{"id":892,"date":"2010-10-15T15:17:34","date_gmt":"2010-10-15T05:17:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/?p=892"},"modified":"2011-12-14T16:39:45","modified_gmt":"2011-12-14T06:39:45","slug":"keeping-up-with-the-joneses-tv-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/keeping-up-with-the-joneses-tv-show\/","title":{"rendered":"Keeping up with the Joneses of Coolibah Station, Channel 10"},"content":{"rendered":"

The television series ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’<\/strong> has just started screening on Thursday nights at 8pm to 8.30pm \u00a0on Channel 10<\/strong>.\u00a0 The first episode ran for 60 minutes\u00a0and the other 15 episodes are 30 minutes long.\u00a0 This ‘reality’ documentary features Milton Jones<\/strong> 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.\u00a0 Others feature regularly, such as roadtrain driver Hamish Mundel, younger brother of Cristina.\u00a0 Hamish’s wife Kristie also works on the stations as a governess, and Raine Pugh is a jillaroo on Coolibah.\u00a0 Station\u00a0cook Trevor Easton and\u00a0trainee\u00a0chopper mustering pilot Jeff O’Connor also appear in some episodes.\u00a0 The Joneses live on Coolibah station<\/strong>, situated on the Victoria River<\/strong> roughly half way between Katherine<\/strong> (NT) and Kununurra <\/strong>(WA).\u00a0 (Regarding the property name\u00a0–\u00a0‘coolibah’ is a very hard-wooded\u00a0inland eucalypt\u00a0that is very tough, but it favours places were it can sink it’s roots into water, eg along gullies and creek banks.\u00a0 It’s mentioned in Waltzing Matilda.\u00a0 Another common spelling is ‘coolabah’, which is the usual southern Australian pronunciation,\u00a0 while ‘coolibah’ is the usual northern pronunciation.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

The ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’\u00a0 TV\u00a0series\u00a0covers from the end of the wet season into the start of the\u00a0dry season, when mustering takes place.\u00a0 Apparently the\u00a0film 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.\u00a0 It must have been filmed this year, because during 2009 television show\u00a0producers 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’<\/strong> and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’<\/strong>.\u00a0 Only a pilot programme had been made by WTFN by December 2009.\u00a0 Thankfully the initial American-sounding title of\u00a0 ‘Sky Cowboys’<\/strong> was dropped in favour of the very clever ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’\u00a0\u00a0(given the opportunity, no doubt Milton would have had a pithy comment on\u00a0the ‘Sky Cowboys’ \u00a0title,\u00a0especially if he’s familiar with the derogatory\u00a0implication of calling an operator a \u00a0‘cowboy’ in Australian cities.)<\/p>\n

Of course the Top End scenery is stunning (the livistona palm-tree decorated red escarpments in the Victoria River Region <\/strong>of the NT are truly spectacular) and the cinematography is excellent as is the high definition quality; although I\u00a0don’t like the over-saturated\u00a0artificial colouring of digital photography.\u00a0 Instead of the natural greens, reds and blues\u00a0of the Australian bush,\u00a0with subtle graduations in colour, we have garish primary colours akin to a bottom-dollar children’s picture book.\u00a0 However there’s a\u00a0 couple of particularly good points about the show, if the first episodes are anything to go by.\u00a0 It’s a reality\u00a0TV show\u00a0at its best – while it is\u00a0unusually 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 –\u00a0from exciting action to relatively mundane – there’s no dreamt-up drama or repetition of stuff you’ve seen before.\u00a0 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\u00a0it’s gone – because\u00a0station residents aren’t the type of people to do re-enactments.\u00a0 In any case, if they did, they would look so uncomfortable the footage would not be usable anyway.\u00a0 \u00a0<\/p>\n

Most\u00a0‘reality’ television shows are excrutiating viewing because the average\u00a0 30 minute programme\u00a0dedicates 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.\u00a0 The average ‘reality’ TV show must be made for\u00a0viewers so dim they require incessant repetition because their memories have more holes than sieves.\u00a0 This makes ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ a breath of fresh air.<\/p>\n

It’d be nice to think\u00a0 the average Australian would learn something from a show like\u00a0‘Keeping up with the Joneses’\u00a0but unfortunately perhaps not, if the reviews on the internet are anything to go by.\u00a0 For example one TV show reviewer writes that Milton Jones and Cristina met at a campdraft, ‘an outback race meeting’.\u00a0 Campdrafting <\/strong>events feature stockhorses – usually ridden by station people – cutting out a weaner and lapping it around\u00a0markers in a particular order and horse racing is professional jockeys racing thoroughbreds around a turfed or graded track.\u00a0 Both sports involve horses but that’s where the similarity ends.\u00a0 Sometimes campdrafts and race meetings are run consecutively over a weekend to encourage\u00a0people to make the effort to travel the long\u00a0distances required\u00a0to attend, \u00a0but they’re entirely different sports.\u00a0 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.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

More than one reviewer said the Joneses use ‘a fleet of 42 choppers to muster cattle’\u00a0\u00a0which 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\u00a0per hour to hire.\u00a0 Nobody works up to owning their own helicopters by treating them like cars.\u00a0 Anyone who owns their own mustering choppers <\/strong>is more likely to use two or perhaps three for especially large paddocks or difficult country to muster,\u00a0because 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).\u00a0 Mustering choppers are\u00a0not just expensive to buy and insure they’re\u00a0very expensive to maintain.\u00a0 And more mustering choppers than three would rarely result in a more efficient muster, anyway; in fact it could be the reverse.\u00a0 \u00a0Milton 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.\u00a0 Idiot statements like ‘massed helicopters herding cattle over plains’\u00a0 are common in the online TV show reviews.\u00a0 (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\u00a0when 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\u00a0sight.)<\/p>\n

All the TV show reviewers\u00a0I came across\u00a0call Milton Jones a ‘farmer’ and quite a few refer to the station as a ‘farm’, which is akin to calling a\u00a0roadtrain a ‘ute’.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 (Farms grow crops, cattle and sheep stations run livestock and are generally much larger, certainly in the northern inland.)\u00a0 All the other rural terminology and common expressions used naturally in ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ seems to have completely passed the\u00a0reviewers by also.\u00a0\u00a0 (Apart from\u00a0some TV show reviewers who made a big deal of the commonly used \u00a0‘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.)\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0 Although a fair slab of Coolibah Station boundary is shared with the Gregory National Park<\/strong> and\u00a0Bradshaw Station<\/strong>, bought from Ian McBean by the Australian Army for a bombing range in 1996,\u00a0of course the Joneses have neighbours; such as on AACo-owned Delamere Station<\/strong> and Heytesbury Pastoral<\/strong> owned Victoria River Downs.\u00a0<\/strong>Coolibah is not on an island.\u00a0 The neighbours are<\/em> low in number and\u00a0a bit of a drive away but this is naturally\u00a0entirely usual\u00a0for stations measuring 10,000 square kilometres or more – of which there are quite a few, in northern Australia.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n

Unfortunately the average\u00a0TV show\u00a0reviewer\u00a0is not even\u00a0as deep as an October puddle; they’re \u00a0just looking at the\u00a0scenery in ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ and commenting on the antics of Coolibah’s Milton junior.\u00a0 There was also criticism of their speech – what suburban film critics view as ‘ockerness’ – and criticism of the\u00a0narrator\u00a0James Blundell, well known country music singer\u00a0(with the perfect deep voice for narrating an outback documentary).\u00a0\u00a0 Hopefully the general Australian population are more thoughtful, observant and objective than the average Australian TV show reviewer and they’ll be\u00a0thinking 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.\u00a0 And how you don’t get to run a multi-million dollar business without\u00a0ability.\u00a0\u00a0Viewers 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 \u00a0machinery parts in remote areas,\u00a0the 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\u00a0impassable roads.\u00a0\u00a0All good points made in the first episode of ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’.\u00a0 If early comments on online forums are anything to go by, the general public are far more astute and discerning than the reviewers.<\/p>\n

Admittedly the sensationalist-style publicity material pumped out by Channel Ten’s marketing department\u00a0regarding ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ doesn’t help.\u00a0 Describing it as a ‘hard and lonely life’ and Milton and Cristina Jones as an ‘ordinary’ family ‘living extraordinary lives’ \u00a0is so inaccurate that\u00a0at\u00a0first\u00a0I presumed no-one would swallow\u00a0such a\u00a0ridiculous statement whole.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0But it has been repeated verbatim in online media so much,\u00a0it needs explaining.\u00a0\u00a0 It’s actually the reverse of an ordinary family living extraordinary lives.\u00a0\u00a0For several reasons Milton Jones isn’t your average bloke so they are not your average ‘outback’ family, and the life and work\u00a0on Coolibah station is actually very\u00a0typical of big northern Australian cattle stations, rather than unusual.\u00a0\u00a0 (Although crocodile\u00a0nest 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.)\u00a0 \u00a0The 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.\u00a0 For example, when Milton bought Coolibah\u00a0Station in 1988\u00a0he\u00a0apparently paid cash for it.\u00a0 That’s not usual.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 The TV series production company approached a lot of northern property owners, managers, chopper pilots and\u00a0mustering companies\u00a0over more than twelve months, looking for a chopper pilot to film.<\/p>\n

Milton Jones is now the sole owner of North Australian Helicopters (NAH)<\/strong>, a helicopter business that specialises in aerial mustering (with clients such as Australia’s largest pastoral company, AACo<\/strong>, and one of the largest privately owned pastoral companies, Stanbroke<\/strong>), government work (National Parks and environmental services etc) and tourism flights over\u00a0Nitmiluk (Katherine) Gorge and Kakadu (from Jabiru airport).\u00a0 NAH\u00a0employs 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.\u00a0 NAH has a hangar at the Mt Isa airport (purchased along with 5 helicopters when NAH bought the AACo’s\u00a0helicopter division, a few years ago) and a large building\u00a0on the\u00a0western edge of Katherine, on the\u00a0road to Kununurra.\u00a0<\/p>\n

‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ is in a very similar mould to Troy Dann’s 1990’s ‘Outback Adventures’<\/strong>, also set in the Northern Territory.\u00a0 However the\u00a0Territory isn’t the only place that has big cattle stations – the largest in the world is in fact located in\u00a0northern South Australia, and others are located in Western Australia, Queensland, and western New South Wales.\u00a0\u00a0There was one Troy Dann\u00a0‘Outback Adventures’\u00a0episode\u00a0featuring a visit to Coolibah Station, and another episode\u00a0featuring Troy going bullcatching with Milton Jones.\u00a0 When Milton left school in the early 1980’s he started work as a bullcatcher, and his first wife’s brother is\u00a0well-known bullcatcher Kurt Hammar (owner of\u00a0 Hammaco Pty Ltd).\u00a0 Coolibah is surrounded by the ideal\u00a0habitat for cleanskins (unbranded cattle).<\/p>\n

Charles Chauvel’s<\/strong> Australian classic ‘Jedda’ <\/strong>was filmed on Coolibah Station in 1955, and in 2005 Baz Luhrmann<\/strong> had considered it for the site of ‘Faraway Downs’<\/strong> in his ‘Australia’ film<\/strong> (but ended up further west,\u00a0on CPC<\/strong>-owned Carlton Hill Station<\/strong>, north of Kununurra, W.A.).\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

It will be interesting to see if the \u00a0‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ television series\u00a0inspires another generation of kids to dream about heading bush, just as McLeods Daughters and Troy Dann’s Outback Adventures did.<\/p>\n

The most astute comment in the first episode came from the\u00a0young chopper pilot Jeff O’Connor, who said\u00a0when he’d just arrived on Coolibah\u00a0 station from Maroochydore (on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast), that it\u00a0was ‘like another world’<\/strong>.\u00a0 That comment really sums it up – the gulf between remote inland cattle stations and coastal, urban Australia should not be underestimated.\u00a0 Unfortunately this was completely lost on the TV show reviewers – here’s hoping that the public are smarter and look a bit deeper.<\/p>\n

If you are interested in seeing hundreds of authentic photos taken on dozens\u00a0of Australia’s largest and most famous cattle stations, spread between Queensland’s remote Cape York Peninsula<\/strong> and arid Channel Country<\/strong>, to the historic properties of the Northern Territory<\/strong> and Western Australia’s beautiful East and West Kimberley<\/strong> regions; refer to the coffee-table style books \u00a0‘A Million Acre Masterpiece’ and ‘Life as an Australian Horseman’<\/a>.\u00a0\u00a0 The landscapes of the stations featured range from the\u00a0red sandhills of central Australia, to coastal marine plains with miles of deserted beaches, dramatic limestone\u00a0cliffs\u00a0and vast open ‘downs’ country.\u00a0 In 2009 these books were purchased and used as references and inspiration by ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ television series production company, WTFN.\u00a0\u00a0 These\u00a0quality hardback\u00a0 books are ideal presents to give to anyone interested in the Australian outback<\/strong>, or who is dreaming of working on a cattle station – or anyone who has memories of working in the bush.\u00a0\u00a0 They’ve been given as gifts to people all around the world –\u00a0to ageing parents who grew up on farms, overseas-residing siblings and young kids dreaming of heading bush;\u00a0\u00a0to European Ambassadors and some\u00a0of the largest rural landowners in the U.S. and people in every other walk of life.\u00a0\u00a0To read comments by purchasers<\/strong> all around Australia and overseas, from cattle station owners to capital city residents, refer to Testimonials<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The television series ‘Keeping up with the Joneses’ has just started screening on Thursday nights at 8pm to 8.30pm \u00a0on Channel 10.\u00a0 The first episode ran for 60 minutes\u00a0and the other 15 episodes are 30 minutes long.\u00a0 This ‘reality’ documentary features Milton Jones and his second wife Cristina, their four year old son ‘young Milton’ […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[8,11,217],"tags":[82,179,213,214,215,218],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892"}],"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=892"}],"version-history":[{"count":41,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2136,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/892\/revisions\/2136"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=892"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=892"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fionalake.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=892"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}