Edge of Everything

The Edge of Everything On this vast cattle station, young workers come for the change and stay for the challenge - learning the ropes of the beef industry and much more about themselves. The sun doesn’t rise at Barkly Downs so much as seep - slowly and sideways - into a sky that’s already too big for its boots. At Number Six Yards, light hasn’t yet spilled over the horizon, but the day has started without it. Weaners murmur in the half-dark, as silhouetted station hands march from vehicle to animal and back again. “I haven’t ridden much before,” says 23-year-old Alice from New Zealand, as she tightens the girth on a stock horse. It’s her second week on the job and she’s full of questions, but there’s no time to linger. The station spans 942,500 hectares near Mount Isa in northwest Queensland, wedged against the Northern Territory border. From above, it looks like a straw-coloured sea - flat and featureless. That’s the nature of downs country: too harsh for trees, but ideal for native grasses like Mitchell and Flinders, which cattle thrive on. It’s a landscape that asks for little but gives just enough. On the ground, it feels like nothingness to the shimmering horizon, until you realise those vast paddocks are the engine room of the world’s largest family-owned vertically integrated beef empire, Australian Country Choice (ACC).