Helicopter Cowboy

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31729, 12 July 1968, Page 11

Helicopter Cowboy

(N.Z.P.A. Staff Correspondent) SYDNEY, July 11. The jet age has reached one of the remotest corners of the Australian outback, with the introduction of a helicopter to round up wild cattle on a lj million-acre station in Western Australia. The familiar figure of a stockman on horseback with a couple of dogs has been replaced by a helicopter carrying a stockman armed, not with a rope, but with air-to-ground radio. Since the helicopter eowboy was introduced on the rambline Thiess Holdings property at Mount Hart, in the Kimberley ranges, this year, more than 2000 wild cattle have been rounded up.

Many of them have been flushed from scrub-covered hillsides where no stockman on horseback could hope to muster.

When a herd is spotted by the helicopter pilot, the stockman radios its location to a ground party, station cattie are moved into a clearing as a decoy, and stockmen take up positions on the flanks, forming on open-ended circle. Diving and hovering, the helicopter chases the wild herd into the waiting circle, and the animals are driven off to branding yards at the out-stations.

The helicopter costs *9O an hour to operate, and as this is the average price of a bull at the Derby meat works, 140 miles away, a bull has to be yarded every 60 minutes to make it profitable. “So far, we have been averaging three bulls an hour,” said the pastoral manager (Mr Peter Murray).