Word: stationer
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...seemingly sleepy hamlet-nestled in mulga scrub on an uncharacteristic hill above the Nullarbor, close to the South Australian border-Eucla has a work ethic that could put many city folk to shame. As well as an industrious roadhouse, police station, meteorological office and quarantine center, the 50-resident village is a hub for shark fishing and starling shooting (the bird is considered a pest in Western Australia). "We're either sleeping or working," says local mechanic Rodney Fowler, 60, proudly wearing his eucla spirit of the desert windcheater...
...Burton is finding this stage of his life busier than he expected. "Supposedly ret-ired," he says, with mischief in his eyes. "I was happy catching crayfish and sinking piss." But now he's living at Springvale and running several properties for his son Jack, whose base is Yeeda Station near Derby, a 600-km drive west. "Bought this place three years ago for $15.2 million. Now it's worth $38 million. Maybe. We're here for the long haul...
...Springvale homestead, an hour's drive from Halls Creek, was the home of legendary cattleman and bush poet Tom Quilty. Until the 1886 gold rush, the station was one of this region's few inhabited places. Historian Geoffrey Blainey described men with gold lust traveling the final 1,000 km from Katherine. "The manager of Spring Vale reported that 'great numbers of men from Queensland have passed by, some of them very undesirable characters, who prefer picking their own beef and horse-flesh,'" he writes in The Rush That Never Ended. "They faked the brands on their stolen horses with...
...Next to the highway, a dozen station hands and visitors are helping to load a double-decker, three-carriage road train; 1,200 hooves are bound for nearby Alice Downs and then Wyndham for shipping. As ringers crack whips, three women are prodding mickeys (young bulls) through a series of pens; red dust and deep-voiced murmurs of "Get on" and "Go" fill the air. Burton, fag in hand, strides about. The mickeys are the most economical stock; there's little price premium in fattening them up. "The whole operation is about turning grass into T-bones," he says...
...Yiyili, excised from Louisa Downs Station, is considered to be a model remote community. Assorted ministers and politicians from all over the nation have come here to see good news in the making-and, if you look on the walls of the administrative offices, to be photographed. Plans are afoot to capture more of the tourist dollar, through art and guided tours of Gooniyandi country. "The demise of trad-itional communities is due to structures, such as the [defunct] Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Comm-ission, that have been imposed from afar by governments," says school principal Len Boyle...