Lives and Livelihoods

Outstanding achievements by outstanding Individuals

Ian and Kay McBean

Ian McBean arrived in Central Australia with little more than a swag and a saddle back in 1953, for his first taste of life on an outback cattle station.

He worked his way up from a harsh and humble start in frugal stock camps and dusty droving tracks, to become one of the Northern Territory’s most successful family cattle station owners.

Ian, who was born in the Riverina in NSW in 1931, has seven children and is married to former bush nurse Kay. He had an early introduction to life on the land, as the son of a WW1 soldier settler.

The family farm went broke and his Dad joined up for active service again in 1939. After finishing school in Sydney, young Ian and his mate worked their way up to sub-overseers at Gurley Station near Moree in NSW.

This didn’t last long. The land they were working on was resumed for soldier settlement in January 1953. Ian’s mate, Bob Gartery had heard of cattle work at Elkedra Station in Central Australia and wrote to the owner Johnny Driver.

The boys were taken on there and then - and so began Ian McBean’s 50 years of involvement in just about every facet of the Territory cattle industry.

“He gave us a job ringing and droving with Max Shepley, a very well-known cattleman around Alice Springs in those days,” Ian said.

“In September of that year, a mob of us went to the Brunnette Downs Races and I picked up a job there working on the station for a couple of years. In 1955, I went droving with Don and George Booth, taking cattle from Brunette Downs into Queensland.

“In 1956, I bought their plant and continued droving in my own right, taking cattle from Brunnette Downs and Alexandria into Queensland.”

Ian interspersed droving with mustering and breaking in horses on the Barkly before moving across the border to Camooweal later in 1956.

A job in the early 1960s took him thousands of kilometres away into the Territory’s Victoria River District, to drove cattle from Auvergne Station to Queensland.

Suddenly, things took on a whole new perspective for Ian McBean.

“While I was on the road with a mob in 1964, I drew Innesvale Station in a land ballot,” he said. “So I sold out in Camooweal and brought my horses over to my new land. There was absolutely nothing there. No fences, no improvements, nothing! Just a couple of old fallen down yards that the Quiltys had left there a long time back.”

“It was all packhorse mustering in those days, ”Ian recalled. “We’d erect hessian yards as we went, carrying the hessian on the horses, watching at night and would be out for up to six weeks at a time. When droving, we’d travel with a cook, a horse-tailer and three or four ringers to work the cattle. Every ringer had four horses so the horses could have a spell on the long journeys.

“However, in the Innesvale stock camps, we’d have eight to ten ringers and about 90% of them were Aboriginal. They were top men, highly skilled at what they did.”

Ian built up Innesvale into a workable cattle station then, in the early 1980s, sold it off and moved onto his new purchase, nearby Bradshaw Station. Again, he developed the property into a very workable venture before selling out to the Defence Department in 1996 and moving to the Top End to take on Bonalbo Station in the Douglas Daly mixed farming district.

“We now run a small Brahman breeding herd and buy cattle to grow out for the live export trade,” Ian said. “We also grow improved pasture and have increased our carrying capacity from 6-8 beasts per square kilometre, to one beast per hectare.

And how does the future look for Top End cattlemen? “I think there’s an extremely positive outlook for the Territory cattle industry, from the live export side of things,” Ian said.

“ South East Asia now has more meat-eaters looking for a high quality product, and we’re lucky to be in a position where we can supply quickly to this region. We have our ups and downs like any other pastoral or agricultural sector but generally, things are looking pretty bright for the future.”

Ian says he looks back with nostalgia on his old droving and mustering days but while he’s happy to have been part of it, he enjoys the comforts of modern farming and wouldn’t want to go back to his former lifestyle.

Source: Kerry Sharp