‘The station? Wow. Where to start?’ They’d be at the homestead soon. She tapped the steering wheel. ‘Setabilly has been in our family for a hundred and ten years. Compared to Aboriginal history, which sits something past forty to sixty thousand years, of course that’s nothing, but for us we have loved it for a long time. The holding sits at over a million acres and technically could carry up to eight thousand head, but we don’t have the people power for that at the moment. It’s around two thousand now, plus calves, which is about a thousand too many breeders for the drought in Granny Mim’s opinion, but my brother disagrees.’

She turned to look at him. He watched her thoughtfully. His brows had climbed at the numbers she’d been listing. ‘What’s that acreage in hectares?’ he asked.

‘Four hundred and sixty-two thousand, eight hundred.’

He smiled. ‘Is that roughly?’ The teasing Zac was back. ‘It’s hard to comprehend one holding of that size. It sounds so enormous.’

She shrugged. ‘Anna Creek Station in South Australia is Australia’s largest station, and it’s six times our size. So much of the land is dry and the foliage is sparse, so you need the size to carry the cattle.’

‘So what do you do for water in the centre of the Australian desert?’

‘It’s not all desert. We have eighty kilometres of frontage to the Finke River, though most of that runs water thirty feet below the surface, so dams are the mainstay. It helps that we have a few permanent surface waterholes, but that still leaves a lot of distance between water for the cattle. That’s where the dams and bores come in.’

‘I can’t quite get my head around that amount of land. So how do you muster the cattle?’

She laughed. ‘Watch a lot of cattle shows, do you?’

‘Not a lot, but I did see the Paul Hogan crocodile movies when I was a kid. Do you use horses and dogs like on the TV?’

‘Not us. That’s a different part of Australia. Though we have a yard dog. In the centre of Australia, the lack of surface water pretty well takes working dogs out, though there are a few. Too much distance between water for them – they get too hot, exhausted and die if they get too single-minded chasing cattle. There are plenty of wild dogs, but I’m not sure how they survive. We mostly use quads or bikes, and aerial mustering, which we rent. And now with Jock’s bores we do bore management and the stock automatically move closer.’

‘And other water sources?’