The television series ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has just started screening on Thursday nights at 8pm to 8.30pm on Channel 10. The first episode ran for 60 minutes and the other 15 episodes are 30 minutes long. This ‘reality’ documentary features Milton Jones and his second wife Cristina, their four year old son ‘young Milton’ and Milton’s older son and daughter from his first marriage, who are away at boarding school in Brisbane, Beau and Alex. Others feature regularly, such as roadtrain driver Hamish Mundel, younger brother of Cristina. Hamish’s wife Kristie also works on the stations as a governess, and Raine Pugh is a jillaroo on Coolibah. Station cook Trevor Easton and trainee chopper mustering pilot Jeff O’Connor also appear in some episodes. The Joneses live on Coolibah station, situated on the Victoria River roughly half way between Katherine (NT) and Kununurra (WA). (Regarding the property name – ‘coolibah’ is a very hard-wooded inland eucalypt that is very tough, but it favours places were it can sink it’s roots into water, eg along gullies and creek banks. It’s mentioned in Waltzing Matilda. Another common spelling is ‘coolabah’, which is the usual southern Australian pronunciation, while ‘coolibah’ is the usual northern pronunciation.)
The ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ TV series covers from the end of the wet season into the start of the dry season, when mustering takes place. Apparently the film crew lived on the station for 6 months (installing their own phone lines and data cabling etc), so they must have only just completed filming recently. It must have been filmed this year, because during 2009 television show producers WTFN were still researching possible subjects and locations – including picking my brain regarding possible pilot and cattle station subjects, and purchasing copies of my books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’. Only a pilot programme had been made by WTFN by December 2009. Thankfully the initial American-sounding title of ‘Sky Cowboys’ was dropped in favour of the very clever ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ (given the opportunity, no doubt Milton would have had a pithy comment on the ‘Sky Cowboys’ title, especially if he’s familiar with the derogatory implication of calling an operator a ‘cowboy’ in Australian cities.)
Of course the Top End scenery is stunning (the livistona palm-tree decorated red escarpments in the Victoria River Region of the NT are truly spectacular) and the cinematography is excellent as is the high definition quality; although I don’t like the over-saturated artificial colouring of digital photography. Instead of the natural greens, reds and blues of the Australian bush, with subtle graduations in colour, we have garish primary colours akin to a bottom-dollar children’s picture book. However there’s a couple of particularly good points about the show, if the first episodes are anything to go by. It’s a reality TV show at its best – while it is unusually tightly edited (a bit more detail regarding what is going on and why, and a longer look at each scene, would actually be more enjoyable – hopefully it will relax a bit as it progresses), it shows what the cattle station residents are really doing on a daily basis – from exciting action to relatively mundane – there’s no dreamt-up drama or repetition of stuff you’ve seen before. These are bushies not actors, so what you see is basically what you get – if the cameraman didn’t get it on film in the first take, then it’s gone – because station residents aren’t the type of people to do re-enactments. In any case, if they did, they would look so uncomfortable the footage would not be usable anyway.
Most ‘reality’ television shows are excrutiating viewing because the average 30 minute programme dedicates the first ten minutes to repeats of stuff from the previous episode and the last ten minutes tells you what you’ll see next time, with just a third of the show being watchable, in the middle. The average ‘reality’ TV show must be made for viewers so dim they require incessant repetition because their memories have more holes than sieves. This makes ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ a breath of fresh air.
It’d be nice to think the average Australian would learn something from a show like ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ but unfortunately perhaps not, if the reviews on the internet are anything to go by. For example one TV show reviewer writes that Milton Jones and Cristina met at a campdraft, ‘an outback race meeting’. Campdrafting events feature stockhorses – usually ridden by station people – cutting out a weaner and lapping it around markers in a particular order and horse racing is professional jockeys racing thoroughbreds around a turfed or graded track. Both sports involve horses but that’s where the similarity ends. Sometimes campdrafts and race meetings are run consecutively over a weekend to encourage people to make the effort to travel the long distances required to attend, but they’re entirely different sports. It’s a careless stuff-up akin to calling soccer ‘AFL’ because they both involve a football, or calling diving ‘swimming’, because they both involve people in water.
More than one reviewer said the Joneses use ‘a fleet of 42 choppers to muster cattle’ which is probably the most preposterous of statements; cattle stations employing a contract chopper musterer will try to get by with just one, or two at the most, because they cost several hundred dollars per hour to hire. Nobody works up to owning their own helicopters by treating them like cars. Anyone who owns their own mustering choppers is more likely to use two or perhaps three for especially large paddocks or difficult country to muster, because they’re not paying a middleman, but any more choppers than three and they’re likely to be tearing up cash (operating at a loss). Mustering choppers are not just expensive to buy and insure they’re very expensive to maintain. And more mustering choppers than three would rarely result in a more efficient muster, anyway; in fact it could be the reverse. Milton has a commercial aerial mustering business that’s why his company NAH owns so many helicopters – to imply his several dozen choppers are all for mustering the Joneses own cattle station, Coolibah, is ludicrous. Idiot statements like ‘massed helicopters herding cattle over plains’ are common in the online TV show reviews. (In Australia it’s ‘mustering’, not ‘herding’; and ‘massed helicopters’ gives entirely the wrong impression – two or even three choppers might work relatively closely together when yarding up a big mob if trouble is expected [or there is a film crew on hand]; but the rest of the time the pilots are flying a large distance from one another – virtually out of sight.)
All the TV show reviewers I came across call Milton Jones a ‘farmer’ and quite a few refer to the station as a ‘farm’, which is akin to calling a roadtrain a ‘ute’. (Farms grow crops, cattle and sheep stations run livestock and are generally much larger, certainly in the northern inland.) All the other rural terminology and common expressions used naturally in ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ seems to have completely passed the reviewers by also. (Apart from some TV show reviewers who made a big deal of the commonly used ‘eh’, or ‘ay’, as one spelled it; completely ignoring the fact that urban speech is littered by popular/fashionable expressions, for example ‘like’ – it’s simply that they’re not familiar with the typical speech of a northern cattle station resident.)
Another TV reviewer said the Jones family ‘has no neighbours and Darwin is more than 1,000km away’ subtly implying that the only other people living in the Top End of the Territory are Darwin residents. Although a fair slab of Coolibah Station boundary is shared with the Gregory National Park and Bradshaw Station, bought from Ian McBean by the Australian Army for a bombing range in 1996, of course the Joneses have neighbours; such as on AACo-owned Delamere Station and Heytesbury Pastoral owned Victoria River Downs. Coolibah is not on an island. The neighbours are low in number and a bit of a drive away but this is naturally entirely usual for stations measuring 10,000 square kilometres or more – of which there are quite a few, in northern Australia. There are also quite a few stations that are cut off by uncrossable creeks and rivers, or boggy roads, for weeks or months over the wet season – especially on Cape York Peninsula and the northern Kimberley region.
Unfortunately the average TV show reviewer is not even as deep as an October puddle; they’re just looking at the scenery in ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ and commenting on the antics of Coolibah’s Milton junior. There was also criticism of their speech – what suburban film critics view as ‘ockerness’ – and criticism of the narrator James Blundell, well known country music singer (with the perfect deep voice for narrating an outback documentary). Hopefully the general Australian population are more thoughtful, observant and objective than the average Australian TV show reviewer and they’ll be thinking about what it would really be like to live and work on a cattle station, about the work that is done and how difficult the work can be, how different the language used is, etc. And how you don’t get to run a multi-million dollar business without ability. Viewers will be noticing food-for-thought details that are very typical aspects of cattle station life – such as the headaches involved in obtaining small but vital machinery parts in remote areas, the longer term planning and organisation required to run businesses efficiently a long way from the nearest town, the vagaries of station cooks and staff management challenges (far more difficult out of town, where everyone is cooped up together) and management challenges caused by impassable roads. All good points made in the first episode of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’. If early comments on online forums are anything to go by, the general public are far more astute and discerning than the reviewers.
Admittedly the sensationalist-style publicity material pumped out by Channel Ten’s marketing department regarding ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ doesn’t help. Describing it as a ‘hard and lonely life’ and Milton and Cristina Jones as an ‘ordinary’ family ‘living extraordinary lives’ is so inaccurate that at first I presumed no-one would swallow such a ridiculous statement whole. But it has been repeated verbatim in online media so much, it needs explaining. It’s actually the reverse of an ordinary family living extraordinary lives. For several reasons Milton Jones isn’t your average bloke so they are not your average ‘outback’ family, and the life and work on Coolibah station is actually very typical of big northern Australian cattle stations, rather than unusual. (Although crocodile nest raiding isn’t something everyone does for a living, it’s not unique in the top end of the NT, where saltwater crocodiles are proliferating and farming increasing.) The average Australian would have no idea what happens on a typical Australian cattle station, unless they’ve watched Troy Dann’s television series and so at least seen some of the work before; so it’s not reasonable to expect the average viewer to understand what is typical on a cattle station and what is not. For example, when Milton bought Coolibah Station in 1988 he apparently paid cash for it. That’s not usual. And few cattlemen would ever agree to having a TV film crew live on their station and follow them around for six months – most are flat out tolerating a still camera for a few days. So these Joneses are not an average family in these respects, except Milton is fairly typical of a self-made man & Territory resident – ‘it’s my way or the highway’ and what you see is what you get. The TV series production company approached a lot of northern property owners, managers, chopper pilots and mustering companies over more than twelve months, looking for a chopper pilot to film.
Milton Jones is now the sole owner of North Australian Helicopters (NAH), a helicopter business that specialises in aerial mustering (with clients such as Australia’s largest pastoral company, AACo, and one of the largest privately owned pastoral companies, Stanbroke), government work (National Parks and environmental services etc) and tourism flights over Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge and Kakadu (from Jabiru airport). NAH employs several dozen people and runs a few dozen helicopters (42 according to the television show promos), most of which are Robinson R22s, the most commonly used helicopter for aerial mustering. NAH has a hangar at the Mt Isa airport (purchased along with 5 helicopters when NAH bought the AACo’s helicopter division, a few years ago) and a large building on the western edge of Katherine, on the road to Kununurra.
‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ is in a very similar mould to Troy Dann’s 1990’s ‘Outback Adventures’, also set in the Northern Territory. However the Territory isn’t the only place that has big cattle stations – the largest in the world is in fact located in northern South Australia, and others are located in Western Australia, Queensland, and western New South Wales. There was one Troy Dann ‘Outback Adventures’ episode featuring a visit to Coolibah Station, and another episode featuring Troy going bullcatching with Milton Jones. When Milton left school in the early 1980’s he started work as a bullcatcher, and his first wife’s brother is well-known bullcatcher Kurt Hammar (owner of Hammaco Pty Ltd). Coolibah is surrounded by the ideal habitat for cleanskins (unbranded cattle).
Charles Chauvel’s Australian classic ‘Jedda’ was filmed on Coolibah Station in 1955, and in 2005 Baz Luhrmann had considered it for the site of ‘Faraway Downs’ in his ‘Australia’ film (but ended up further west, on CPC-owned Carlton Hill Station, north of Kununurra, W.A.).
It will be interesting to see if the ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ television series inspires another generation of kids to dream about heading bush, just as McLeods Daughters and Troy Dann’s Outback Adventures did.
The most astute comment in the first episode came from the young chopper pilot Jeff O’Connor, who said when he’d just arrived on Coolibah station from Maroochydore (on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast), that it was ‘like another world’. That comment really sums it up – the gulf between remote inland cattle stations and coastal, urban Australia should not be underestimated. Unfortunately this was completely lost on the TV show reviewers – here’s hoping that the public are smarter and look a bit deeper.
If you are interested in seeing hundreds of authentic photos taken on dozens of Australia’s largest and most famous cattle stations, spread between Queensland’s remote Cape York Peninsula and arid Channel Country, to the historic properties of the Northern Territory and Western Australia’s beautiful East and West Kimberley regions; refer to the coffee-table style books ‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’. The landscapes of the stations featured range from the red sandhills of central Australia, to coastal marine plains with miles of deserted beaches, dramatic limestone cliffs and vast open ‘downs’ country. In 2009 these books were purchased and used as references and inspiration by ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ television series production company, WTFN. These quality hardback books are ideal presents to give to anyone interested in the Australian outback, or who is dreaming of working on a cattle station – or anyone who has memories of working in the bush. They’ve been given as gifts to people all around the world – to ageing parents who grew up on farms, overseas-residing siblings and young kids dreaming of heading bush; to European Ambassadors and some of the largest rural landowners in the U.S. and people in every other walk of life. To read comments by purchasers all around Australia and overseas, from cattle station owners to capital city residents, refer to Testimonials.
Tags: Living in the country and remote areas, Image of the bush, Mustering Choppers, Coolibah Station, Keeping up with the Joneses, Australian outback TV and film