Host: Wooroona Grazing Co.
Region: Central Highlands, Queensland
Nearest town: Rockhampton/Emerald – both 2 hours in opposite directions
Nearest (and recommended) roadhouse: Duaringa – highly rate the toasted steak sandwiches
Number of cattle: combined carry average across 3 properties is 4000
Number of staff: 3-4
Size of station: The home station is 30,000 acres (12,500 Hectares)
How often and how the mail is delivered: Twice a week, by a mail run car
How often and how the stores shopping is done: Once every two weeks and by going to town and buying bulk.
Blog: https://graziher.wordpress.com
Website: https://www.graziher.com.au
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/graziher/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/graziher/
Hello from “Wooroona”, a cattle property in the Central Highlands of Queensland. Wooroona is a generational cattle property that has been in the Dunne family a touch over 100 years. James O’Grady Dunne purchased it from the Livingston family in 1907 and it has carried down through the generations and here we are today. Six generations later it is a thriving 12,500 hectare property, home to Tim and Kath Dunne and their six children Erin, Claire, Colleen, Kathleen, Patrick and Bill.
Watching grass grow.
Grandad – James ‘Bill’ Dunne, astride a horse outside the second Wooroona homestead (the original burnt down), circa 1930s.
Afternoon tea in the early days of the Dunne family settling Wooroona. Possibly more civilised then than now.
Our family, standing on the grid before the homestead at Woooroona. Taken in 2014 at Easter time.
Wooroona originally ran sheep, which were replaced by cattle due to losses of livestock to spear grass and dingos. It is a mixture of range country and creek flats, with native grasses. European cattle breeds such as Shorthorn and Herefords were stocked for a number of years before moving to the Brahmans around the 1950s.
Art Dunne, Mack & 2 Shorthorns bulls at Wooroona. The two trees still standing today.
The change in breeds came from the area being land that carries the cattle tick and being an area that has its dry years. Where European breeds of cattle will be affected greatly by cattle ticks in and the harsher climates of drought and dry times, the Brahman cattle will endure the dry times as being hardier animals therefore are suited better to the areas conditions.
Calves drafted, ready for branding at Wooroona.
Feeding the weaners.
James (Bill) Dunne (Grandad) decided to trial the Brahman cattle which were a relatively new breed to Queensland. Whether it bears some truth, the tale is told that James Dunne bought the first young Brahman Bull calf for Wooroona in the back of a jeep, tied in a hessian bag.
Assorted mob of cattle ready for drafting, Coffee Pot, a fattening block.
Heading home.
The Graziher magazine is run out of Wooroona by Claire Dunne.
Episode 61. Tylah Bonisch – Her first year as Head Stockwoman
Since she was knee-high to a grasshopper, Tylah Bonisch knew she wanted to work with cattle and horses. She didn’t travel to the north for a gap year, but to start her career in the pastoral industry. In this episode Tylah and I speak about her time in the industry so far, and how she […]
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Flying Shy
Most stations have a plane or a helicopter, and at some point you’re going to get offered a flight. Here’s how to totally ruin your chances of ever having a second go. 6am and we’re just pulling up to the airstrip – a wide gravel road a short way from the homestead. Inside the old […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
