of them. Either chat with the station manager or leave a message with your phone number and your name. If you don’t have the guts to do this, then I really don’t advise going on this mad adventure.
  6. Get a job and stick to it. Last at least 2 months, otherwise your a sissy.

What to expect:

  1. The Pay: I earned $550 a week as a level one station hand (jackaroo.) I saved 95% of it because there was nowhere to spend money in that super isolated place.
  2. The Time: 5-6 days a week. Expect to start as the sun goes up and finish about an hour before it goes down.
  3. The Work: Sometimes the day goes so fast you don’t even know what happened. For example: mustering days are adrenaline pumping days on horse back or motorbikes in the mad dust and heat. The work is wild and fun. Sometimes te days are slow and monotonous. You can end up mixing concrete and cleaning out water troughs all day.
  4. The Good Times:
    1. Rodeo: small scale rodeos in little towns. This is where you can get into some awesome stuff; bronc/bull riding, calf wrestling, tug-a-war, or just beer drinking
    2. Race days: great events where you can gamble on the horse races and check out all the pretty girls (or cowboys if your into that sort of thing) in their facy dresses and unique hats. Great times at the pubs after a day at the races.

Tips:

  1. Keep a positive attitude. Being sociable is really important out there.
  2. Always do your best. Australia is a huge country but a small community. Being an honest memorable bloke/shelia (Australian for guy/chick) will pay out in the long run.
  3. Be proactive: no one wants to have to tell you everything to do and when to do it. Find problems and fix them before you need to be asked.
  4. Work for a reputable person. In the outback there are some scumbags so don’t even start with them. I heard about a Spanish guy who worked 4 months at a station in Western Australia. The station owner then bought him a ticket to Brisbane. The spaniard never got paid. Don’t fall into a trap. If you find yourself in a trap, leave right away.
  5. Have fun. It’s one hell of a time in the outback. Enjoy it.