Cattle processing day. Never an easy job with handled cattle let alone crazy wild ones... dehorning, branding, tagging and castrating is the goal today. Then separating Mickey bulls from the others. Some of it appears brutal to say the least. I'm now on the branding iron, which in most cases works well. The odd beast moves before the three second count is up. This results in a double brand which is messy...Roderick has cut his hand open with the power saw that is...

Well today was a disaster... up early with a chopper here to muster some stock the west side of the Gibb Valley River. We loaded up the horses and headed to the yards. We unloaded them down the cattle race which I'm not sure I would have used. Anyway we got them there in one piece. Roderick and Ben - the chopper pilot took off and headed out to scope the lay of the land. We on the other hand saddled up and headed down the track. We had no idea what we were up to...

Limited to do list today! Started with a trip to the yards and we put up the hessian wings to the yards. Always an adventure, we have too many chiefs and not enough Indians. However once we completed the task we started looking for a bank as we need to truck the 6 horses to the yards tomorrow morning. We found one that I think that we are going to use, however there is about a 2ft drop from the truck deck to the bank. It's really something that I wouldn't do with...

A bit of a sleep in today. Up at 5. Poppy isn't well at all. Hacking cough and a fever - Netty is taking him to Kununurra hospital. Seriously not looking well. We wait with anticipation as to what they do with him. He had been in town for a four day weekend of drinking, smokes like a train and got locked in someone's bedroom... he reckons he climbed out an air conditioning vent... how much is true we will never know - except the drinking part! We headed to the ro...

Up at 3:45 for a 4am breakfast of bacon eggs and spaghetti. A little early to be fair, but lunch will be a long time away. Headed out to the first lot of temp cattle yards in one of the bull catchers. No headlights and the sun hadn't appeared yet, so was pretty illegal to say the least. No windscreens so we ran into a few bugs and it was amazing how the temperatures would change every time we went up or down hill on the road. First time I've been cold in Austral...