Articles > Helimustering in 'Effin Q

Extract from 'No Worries'
On a journey through Australia in 1994, I found myself staying for a while on a huge cattle station in Far North Queensland – ‘Effin Q as the locals called it. I’m not a terrifically keen flyer at the best of times, but the invitation to go ‘heli-mustering’, that is rounding up the cattle by helicopter, proved impossible to refuse. It was clear that my entire Pommie masculinity was at stake...

The muster had started. It was late the next morning (nine) and I was going up in the chopper. If Dick the pilot could just get the engine started.

"She'll be right, mate," he told me with a wink. "Just give her a jump start, no worries." He wandered off across the yard to fetch the Landrover.

'She' was a little plastic bubble with two bucket seats and open sides. Above were three flimsy white blades and an insubstantial white pipe leading to an even flimsier- looking rear propeller. What was I doing? I' m not crazy about flying at the best of times. I knew that heli-mustering was so dangerous that pilots couldn't get insurance.

Dick had got the jump leads on and the blades were whirring. He gestured for me to get in, showed me how to use the headset intercom.

"You'll need these two, mate," came his crackling voice, pointing at a belt and a shoulder strap. "Shouldn't fall out then." He grinned, sucked hard at his drooping roll-up, gave me the thumbs-up, and -

Oh shit.

With a stomach-lurching whoosh we're up in the air, coasting along about a hundred feet or so above the red earth, the little green wattle trees, the bleached stick-trunks of dead eucalyptus, the tiny dots that are anthills -

Oh shi-it.

Dick has seen a cluster of cows. He banks sharply side-ways so I'm suspended by my shoulder straps at a 45-degree angle, nothing between me and the far-below ground -

Oh SHI-I-IT!

He dives. Towards the little, not-so-little, suddenly big trees. The leaves fly, the cows dance out of the airstream. 'Just got to get' em up against that long fence over there, mate, see. Then we push' em up that track and into the paddock.' Before he's even finished speaking -

WHOOSH!

We're off up again, in a giant curve, tilting over his side this time. I'm aware I'm biting my tongue, clutching the edge of the plastic bubble (there isn't even a handle), my body an arc of tension, my mind repeating, This isn't so bad, this is actually quite fu-u-un -

Oh shi-i-i-i-i-t.

The roller coaster takes another dive, we're right in among the trees again, cattle dancing, dust flying, one moment a hundred, the next four feet off the ground.

And that's how it's done. Up to spot the stragglers, down to swoop behind them like a giant mechanical hawk, chasing them through the treetrunks till they're safely in the herd. Later, over a beer, Dick muses on why the cows respond so instantly to the helicopter: 'It's something primeval in them; whether a big bird used to prey on them centuries ago, I don't know.' Thirty years ago, this mustering was done much more slowly by ringers on horseback (Aboriginals many of them) but then this crazy Vietnam veteran turned up, a Yank, used to wear a red headband they say, and now, Australia-wide, the horses are a quaint extra and flying choppers is what every head stockman aspires to do.

Up in the air I'm sort of getting used to it. It's almost boring after a while, if you can be bored and scared stiff at the same time. The first stage, getting the bulk of the herd up against the fence on the long straight dirt track to the paddock, is achieved remarkably quickly. Then we get to the stragglers, the reluctant, recalcitrant ones. Dick has great fun with these.

After two hours we land for a minute and I make an excuse to join Eric in the Toyota. "Just want to see what it looks like from the ground," I say, fooling neither of them. And what it looks like from the ground is -horribly dangerous. I can hardly believe I've been up there in that mad little dancing white bubble.

Eric inches forward. "Come on you old bitch!" he shouts, honking at a straggler. The cow sits down behind a tree. Eric jumps out, claps his hands, chucks little dry logs at her till she leaps up and lollops off. I'm still transfixed by the chopper, one moment noisily right above us, the next a distant white dot in the blue.

"Do these guys ever get their motors stopping?" I ask Eric.

"Yeah. But if they're high enough they can land. The propeller keeps on going, they can bring her down."

"And if it isn't high enough?" Dick is swooping about twenty feet above us now. "If his motor stopped now," Eric shouts, "he'd be duckshit."

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