The most recent episode of\u00a0 7Mate’s\u00a0 ‘Big Australia’ TV series featured life on a northern Australian cattle station.\u00a0 Over the one hour programme, 3,000 head were mustered out of Green Holes paddock on the Acton Land & Cattle Company’s ‘Millungera’ Station, in Queensland’s Gulf Country.<\/p>\n
Brothers Graeme and Evan Acton are well known in the northern Australian cattle industry – keen campdrafters as well as long-term cattle station owners. The Acton family arrived in Australia from Ireland in the 1860s and Graeme and Evan started out in the Rockhampton area of Central Queensland.\u00a0 Acton Land & Cattle Company now own 7 cattle stations covering around 4 million acres, carrying 150-180,000 Santa Gertrudis and grey Brahman\/Charolais cross cattle.\u00a0 The Acton family bought Millungera in 1980.\u00a0 The million acre station with 23 artesian bores runs around 35,000 cattle.<\/p>\n
Unlike most similar programmes, ‘Big Australia’ features interviews with almost everyone on the station,\u00a0 and these interviews are a lot longer than an editor usually allows.\u00a0 So viewers get to hear a range of people speaking about station life and what their job involves, giving those unfamiliar with cattle station routines, climate and challenges a much better understanding than is usually the case.\u00a0 The people interviewed include Graeme Acton, Evan and his wife Kim, Philip Acton (manager), Tom Acton, pilots Kent Hansen & Ben Hutton, Reg (bore drain delver), Luke (headstockman), Elliot Batchelor (leading hand) Heidi (jillaroo), Neil (preg tester), Kevin (Nashy) Nash (grader driver\/plant operator), and Imran (a genial English Muslim backpacker working as fill-in station cook, cooking non-halal beef day in day out).<\/p>\n
Like all the other television programmes on Australian outback cattle stations, ‘Big Australia’ did include a few of the usual sorts of\u00a0 over-dramatisations but these were relatively minimal.\u00a0 ‘Big Australia’ did offer the clearest and most helpful\u00a0 information on ground and aerial cattle station mustering – including chopper mustering explanations – that I’ve ever seen on television.\u00a0 Very thought provoking and interesting.<\/p>\n
If you missed it, this episode can be seen on Channel 7’s Yahoo website. But be quick because apparently episodes are only viewable for 7 days after screening.\u00a0 Produced by Tim Boric for Southern Cross Austereo.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The most recent episode of\u00a0 7Mate’s\u00a0 ‘Big Australia’ TV series featured life on a northern Australian cattle station.\u00a0 Over the one hour programme, 3,000 head were mustered out of Green Holes paddock on the Acton Land & Cattle Company’s ‘Millungera’ Station, in Queensland’s Gulf Country. Brothers Graeme and Evan Acton are well known in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[3,5,8,10,11,15,165,217],"tags":[82,158,161,166,213,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2716"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4237,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2716\/revisions\/4237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2716"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2716"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2716"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}