Cattle and Pearls, it’s all in a Day's Work: Marie Muldoon at Midway

Marie Muldoon works from home, offering exquisite Paspaley pearl jewellery to Paspaley clients around the world.

She had mentioned this to a New York client but nothing had prepared the lady for the ear-splitting bellow that suddenly rent the office air.

Excuse me. What was that?” said the startled buyer.ss

“Stella,” apologised Marie.

Stella is the poddy calf that thinks it’s one of the family. She was protesting at the office door, two feet from Marie’s computer.

That’s because “home” is Midway, a cattle property in the heart of the Douglas Daly, where the phone and email are delivered by VPN dial up and the broadband
service by satellite. The Paspaley head office is a two-hour drive away in Darwin.

Marie and her husband Chris, better known as ‘Mully’, manage the property for the Underwood family of Riveren Station.

The Riveren cattle come to Midway before they are exported, thriving on the lush improved pastures and wet season rain that are the envy of drought-stricken farmers around Australia.

For Marie, her family’s purchase of Midway gave her the best of two worlds. She was able to keep her job with Paspaley, while helping Chris run the property. Balancing the two jobs, however, takes an awe-inspiring discipline.

The pair are up each day at 5.30. After breakfast, Marie takes a brisk walk with the ‘family’: Midway’s five dogs. Stella, the poddy calf, trots along at Marie's shoulder as the dogs shoot madly in and out of the scrub, the dam and the cattle troughs yapping joyously in the dawn.

Marie's in office mode by 7, although the jeans, farm boots and bits of hay in her jumper are a world away from glamorous city outfits. She works until 4 pm, leaving a couple of hours of daylight to help on the property or in the garden.

When we dropped in, Chris was ploughing Marie a new vegetable patch while Stella eyed off the food potential of a box of seedlings he had bought home from a trip to Darwin.

The high tech ‘virtual’ pearls showroom, which doubles as an office for Chris, is a long way from the isolation of her childhood on Riveren.

“When I went to boarding school, we still didn’t have a phone or television. It was only in the mid 80s that we were connected to a landline,” she says.

Returning to the land was a long journey.

Marie left Riveren for a Sydney boarding school at 11, worked in hospitality management in Darwin, events management in Singapore, then for 10 years with Paspaley in sales and retail management.

She crossed paths with Chris, an Elders stock and station agent, at her parents' property

"Chris was a cattle buyer, so he understands the cattle game. He had a Diploma of Agribusiness and some farming knowledge, so he has the skills to run the place.

“He's very keen to try new things and not take people's word for what works," says Marie. "I always wanted to come back to the land, but it took meeting the right person."

With a prospective son-in-law in sight, the Underwoods bought Midway two years ago and Chris set about transforming the property which, at 7,000 acres, is the equivalent of just one of the smaller paddocks on the million acre Riveren property.

While battling the district's weed problem can be challenge, the couple is thriving, and Chris is leading the district in new cell grazing techniques.

It is an intensive method of farming "but we love our animals", says Marie, with Precious the Jack Russell on her lap at the computer and Stella, the poddy calf, bellowing again for attent.