Host: Blythe Calnan
Location: Middle East & Yarrie Station, Pilbara
Well hello all, I’m not a cattle station, farm, feedlot or anything grand. My business, BMC Consulting, consists of plain old, lil old me, Blythe Calnan. I’ve been invited to be involved in Central Station as my job see’s me working in the Middle East as a consultant providing support for Australian exporters & foreign importers who receive our sheep and cattle.
At home in the yards at Yarrie Station.
I am the daughter of a mining engineer and a school teacher who fortuitously landed at a small mining town called Shay Gap in the Pilbara with 5 children and a menagerie. The menagerie included a few horses and so we came to know the station on which Shay Gap was built, Yarrie. My time at Yarrie with the Coppin family as a child was pivotal in fostering a passion for the beef industry & agriculture that burns stronger than ever today. Yarrie hosted Central Station earlier on this year and you can read about them here.
The Calnan clan
These days I’ve been based back at Yarrie, but there have been many adventures in between. I attended a private girls school in Perth, and hated most minutes of it, but in hindsight all the ‘girl power’ probably did lead me to never doubt I could achieve anything I put my mind to. After a short university appearance I headed up to the Kimberley and worked on Springvale & Moola Bulla stations, which introduced me to a different station life than what I was used to with extra camps, crew and cattle.
I then explored different industries which taught me many valuable skills I use today. I worked in the propagation section of a native nursery, giving me an appreciation of the miracle that every plant is, and the reminder that all farmers are gardeners. I worked on a pearl farm nestled in the spectacular buccaneer archipelago; this was hard work, with a small team living on a tiny house boat. This taught me many things about conflict resolution, finding common ground with people and reward for hard work, finishing lines early equaled fishing trips! I drove a coach giving tours of a bauxite mine, which made me learnt that to engage people you need to know your facts, but also entertain.
I worked on the mines in many different roles, mill rat, machinery operator & crew leader. The biggest thing I learnt from this was the value of systems and how they can increase your safety, productivity and quality, I believe there is a great deal we can learn and apply in our agricultural systems.
During all of this I travelled. Mostly to countries that do not enjoy the high standard of living that we do in Australia. South America, Eastern Europe, Central & Eastern Asia and Africa all taught me to never take what we have in Australia for granted, to have sympathy for others, persevere through uncertainty and that communication is so much more than words. And through all of this I saw that people who succeeded were passionate, so with all of these skills I headed back to what I was passionate about: cattle.
Mustering sheep and goats in the Mongolian Gobi by dromedary camel.
I returned to Yarrie to work for the first time as an adult and reveled in the hard work, steep learning curves and family environment. My childhood friend from Yarrie, Annabelle, was off traveling the world undertaking a Nuffield Scholarship on the Australian Live Export Trade which lead to her being asked to undertake some consulting work in the Middle East region. At a time when they needed some extra hands on deck to undertake some festival programs, I was recommended due to skills in animals handling, cultural exposure and my adventurous nature.
For me that was the start of an amazing career, for the last few years my role has been providing support to exporters & importers of Australian livestock in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Jordan, Oman and Israel. To begin with this role was providing support for gradual voluntary change, this changed at the end of 2011 with the abhorrent footage shown in ‘Bloody Business’.
The trade was reopened with new regulation packaged as the ‘Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System’ (ESCAS). This system places the onus on the Exporter to maintain control of their supply chain and report back to DAFF with independent audit reports on their performance. My work now revolves around aiding markets understanding and implementation of ESCAS and Australian Industry and Governments expectations.
This involves everything from training the labour in stock handling and animal husbandry, implementing & training on standard operating procedures, assisting vets and management access information they need, advising on facility improvements or modifications to meeting with management and Government officials to explain what, why and how things need to progress be part of the supply chain involving Australian animals and the potential consequences of non compliance.
At work in the Middle East with some young racing camels, the muzzles are to prevent picking up rubbish or undesirable food stuffs. They are fed & treated like royalty!
I travel a lot, I stay in hotels a lot and I get to see amazing places. It does sound like a dream job, but keep in mind the travel involved in your last big holiday. Think of working in extremely challenging conditions before, after and during that travel, and think of how much you appreciate your own bed, your family and your friends when you get home.
I manage it with a family who copes with ‘I’m in town for three hours, lets do dinner’, friends who cope with ‘sure I’ll come to your wedding as long as it doesn’t clash with any Islamic ritual slaughter events’ and a boyfriend who copes with ‘I need to be overseas next week sorry, can you drive me 3 hours to the airport, change the holiday plans and cope with 3 dogs on your next work trip’.
I love my work as I know how important it is not only for improving Australian and global animal welfare, but for ensuring our livestock producers have markets operating for their livestock that meet expectations and regulations. I was recently awarded the Cattle Council Rising Champion for 2014, which gives me an amazing opportunity to be an agvocate for this industry that I am so passionate about.
With Sudanese sheep in market
Throughout the year other hosts will have filled you in on the devastating effects of a knee jerk, politically fueled ban on live exports and the ongoing effects that the introduction of the Exporter Supply Chain Assurance System has had. This week I am going to hopefully give you more of an insight into why these things occurred and escalated to the footage you may have seen on TV and share with you how that changed the ways things happen on the ground in our foreign markets by sharing the processes now in place to regulate the treatment and processing of Australian animals. I’ll also introduce you to a few people who look after our animals and have them explain why they like them so much!
Archives

Episode 60. Jess Di Pasquale – Equine adventures in Australia and abroad
Jess Di Pasquale is a born and bred Territory girl. Even though her childhood was colored with living on and visiting cattle stations, she went on the excel in the English equine discipline of Mounted Games, competing overseas 3 times while Representing Australia. In this episode, Jess shares her latests plans to compete in the […]

Episode 58. Danyelle Haigh – Don’t judge this book by its cover
Let’s be honest, we love to judge. It’s second nature to take someone at face value and make assumptions about them. In social science, this phenomenon is called schema are mental structures that an individual uses to organize knowledge and guide cognitive processes and behaviour. So what that means, is that we use Schema to categorize objects and […]

From brats to bovines
Written by Sarah Johnson It started off as a distant dream back when I was in high school. You know.. the good old year 10 subject “careers”, when it’s that dreaded time where you’re almost an adult and have to start making career choices. Everyone else was expressing that they wanted to become lawyers, engineers, […]

Episode 57. Luke Hayes – Venturing off the pastoral pathway
Luke Hayes was born a 6th generation pastoralist on Deep Well Station in Central Australia. You’d be forgiven if you assumed that Luke was planning to continue in the same line of work as the previous 5 generations of his family – it just makes sense, right? However, that is not Luke’s story. As a […]

Rain man
Written by James Christian There’s nothing more satisfying than having a property owner leave you in charge for a bit while they take off on holiday, and when they return you can honestly report that nothing is broken or lost, and that the livestock are healthy and fat, the dams are full and the grass […]

Episode 55. Tanya Heaslip – An Alice Girl
Tanya was raised on a cattle station north of Alice Springs during the 1960s and 1970s. The stories from her childhood sound like something out of book – too wild and wonderful to be true. As it turns out – they are so extraordinary Tanya has published them into a memoir called An Alice Girl, […]
First Impressions Count
When is it too early to ask your new boss about the existence of aliens? Day two, probably. So we’re out on a windmill run. The station owner might need a hand pulling a windmill (or is it pulling a bore? Not sure….) As he climbs the precarious ladder up the side of this rusty […]

An Alice Girl
An Alice Girl is Tanya Heaslip’s extraordinary story of growing up in the late 1960s and early 70s on a vast and isolated outback cattle property just north of Alice Springs. Tanya’s parents, Janice and Grant ‘the Boss’, were pioneers. They developed the cattle station where water was scarce, where all power was dependent on […]

When the boss bought home a wife
A copy by memory of poems by W. DeBeuzeville, who worked for Berte Wilkinson at Yallowin (a stock dealer in the years 1905, 1906, and 1907, before the days of motor cars). When the boss bought home a wife Yes, he’s married is the old boss now, And leads a quiet life A sitting round […]

Episode 54. Steph Coombes – It takes a village
Welcome to the final Central Station podcast for 2020! As per usual, you’re listening to me, Steph Coombes, who is the host of this podcast and who also manages all of the Central Station platforms. Today’s episode has been inspired by Lucy Daley, who featured on Episode 52. When asked what message would she put […]