*The McArthur children ride out on their property Mystery Park in Central Queensland. Photographer: Henrietta Attard.*

Bush Life, by Beauty in the Bush Collective, published by Affirm Press.
Words: Jessica Howard, Photography: Ellie Morris, Georgie Mann, Camilla French,
Kate Nelder, Lisa Alexander, Lindy Hick, Emma Leonard, Jessica Howard,
Henrietta Attard, Elena Chalker.

Zoom up from the land - way up - to where the earth begins to curve just a little and above you blue sky darkens into space. From up there, what can you see of rural Australia?

Apart from all the brown (you’ll get used to that) there are geometric delineations marking paddocks and tightly-bound lines where ploughs have dragged though the dirt. Roads snake through vegetation, engulfed in billowing dust as hardy drivers try to navigate them. If you squint you might spot some of the 27 million cattle and 74 million sheep that graze on Australian land - and the tin roofs marking the homes of the people who care for them. That’s where you’ll find the green - those lovingly-tended gardens are a silent protest to the climate. They’re respite from the harshness over the fence, and are where pumpkins and zucchinis spring from the horse-poo fertiliser, nurtured lovingly with water pumped from the dam.

You’ll be struck by the vastness. To detractors, it’s a void, but ask any country person, and they’ll say it’s what they love most about their home. Nothing about the landscape is strange to us. From the carpets of wildflowers in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt, to the fertile black-soil river flats of central New South Wales, we know the land in the way urban people can recall restaurants or parks. The difference is our land has often been passed through a number of generations.

Take Mystery Park, a 12,000 hectare cattle property in the lush, green strip of Queensland’s northern coast. Rob McArthur is the third generation of his family to live there, and he and his wife Ainsley are confident they’re nurturing the next who’ll come back to work it.

“We always say we’re raising little graziers,” Ainsley laughs. Only 10-year-old Eliza is still at home, waking early to milk the cow before class. Ainsley homeschooled her five other children before they were sent to boarding school, but says the real learning happened outside of class.

“We feel really strongly about the values that are instilled by growing up as a country kid - the work ethic, connection with nature, food production and the environment - they’re exposed to all of that because of where they live.”

If school isn’t at home, getting to class might involve long periods on dusty buses that rattle down dirt roads, stopping at all the properties along them. Any other time kids are in tractor cabins, sheep pens, or the back of utes shoveling cotton seed. They slot into the lives of their parents and help out when old enough - and in the process absorb knowledge and take on responsibility. They’re exposed to life and death in their rawest forms: watching the birth of calves, and slaughter of pigs for their dinner. They learn how to read animals and the weather, build fences, and drive farm vehicles.

The only consistency in housing in the bush is the inconsistency of it - from Les Murray’s ‘louvred latitudes’ where fibro shacks are extended and remodelled to cater for growing families until they become Frankenstein constructions, to the grand bluestone homesteads on farms in the south, replete with cast-iron fretwork and bullnose verandahs.

Rural living can be harsh and isolating, and homes provide a warm (or cool) sanctuary. When city folk might be at the beach or cinema, country people are at home, on the verandah, or chasing chooks from their garden. The house proud paint mission-brown kitchens white and adorn their walls with rural scenes (few long to be anywhere else). They plant roses with joyous names like ‘Golden Celebration’ and ‘Grand Sicle’, spending hours watering, weeding, and muttering things like:

Just because we live in the middle of nowhere - doesn’t mean we need to act like it.

And to prove it, on Sundays, they lay out a very civil hot roast using meat from the farm, sweating into the gravy as they make it. There are boots at the back step, covered in animal poo and mud - these are never worn in the house - and washing machines full of clothes so dirty any sane person would burn them.

Perhaps rusted corrugated iron sheds are the common marker of rural properties, though most farmers would prefer you to look over to their shiny new one. Driveways range from the epic (30 kilometres long or more) to the quaint with a canopy of bowing gums. Most, if not all, bear property signs, carved from wood or cut from steel to announce to visitors and the world, that this is home.

Seasons are similarly incongruent. In the north, they’re roughly divided into three - the Dry, the Buildup and the Wet, which represent a sliding scale of general hotness with fleeting interludes of sub-20 degree weather. The Dry Season, dull in its consistency, is a long sequence of warm, sunny days marked by the scree of galahs. There are the supremely uncomfortable months as temperatures climb into the 40s, humidity builds and everything wanes including the patience of those enduring it. And finally relief: rain - lots of it - often in the form of monsoon fronts that fill rivers and creeks to overflowing. Then the cycle begins again.

Southerners claim to bear witness to four seasons in one day, and pack both work and gum boots, beanies and broad-brim hats just in case. Perhaps only they experience traditional seasons as Europeans know them. Winter is when all the real weather happens in the south - winds roar off Antarctica and straight into utes even when the windows are rolled up - while rain sets in to chill the bones of anyone not already blown away. Total rainfall is roughly similar to the top of the country, but it falls slowly and consistently, unlike the explosions of the north.

The rest of Australia falls somewhere between these two extremes: enduring Summer and Not Summer: half the year beset with heat and biblical swarms of winged insects, and the other slightly less of both. For those on the land, seasons are more likely to be identified by the activity that consumes them: early Winter becomes Seeding or Harvest depending on your crop; while mid-Summer might be Branding.

Then there’s the cruelly-recurrent super season that trumps them all: drought. When days are spent feeding half-starved livestock, or pulling them from boggy dams. Nights are when the real worry sets in - as idle hands allow too much time to think. Dance lessons are cancelled (and so are holidays) and eyes never waver from the horizon in the hope just one of those clouds will dump its watery guts. But rural Australians are resilient. Creatives find beauty in the despair - and everyone manages to survive the stasis with the knowledge that droughts always end. Even long ones.

Distance is forever a burden, especially when anyone’s ill or injured. Hacked limbs, overdue Mums and sick kids require air flight rescue, or mercy dashes that can break the land speed record. Groceries are bought in bulk, and stored in cold rooms and deep freezers (which never seem deep enough). You either forget the taste of fresh bread, or develop a skill for baking. Smoko remains an institution, and ranges from cheese on biscuits to scones and cakes, depending on how long it's been since a store run. It’s eaten from a tuckerbox under a Kurrajong tree or the verandah in an elaborate spread with hot cups of strong, black tea.

Thomas Keneally had a theory about characters in the bush - that they swelled like yeast to fill the geographical vastness, in the way a nervous person babbles during conversation lulls. And it’s true in a way, hats are big; stories even bigger and utes so old you wonder if they’re roadworthy (probably not). Eccentricities flourish in rural areas because no one’s keeping them in check. And while life is still largely traditional, from it springs incredible innovation and creativity, that we ourselves represent.

Find out more about Beauty in the Bush Collective on Instagram @beautyinthebushcollective

Bush Life

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A Place in Time: Dunlop Station