The Outback Wrangler by Matt Wright & Tom Trumble

Author:Matt Wright & Tom Trumble [Wright, Matt]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Non-Fiction
Publisher: Penguin Random House Pty Ltd.

12

Murder in the Outback

Situated in far north Queensland, Wrotham Park Station is 600 000 hectares of limestone escarpments, towering rocky pillars, rainforest country, rivers, billabongs and rolling hills. It’s beautiful country, ideal for grazing while offering cattle plenty of places to cool off in the shade. It’s also a nightmare for a mustering pilot and not just because of the terrain.

I’d been sitting up in Mount Isa when the call came through to John Logan. One of the other pilots, a bloke by the name of Nick, had been in a bad crash. They needed someone to sling what remained of Nick’s chopper back to the homestead. Witnesses to the crash said that he was pushing the cattle in towards the yard when he was hit by a microburst – a sudden downdraft that occurs in thunderstorms and is lethal to low-flying aircraft. The chopper nearly flipped on its lid. He overcompensated, pulling the cyclic back too hard and putting the main rotor back through his tail boom. He levelled out and for a split second everything seemed fine, but the damage to the tail boom was catastrophic. It snapped off. Without the anti-torque rotor, the helicopter went into a violent spin, flipped onto its side and barrel-rolled several times before miraculously landing upright. He was dragged out unconscious suffering only a broken arm from the main rotor blade coming down through the cab of the chopper. He was lucky to have survived.

I ended up taking over from him at Wrotham Park. It would have been better if Nick retired then. He instead decided to get back up in the air and flew for another few years as a mustering pilot at other stations around Australia. He put a few more machines into the ground along the way. He met his end out on a dual muster due to a fault in the machine.

Wrotham Park was infamous for chopper crashes. Prior to my time, several pilots mustered that country and crashed regularly. One bloke crashed nine times and the lucky bastard still managed to survive. I even remember back to when I was doing my licence I was always hearing stories of Wrotham Park. The cattle were wild and its rubber-vine jungles were treacherous. This was not a place to be treated lightly.

A big part of mustering on Wrotham Park involved catching cleanskin cattle. We call them cleanskins because they have never been brought to the yard. As such, these animals have unblemished skin having never been branded or earmarked. They are bred in the wild and grow up that way, charging anyone who dares to come near.

Cleanskins are worth a bit, provided you can get them into the yard without wasting resources or getting yourself killed. If a bull is too dangerous, then it has to be shot. I did a bit of bull catching with Milton at Moroak and Coolibah. It was great fun, heading out on bull catchers, bikes or horseback and head-roping a big old wild bull. But at Wrotham Park there was a higher degree of difficulty.

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