Every week I enjoy seeing the photographs featured in The Saturday Age’s Good Weekend Magazine’s Exposure section on page 3 so it’s a real treat to have one of my photos featured today. It’s a photo from my in-laws cattle station in central Queensland where they are suffering the effects of the current drought. Caption is below.
The grass has all but dried up at Riverside Station, a sixth generation family beef farm with 12,000 head of cattle on 80,000 acres near Nebo in central Queensland. The remaining grass lacks adequate nutrients, so 40 kilogram "lick blocks" are distributed through the paddocks packed with protein, calcium, multi-vitamins, and sweetened with molasses. "The horses were walking lethargically but with heartbreaking enthusiasm toward these blocks," says photographer Charlie Kinross, whose wife's parents run the farm with three of their six children. "The flocks of cockatoos and galahs in nearby trees are particularly noisy at sunset, their squawks sounding as wretched and dry as the land," Kinross says. "They can't remember a drought this bad at Riverside."