24 June 2011 - Gracemere Caravan Park, Queensland

What an interesting day we have had! Yet another lovely sunny day, perhaps a little cooler after a slightly warmer night. After breakfast, dressed in jeans and sturdy shoes, we headed to the Gracemere Saleyards. Today was the weekly prime beef sale and while cattle auctions might well be a mundane event for many pastoral people, the sales here in Gracemere are well promoted as a tourist attraction as well as being a major part of the running of the main industry here: beef.

Here at Gracemere, the yards hold 200 holding pens, 20 sales pens and a covered arena seating 1,000 people for the stud auctions or other special sales that happen here. The Friday sales average 3,000 head of cattle per sale which equates with 150,000 head per year, generating cash flow of $100 million annually. Apart from these weekly sales, there are annually 20 stud cattle sales, property auctions and sales of quarter horses, camels, Shetland ponies and saddlery.

In Central Queensland, Brahman and Brahman Cross derivations make up an estimated 95% of the cattle breeds. The Brahman are bred from the Indian Zebu and have an excellent resistance to ticks. The Brafords which I have referred to much earlier in this work, are a cross of Hereford and Brahman, who apart from resisting the ticks, also cope remarkably well with drought conditions. Charbray are the result of breeding with Charolais bulls and Brahman cows in the USA in the 1950s; they cope very well with heat. And finally the Droughtmasters, a Brahman and Shorthorn Cross, red in colour, are excellent foragers and have a quiet temperament. There are a total of 50 breeds here in Queensland, including Australia’s own Belmont Red, who evolved in North Queensland.

The salesyards at Gracemere

We latched on to a cattle farmer, older than us, (or rather he latched on to us). He has three land holdings, tiny in the scale of Australian holdings and more in line with New Zealand farms. He has Belmont Reds and is fiercely passionate about them, as is any single breed cattle farmer the world over.

However for all these grand figures quoted above, the sale today was a shrunken version of the normal event. The recent political crisis concerning live exports of cattle to Indonesia, and the temporary ban in place, has pulled the plug on cattle trading. The whole future of the industry is in question, at least for now. I was pleased to learn that there are abattoirs still operating in the region, two just locally, so there is still an outlet for cattle ready for kill. However the crisis remains for those ready for export, ready to be finished in Indonesia in their feed-lots. According to the media, who was responsible for raising this issue, there are those farmers who are ready to go out and shoot their herds rather than see them starve to death. While this is a real problem ethically, the knee jerk reaction has not considered the repercussions. There are not the abattoirs to handle the quantities of livestock and even then, Indonesian people do not have the resources to stock the frozen meat.

We stayed for just under an hour, careful to keep our hands in our pockets; we did not think it would be very humane to have a beast on a rope behind our rig. We do travel slowly but not that slowly! From there we drove into the "town” of Gracemere, expecting a less classy suburb of Rockhampton. I had seen or heard media reports of a negative nature about the place, however bad stuff can go down anywhere. Instead we found a small country town with a shopping centre as big as Onerahi, but with service industries such as light engineering on the outskirts and the residential area no more or less than anywhere else. We purchased fresh bread for lunch and the daily newspaper and returned to our camp which is just down the road toward Rockhampton.

I quickly packed up our lunch and we headed off to the Botanic Gardens. These are situated on the south western edge of the city, beside the Murray Lagoon, and were established 130 years ago. There are many tropical plants and trees here and it is just lovely to wander through the plantings. We walked quite randomly along the pathways confused by the poor map but found our way easily back to the cruiser. The park also houses a small free zoo, an absolute gem with a variety of Australian wildlife. There we saw kangaroos, snakes, monitors, dingoes, wallabies, wombats and most especially, koalas. This was the first time I had seen a koala here in Australia apart from those on road signs, although disappointingly not in the wild, not so confined that they could not find their way into the gardens if they had a mind to escape.

My first koala in the flesh

When I was very small, but old enough for my youngest sister to have become a real person, my mother’s brother came across to Australia for a holiday. This was quite something in our family in those days, and he returned with three stuffed koala bears, one for each of us. The smallest one was given a haircut by my youngest sister and never really recovered, I think the middle sized one still sits in a place of honour in my second sister’s house and my own one split and disintegrated just recently. He must have been nearly fifty years old; he’d had a good innings. Because of this early encounter with koalas, I was looking forward to seeing one in the flesh. The three in today’s zoo were just as cute and charming as my own veteran, but I was disappointed to discover that their rear ends were reminiscent of wombats, rather than the tidy flat back ends of their stuffed counter parts. Now interestingly one of the interpretative signs confirmed that the wombat is most closely related to the koala. This disappointment is commonly experienced by those who view monkeys in the flesh for the first time, unless they have followed National Geographic documentaries carefully.

After leaving the gardens we drove into the city, stood in a queue at our bank for longer than is acceptable, picked up the fifth of the six expected pieces of mail and indulged in sundaes at our favourite Scottish restaurant. Our trip home was slow; we thought ourselves caught up in Rockhampton’s rush hour however discovered closer to home that there had been a car accident and rubber-neckers were causing mayhem.