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Australia

Farmers concerned at potential foot-and-mouth spread as Australia and Indonesia tackle outbreak

Farmers concerned at potential foot-and-mouth spread as Australia and Indonesia tackle outbreak

Nathaniel Rose kept his shoes and sandals separate from his main baggage as he traveled home from Bali to Melbourne last week.

During his 10-day holiday on the Indonesian island, Mr Rose said he was aware of concerns that tourists visiting Bali might bring foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) back to Australia, including via contaminated soil on footwear.

“I did one trip to Mount Batur that could be considered rural. We walked through the village along the dirt track,” he said.

As per Australian government advice, Mr Rose thoroughly cleaned his footwear before he got on the plane.

“There were foot-and-mouth disease signs at Denpasar Airport,” he said.

“When we got off [the plane] there were biosecurity officers and we had to walk on a disinfectant mat.”

a man smiling close up wearing a glasses
Nathaniel Rose took precautions to ensure he did not bring the disease from Indonesia to Australia.(Supplied)

An outbreak of FMD could devastate Australia’s livestock industries, cost the Australian economy around $80 billion, and lead to many animals being slaughtered to control the disease.

Those potential consequences are why the agriculture industry here has been begun on tenterhooks since an outbreak in Indonesia in May, with some calling for a travel ban.

Farmers and authorities in Indonesia are working hard to contain the virus’s spread, while the Australian government this week committed $10 million towards biosecurity measures in Indonesia to tackle the outbreak.

FMD is a highly contagious animal disease that affects all cloven-hoofed animals and is carried in many ways, including by live animals, in meat and dairy products, soil and untreated hides.

It is commonly spread between animals through inhalation, ingestion and contact with infected animals, but is not to humans, including by eating affected meat.

The virus is different to hand, foot and mouth disease common in children.

Local farmers implement strict controls

FMD Greenfields Farm East Java
Greenfields Indonesia own the biggest dairy farm in East Java.(Supplied: greenfieldsdairy.com)

The outbreak in Indonesia is the biggest since 1990 and is estimated to be costing the local economy $200 million per month.

Since May, 479,000 animals have been infected with FMD in Indonesia.

More than 9,000 animals have been killed to try to control the virus’s spread, while another 5,189 have died from the disease.

The province of East Java currently has the highest number of infections, with a mix of farms in that area, including smaller traditional farms and others run by large companies.

East Java’s biggest dairy farm is owned by Greenfields Indonesia, a company established by a group of Australian and Indonesian entrepreneurs.

Map of FMD cases in Indonesia
The provinces in Indonesia with the most foot-and-mouth cases.(ABC News graphic: Jarrod Fankhauser)

The farm, with 16,000 cattle, has implemented strict biosecurity measures, despite no cases of the virus being detected there.

Richard Slaney, from Greenfields Indonesia, said the company’s cattle underwent frequent health checks and were being vaccinated against the disease.

Mr Slaney said there were also strict controls to clean workers’ dirty clothing and footwear, vehicle tires and animal feed.

“No outside visitors are allowed to come [to the property],” I added.

He said vehicles were sprayed from “top to bottom”.

“All vehicles have gone through an additional cleaning process and very strict controls are also applied to the milk tank transport vehicles,” he said.

Small farmers can’t afford vaccines

a man is feeding his cows in a shed
Robi Gustiar says some farmers are having trouble accessing vaccines.(Supplied)

Robi Gustiar is a cattle farmer and the secretary-general of the Indonesian Cattle and Buffalo Breeders Association that represents small farmers who have between five and 30 cattle.

He said smaller farmers were also doing what they could to control the outbreak.

“For farmers who have up to five cattle, they spray disinfectant in locations around cattle pens and on vehicles.”

He said some farmers were still waiting for vaccines from the government, while medium and larger traditional farmers were proposing to purchase vaccines independently to access them faster.

FMD Greenfields Cows East Java
Larger farms, like the Greenfields farm in East Java, have better access to vaccines.(Supplied: greenfieldsdairy.com)

Mr Gustiar said small farmers could not afford vaccines and distribution was not easy.

“Indonesia is an archipelago country, so transportation is a problem. They [need to] make sure the vaccine is still active when it reaches the cattle,” he explained.

Australian government support for Indonesia announced this week included supplying more vaccines to Indonesia as well as protective equipment, training and expertise.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt said $4 million of the $10 million dollars allocated was for vaccine purchasing.

“This is on top of support already announced for Indonesia, which included 1 million doses of foot-and-mouth disease vaccine and almost half a million doses of lumpy skin disease vaccine already committed by the Australian government,” he said.

Disaster authority bolsters Indonesia’s response

a man vaccinating a cow in a shed.
Indonesia has procured 3 million vaccine doses to tackle the disease.(Supplied: FAO Eko Prianto)

According to Indonesia’s Foot and Mouth Taskforce, more than 1.2 million doses of vaccine have been administered to animals.

Spokesperson Wiku Adisasmito said he hoped that the outbreak would be under control by the end of the year.

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Australia

Foot-and-mouth disease led to 6 million slaughtered animals in England 21 years ago. Could it happen in Australia?

A man in a green wet weather jacket stands in front of a herd of black and white cows.

Robert Craig’s memories of foot-and-mouth disease tearing through the north of England are more than 20 years old, but they’re as painful as ever.

“It still makes my hair stand on end now,” the dairy farmer said.

“You don’t realize at the time that things do affect you longer term.”

There has not been an outbreak of the disease in Australia for over a century, but cases detected in Indonesia in May have put authorities on high alert, and farmers fear what could happen if the disease lands in Australia.

Foot-and-mouth spreads rapidly between cloven-hoofed animals including cattle, sheep, pigs and goats. It’s serious and highly contagious.

Warning: This story contains images some readers may find distressing

In February 2001, Robert Craig was raising a young family in Cumbria, which became one of the worst-affected areas during a devastating outbreak of the disease.

It led to the mass slaughter of cows, pigs and sheep.

“I remember being out in the fields, I think spreading fertilizer, and they were rounding up these sheep and lambs and there’s this truck in the gateway,” he told the ABC News Daily podcast.

“Seeing them rounding up newborn lambs and you knew where they were going, that was just hideous. Absolutely hideous.”

Men checking cow carcasses as they are lined up with excavators in the background.
Slaughtered cows in Yorkshire were lined up before they were loaded onto trucks and transported to a burial pit.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Mr Craig said he remembers tracking the spread of the disease on a map and watching as it got closer and closer to his own farm.

“There was a real sense of despair. It was hard for people to see at that time how anything could get back to normality because such a huge number of livestock had been taken,” he said.

Over the course of 11 months, more than 6 million cows, sheep and pigs were slaughtered in an effort to contain the spread of the disease, although only a relatively small portion of that number had the infection.

In total 2,000 cases were ultimately confirmed across the UK.

“I don’t know whether it did any good either. There was a fair bit of panic at the time,” Mr Craig said.

“It was just like, removing as much livestock as possible to try and slow [it] down, to get in front of it because it had gotten so badly out of control.

“I don’t know if they even tested these sheep that were taken away.”

Mr Craig was one of the lucky ones whose animals were spared, but his community suffered badly.

“Pretty much all of our neighbors sort of succumbed to it at some point,” he said.

“The whole of our area was pretty much just dead, like no livestock at all.”

Dead cows being sprayed with disinfectant on a farm.
In 2001, destroyed cattle with foot-and-mouth disease were sprayed with disinfectant to stop the spread.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Australians sent to help

Australian vet Bill Sykes has similar “life-changing” memories of the time.

The Victorian, who had a background in national disease control and animal slaughtering, was sent to Yorkshire, in northern England, as part of an Australian contingent deployed to help.

“It’s 20 years on, there’s a lot of things I don’t remember since five minutes ago, but these things come back, and they haunt,” he told the ABC News Daily podcast.

Mr Sykes recalls how the abattoir workers would try to calmly gain the trust of bobby calves, or calves less than a month old, before the slaughter.

“The strategy was to put his finger in the calf’s mouth so that it would happily suck and while it was sucking, he’d shoot the animal with a captive bolt pistol, and it would drop and then he’d go to the next one .”

But for him, the destruction of newborn lambs via lethal injection was particularly devastating.

“They went limp in your arms, you put them down and you picked up the next one,” he said.

“And I happened to love little lambs. I found that real, real tough.”

Mr Sykes said the immediate impact of the disease in the countryside was stark.

“At the bottom of the valley, everything is normal, sheep and cattle grazing in the paddocks,” he said.

“By the time we get to the top of the valley there’s nothing there, it’s just an eerie silence. It’s a sea of ​​nothing.”

Two men walk towards green hill, lined with empty paddocks.
The “sea of ​​nothing” remained after neighboring Yorkshire farms had been “slaughtered out”.(Supplied: Bill Sykes)

Australia assesses its preparedness for an outbreak

Bill Sykes, who is also a former regional vet officer in the Victorian Agriculture Department and former Nationals MP, is enraged by reports of Australia’s biosecurity laws being breached.

Foot-and-mouth disease can be carried on meat and animal goods, and in one recent case, a backpacker returned from Indonesia with prohibited meat.

The passenger was fined $2,664 after being detected with undeclared sausage meat and a ham croissant at Darwin airport.

“Just unbelievably dumb. Stupid, thoughtless, call it what you like, but that’s the sort of situation that can occur,” Mr Sykes said.

Foot-and-mouth disease can also spread in air particles between animals situated closely together, through contaminated water and on clothing and footwear.

The risk of a foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in Australia has increased to approximately 12 per cent after the recent spread in Indonesia and its popular tourist island, Bali.

Mr Sykes said vigilance is paramount.

a number of officials in white coats inspecting sick cattle.
Officials from the Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture visit a farm in East Java where cattle have foot-and-mouth disease.(Supplied: Indonesian Ministry of Agriculture)

The Australian government has introduced a range of measures to lower the risk of foot-and-mouth disease entering the country.

Biosecurity measures have been ramped up at airports, including installing acidic disinfectant foot mats and increased surveillance on meat products entering the country.

Agriculture Minister Murray Watt announced a new task force will also be established to focus on how to best prepare for a potential outbreak.

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Categories
Australia

Critically-endangered Capricorn yellow chat given a fighting chance by graziers’ soft touch

Little yellow bird standing on a blade of grass

Central Queensland’s Shoalwater Bay may be better known as a military training ground for human conflict, but nearby graziers and conservationists are fighting for the survival of a unique species.

The Capricorn yellow chat is a critically endangered flycatcher unique to the region including near the bay better known for military training and war games involving soldiers from across the world.

Birdlife Capricornia secretary Allan Briggs said the endangered species survives in a flat environment which is also attractive for cattle grazing.

“Wherever we find them they are in what we call a marine plain environment which is basically a treeless environment, that’s right on the [coastal] edge and experiences some tidal flooding,” he said.

“That’s one of the reasons why people don’t see yellow chats, because they’re in very harsh environments and they’re difficult to access.”

Flat, green land with small lakes.
Marine plains are treeless, flood plain country with some tidal inundation.(Supplied: Craig Mace)

Grazier Craig Mace lives at Toorilla Plains and has about 4,000 hectares of marine plains on his property.

Rather than seeing it as lost productivity he said preserving the yellow chat habitat as a healthy environment benefited his business.

“If you look after the environment it looks after you, and the birds, that’s the environment they love,” he said.

“It’s just an aviary for birds and waterbirds. There’s plenty of them out there at the moment.”

He said that his cattle and the natural ecosystem worked effectively side by side.

“The birds just fit in with the cattle,” he said.

“I think the cattle keep the grass down to a degree and you just have to make sure you don’t overgraze the country.”

Cattle in water.
In the event of heavy rainfall graziers have to muster cattle from marine plains to higher ground.(Supplied: Lawson Geddes)

Down the road, Lawson Geddes also has marine plains on his property Couti-Outi.

He said it was a simple question of healthy environment, healthy cattle.

“They’re all animals,” he said.

“I think it’s all part of the environment isn’t it? They’re all a part of the ecosystem and I think they seem to get along quite well.”

The habitat has been working so well that Mr Geddes was surprised to hear the bird was endangered at all.

“Until a few years ago I didn’t know they were endangered,” he said.

“An environmentalist came back very excited one day because he’d found a bird that, apparently, they thought was extinct elsewhere.

“He showed us a photo and it was this yellow chat and we just said ‘Oh, we see that all the time’.”

Bird on the brink

Mr Briggs said the population of yellow chats is on a knife edge and any loss of population or habitat could have a detrimental impact.

“There’s only 250 left in the wild,” he said.

“That means the bird is critically endangered and you can well imagine if we had a major environmental event, like a cyclone or a huge fire that went through, we could end up reducing the population to a level that is not viable and it would end up going extinct.”

Mr Briggs said it made the landowners’ management of marine plains critical to the survival of the species.

“These land managers do a really great job,” he said.

“There’s, for example, invasive weed species and ferals which affect the yellow chat’s habitat and the landowners, the graziers, are keeping these problems under control.

A windmill, cattle, and flat plain.
Craig Mace said his cattle have lived alongside endangered Capricorn yellow chats for years. (Rural ABC: Pat Heagney)

“The cattle as well, they graze the grass and weeds down to a manageable level so they are effectively controlling the fire risk.

“Without them there is no management, and I don’t think the habitat would last very long if it was just left to be in its wild condition.”

Conservation cooperation

Mr Geddes said their work with the Capricorn yellow chat was an example of farmers working with the land, and that agriculture and the natural environment can co-exist.

“This bird has been here as long as I can remember, the cattle don’t worry about it at all,” he said.

“You can see the cows lying down and the bird on its back just going around doing its thing.”

A very green pasture.
Graziers say marine plains are home to a unique ecosystem and cattle feed almost all year round.(Supplied: Craig Mace)

Mr Mace agreed and said it was rewarding to challenge the negative perceptions of agriculture, but they needed to showcase more examples.

“I think the only thing you can do is to get people out and look at it,” he said.

“You can tell people all you like but they have to see it for themselves.

“That’s why we have a lot of environmental groups that come out and survey the place and count the birds”

Mr Briggs said that without the cooperation and management of the graziers it would be a very different story for the Capricorn yellow chat.

“I do want to congratulate the landowners that we’ve been working with,” he said.

“It’s a really delicate balance in these complex environmental scenarios and it really needs the cooperation of everybody — land managers, conservationists — all working together to maintain that population into the future.”

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Categories
Australia

Quick-thinking driver saves more than 100 head of cattle from Tanami Road truck fire

Quick-thinking driver saves more than 100 head of cattle from Tanami Road truck fire

A quick-thinking truck driver saved more than 100 head of cattle after one of his trailers caught fire while he was traveling on one of the Northern Territory’s roughest and most remote roads.

Late last month Cory Stirling was transporting six decks of cattle to Alice Springs via the Tanami Road when he heard a loud bang at about 10pm.

Colloquially known as the Tanami, the road connects Central Australia to the Kimberley region of WA, stretches over 1,000 kilometers, and is notorious for its poor condition.

Mr Stirling explained he pulled the road train up immediately and ran down the side of the 50-metre-long rig to find his rear airbag brake had blown and was on fire.

“I see my airbag was alight so, I just ran back up to my truck to grab my fire extinguisher, went back, tried to extinguish, but it ran out of fire powder,” Mr Stirling said.

“Then it got under the tires, then once they lit up, she was all over.”

Fire damage on a road train trailer.
Fire damage to a trailer on the Tanami Road.(Supplied)

Mr Stirling had to act quickly to separate the trailers to ensure the safety of the cattle.

“I dropped the front run-throughs and then just started jumping as many cattle off [as possible],” he said.

One died on the crate and another had to be euthanized.

“It’s tough — it’s really tough,” Mr Stirling said.

“You’ve got love animals and if you love doing something, like I love carting cattle… it’s really tough to watch.”

A representative of the station where the cattle came from ABC Rural has informed that the remaining cattle on the front two trailers have safely arrived in Alice Springs.

The cattle let off the burning trailer were tracked by helicopters the next morning and moved to a water point on a nearby station and will be collected at a later date.

A defaced road sign with red dirt in the background
A defaced truck stop road sign along the Tanami Road.(ABC Rural: Hugo Rikard-Bell )

Poor condition of Tanami an old foe

Mr Stirling pointed to the poor condition of the road as the primary culprit for the loss of cattle and damage to his truck.

“You have a brand-new crate that could do the same thing,” he said.

“You prep yourself for it, but it’s very harsh conditions, you let your tires down to half the per cent of PSI but still it’s terrible.”

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Categories
Australia

Farmers digging into the eco-friendly powers of dung beetles in far north Queensland

Two men study a clod of earth in a paddock while cattle look on curiously.

A passing observer might think the cattle and dairy farmers of far north Queensland have been having very strangely by digging through their paddocks — elbows deep in cattle dung.

They are on the hunt for an insect that has one of the most unappealing and yet important jobs in the world: eating animal droppings.

Their search comes as soaring fertilizer prices and workforce shortages across Australia accelerate a movement towards natural, non-labor intensive alternatives.

The humble dung beetle offers a real solution.

It recycles effluent waste into organic fertilizer, eradicates flies, aerates the soil and increases water penetration — all while cheerfully munching on dung and asking nothing in return.

Close-up of two large black dung beetles on the palm of a hand.
Onitis vanderkellen dung beetles are abundant at cattle and dairy properties in the region.(Rural ABC: Tanya Murphy)

Beetles that specialize in eating cattle dung have been studied and bred extensively in both southern Queensland and southern states since they were introduced by the CSIRO in the 1970s.

But until now, there have not been any comprehensive long-term studies on how to breed and propagate species suited to northern Australia.

Some 15 farmers in far north Queensland have rolled up their sleeves to find out just what is living in the cow pats on their fields.

Cattle dung ‘attracts flies’

Among the participants is Gail Abernethy, who runs a small herd of cattle at a 36-hectare property at Wondecla on the Atherton Tablelands with her husband Victor.

A woman with a hat and sunglasses stands in a paddock holding a shovel in one hand and a dung beetle in the other.
Gail Abernethy participates in dung beetle collection at her cattle farm in Wondecla.(Rural ABC: Tanya Murphy)

She said she wanted to increase the population of dung beetles in the region, not only to reduce pasture fouling and fly outbreaks, but also to benefit productivity and the environment.

“There are native dung beetles, but they eat marsupial dung, so before the CSIRO back in the 70s and 80s introduced dung beetles from overseas, there was a lot of dung on the ground because it wasn’t being processed,” Ms Abernethy said .

“Cattle dung attracts flies, and that’s why the Australians had the fly salute, and had corks on their hats because there were so many flies.”

Ms Abernethy said dung beetles took the manure and buried it, which improved soil quality and created aeration of the soil, “so you’ve got less run-off from rainwater.”

“But there’s so little research and development being done in northern Australia, where all the cattle live,” she said.

A dung beetle for every season

Ms Abernethy began ordering dung beetles from southern breeders in 2014, but soon realized there was very little information about what species survived well in northern Australia at different times of year.

She and 14 other farmers obtained a Landcare grant to undertake their own research — and they have not been afraid to get their hands dirty.

“You take your shovel and you find a cow pat that’s at least 24 hours old, and put it in your bucket with some soil, and then empty some water into it, and they will float to the top in a graceful style,” Ms Abernethy said.

“We have collected beetles once a month for 12 months, and we now know we have nine separate species of introduced dung beetles and four predatory species.

“They’re the smaller ones who eat the fly larvae … and some of our beetles don’t live down south. They’re just up here in the tropics.”

Creating plant nutrients

South Australia’s Dr Bernard Doube is among the world’s leading dung beetle ecologists and is helping the group with beetle identification.

A man with a hat, gray beard and glasses kneels in a paddock using a stick to dissect a pile of dung.
Dr Bernard Doube is helping Far North Queensland farmers with dung beetle identification.(Rural ABC: Tanya Murphy)

He said the study had revealed a particularly abundant population of one species of dung beetle, Onitis vanderkelleniwhich was thriving in the Atherton Tablelands.

“It’s got a very restricted distribution up here and hardly anywhere else in Australia, but up here, it’s doing a great job,” Dr Doube said.

“It digs a tunnel to about 20 centimetres and lines the tunnel with dung … and down below, the beetle puts perhaps half a liter of dung, a huge amount really, and lays a whole [lot] of eggs in it.

“The eggs hatch into larvae, and the larvae eat all of the dung, and then [produce] all this processed stuff, which is rather like compost.”

Dr Doube said it created a “great big pile of plant nutrients”.

“The roots grow down there, and you get increased production and increased carbon storage because it’s a relatively permanent change in the structure of the soil,” he said.

“And our experiences from southern Australia indicate that we get about a 30 per cent increase in productivity due to the dung burial activity of the beetles.”

A close up of a small pale grub in a nest of dung
Onitis vanderkelleni larvae nest in dung at a property on the Atherton Tablelands.(Supplied: Louise Gavin)

Importantly, Dr Doube said the study had also revealed a gap in the winter population of dung beetles.

“What this project has shown is that we have quite a diversity of beetles here, and they are active during the summer,” he said.

“But at this time of the year in autumn and winter, although there are some beetles present and they’re burying dung, they’re not very common.”

Dr Doube said the group would now seek further funding to import and breed a species of beetle called Onitis caffer, which was more active during autumn and spring.

“We hope that we can get some financial support to establish a dung beetle importation program again, bringing in this particular beetle, which is going to be most beneficial, in my view,” he said.

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Categories
Australia

Darwin traveler fined over undeclared fast food from Bali amid foot-and-mouth disease concerns

a black dog with a read coat with "biosecurity" written on it.

A traveler from Indonesia has been fined thousands of dollars for sneaking two beef sausage McMuffins and a ham croissant into Australia.

Passengers returning from Indonesia have been facing tougher biosecurity checks, after the detection of foot-and-mouth disease (FMD) in cows in Bali.

The highly contagious disease, which is yet to reach Australia, affects cattle, sheep, goats, and pigs, and the virus would have severe consequences for the nation’s animal health and trade.

A biosecurity detector dog at Darwin airport sniffed out the fast food meat products in a passenger’s backpack last week, with the traveler fined $2,664.

The pork and beef snacks were seized and will be tested for foot-and-mouth disease, before being destroyed.

An outbreak of the disease in Indonesia has prompted Australian biosecurity officials to categorize some meat products as “risk items”.

A long line at the Darwin Airport check-in counter during the COVID-19 lockdown.
Biosecurity measures have ramped up since foot-and-mouth disease was detected in Bali.(ABC News: Michael Franchi)

Minister for Agriculture, Murray Watt, said he wanted Australia to stay free of the disease.

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Categories
Australia

Tragedy and hope for Mathew Brockhurst, a paraplegic cattleman

A young man and woman stand smiling as they hold the reins of a horse.

They got the job done far earlier than they expected, and one could even say their 4am wake-up may have been a little too keen.

But there is never an end to the list of jobs “station life” gives you when you first walk through the door, so 4am was probably still a good call.

Mathew Brockhurst wiped his brow, smearing sweat and bull dust across his already grubby face, his hat was resting on a cocked knee as he and his girlfriend Alice Purcell sprawled out under a tree sweaty and covered in dirt.

They had just finished processing a mob of cattle and were sharing a brief reprieve from the heat of the day.

It was around 2pm on November 4, 2021, and the harsh central Queensland sun was glaring through the leaves of the tree the couple was sitting under, casting a checked shadow over their grubby clothes.

Young couple on a pair of horses in the hot sun with windmill in the distance.
Matt and Alice met on their family’s station in the Kimberley.(Supplied: Alice Purcell)

Matt knew they still had to walk the cattle, chilling and chewing in the yard behind them, back to a waterhole and check the bores before sundown, but if they split it, they could be looking at almost an early beer.

Now, Alice was darn capable and could handle the cattle by herself. She had cut her teeth on his family’s property Larrawa Station — a few hours from Halls Creek in the Kimberley, where they met.

They they would head east to Queensland and chase an adventure of their own decided, and here they were, almost a year into that adventure, under a tree, working out who would do what job next.

“She said she’d be right with them [the cattle] and I’d said, ‘I’ll go do the bore run then’,” Matt collected.

The 24-year-old stockman had shrugged and wandered over to his motorbike, strapping on his helmet as he went.

Alice had followed behind him watching his lanky saunter.

Neither of them could ever have guessed it was the last time Matt would walk.

Just a rock on the road

A young woman in hard hat riding a horse, a young man in a motorbike helmet stands beside them.
Matt and Alice working together.(Supplied: Alice Purcell)

An hour or two later and Matt had finally finished for the day.

The sun was still hot as ever but the wind through his shirt was keeping him cool as he cruised home on the same Honda 250 he had ridden almost every day of the nine months he had worked on the property.

“I went around the corner, and there was a rock on the road,” Matt recalled.

“I thought, ‘Oh shit’… I hit it and I went over the handlebars… I wasn’t [going] overly fast or anything.”

Matt has lived his whole life on the land and like so many, there have been plenty of close calls before.

He’d been bucked off horses, run up rails by scrub bulls and come off his fair share of bikes, but he knew almost instantly this was different.

A family riding horses through tall grass and low trees on a cattle muster on Larrawa Station.
A young Matt pictured with his family, as they head off for a muster on Larrawa Station where he grew up.(Supplied: Matt Brockhurst)

“I hit the ground and the dust was sort of settling… I touched my leg, and I could feel it with my hand, but I couldn’t feel it with my leg,

“When you do first aid, you sort of know, once that isn’t coming back with the feeling, there’s something to do with your spinal cord.”

He lay there for two and a half hours in that Queensland summer heat, waiting for help.

“I’d said to Alice, if I’m not home by five, come looking, which is a very common thing on stations, there’s a certain time you meant to be home.”

“I was thinking flat tire, maybe bogged, there had been some rain around earlier on in the day”

Lying there waiting for Alice, Matt began making peace with his life.

“I was prepared to die out there,” he said.

“I was thinking, ‘Shit! What was the last word I said to Alice? What were the last things I said to my mum and dad and brothers?’

“I remember thinking, you know, I’ve made it this far, if I leave now with whatever I have, every moment from now on is a plus.”

They found me

A young man in hospital bed appears to smile despite a neck brace, oxygen and tubes.
Matt had shattered his T5 vertebra.(Supplied: Alice Purcell)

When Matt was eventually found by his boss and Alice, he was severely sunburnt and dehydrated, but alive.

“I could hear ute in the distance, and I’m in the middle of the road lying flat on the ground.

“I’m thinking, ‘Oh shit, this is going to be horrible, if I’ve finally made it to this point, and he comes around the corner and runs me over,'” Matt recounted.

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