Careers

Pandie Pandie Station, most commonly known as Pandie Pandie, also often spelled as Pandi Pandi or Pandy Pandy, is a pastoral lease that operates as a certified organic cattle station in north east South Australia. My Mum took this photo in 1928.

It is situated about 26 kilometres (16 miles) south of Birdsville and 222 kilometres (138 miles) north west of Innamincka along the banks of the Diamantina River in the Channel Country of South Australia. It is also situated toward the northern end of the Birdsville Track.

My Mum took this photo in 1928.

The station was established in 1876 by Robert Frew along with other properties in the area including Annandale, Alton Downs and Planet Downs.^[3] Nearby Haddon Downs station was also taken up by Frew in 1877.

Frew still owned the property in 1881 when he renamed the town of Diamantina Crossing to its present name of Birdsville after being amazed at the amount of birdlife found around the area.

By 1903 Sidney Kidman owned the property, and at this time it was completely destocked after suffering the effects of drought and the death of many cattle.

In 1938, the station was acquired by the Morton family, who held it for 70 years until 2008.

Source https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandie_Pandie_Station#:~:text=It%20is%20situated%20about%2026,end%20of%20the%20Birdsville%20Track.

I joined the board of the Stockman’s Hall of Fame in Longreach in July 2002 and finished my tenure in 2022.
I was Chairman of the Board for 13 years. Peter Hughes is the Chairman now. He’ll support the CEO, Lloyd Mills.

The Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame is a museum located in Longreach, Queensland, Australia, which pays tribute to pioneers of the Australian outback. The centre is also dedicated to Australian stockmen who have shown bravery and courage.

The founder of the Hall of Fame was artist Hugh Sawrey, a well-known painter and former stockman, who had the name registered in 1974, put up the initial funding, and enlisted supporters. His vision was to create a memorial to the explorers, overlanders, pioneers and settlers of outback Australia.

The Diamantina Crossing is a stone causeway across the bed of the Diamantina River, on the route of the old road south from Birdsville township. It was surfaced with concrete in the 1960s. The crossing is not trafficable anymore. You can see why in this image.

The significance and grazing potential of the Diamantina River were recognised by John McKinlay in 1861. When grazing settlement began in the Channel Country, the strategic significance of the crossing became apparent, as it was the only place in hundreds of kilometres where the river narrowed down to two channels and was relatively easy to cross in wet conditions. By 1879 there was a store near the crossing, which within a few years grew into the town of Birdsville. The crossing defined the route from the Queensland

Channel Country to the South Australian markets, which would have implications in shaping the Birdsville Track and Sidney Kidman’s landholdings for a century to come. The old crossing place remained in use until superseded by the bridge on the Birdsville Developmental Road in the 1970s.

You can learn more about the heritage of the Birdsville and Strezlecki Tracks here https://data.environment.sa.gov.au/Content/heritage-surveys/2-Birdsville-and-Strzelecki-Tracks-Heritage-Survey-2002.pdf

The Birdsville Airport is 48m above sea level. I’ve been parking my Cessna 2010 aircraft there for over forty years.
In September 2011, a $1.5 million upgrade was completed which included construction of a new terminal building, resurfacing and the installation of edge lights on runway 14/32 and extensions to the apron area to provide more aircraft parking and manoeuvring space.

GPS Position

25° 5351 S

139° 2051 E

Strip Direction

03 / 21 : 14 / 32

Strip Length

1200 : 1732

Strip Surface

Brown silt clay : Sealed

Jean & Jimmy Crombie are brother and sister. They give us advice when we’re thinking about infrastructure improvements on our organic cattle stations near Birdsville.
Usually I take them for a drive in my vehicle. Jean takes a lot of photos and Jimmy points out landmarks of significance.

They know a lot about this country. We stop for morning tea and lunch and build a small campfire and boil a billy. I appreciate their time and advice.

Where: Simpson Desert | Birdsville | Qld | Australia
What: 25K I 50K | 75K I 100K

The Simpson Desert Ultra is one of Australia’s newest ultra marathons taking place in the heart of the Australian Outback. With distances of 100km, 75km, 50km & 25km, there is something for those new to the ultra-scene, as well as those more accustomed to the gruelling nature of such events. The event takes place near Birdsville on Adria Downs, an organic cattle station in south-west Queensland on the edge of the Simpson Desert and traverses a variety of terrains. From towering sand dunes to rocky gibber plains, it will surely test the limits of each participant and allow them to immerse themselves in a truly unique part of the Australian landscape.

Deirdre Lander was a Non-Executive Director of OBE Organic for 9 years. She completed three terms on the OBE Organic board & finished in June 2022.
She has more than 25 years of Australian and Asian experience as a management consultant, corporate executive, and academic helping organisations implement their business strategy and improve their performance through effective people management.

I appreciated Deirdre’s advice over many years and valued the diverse perspective she brought to our Board deliberations, from her base in Hong Kong.

We hosted Andrew Blinco, OBE Organic’s General Manager Operations & Ziga Drev from Slovenia in Birdsville, in 2019.
I took them to watch the sunset on Big Red, a huge sand dune on Adria Downs Station west of Birdsville.

We had turned to Ziga and the team from Origin Trail for knowledge about blockchain and ways to improve information exchange along the OBE Organic supply chain.

Ziga made a series of tweets about his adventure which you can see here.

Located in Adelaide Street, Birdsville, the Australian Inland Mission Hospital building was erected in 1952-3. It was established in the former Royal Hotel building, the first mission hostel in Queensland and the seventh in Australia. Source Australian Inland Mission Hospital, Birdsville – Wikipedia

These certified organic Herefords are in the Nappanerica Yards on Adria Downs Station west of Birdsville. Herefords fatten easily on the native grasses of the Channel Country. They are well suited to the temperate zone where temperatures can range from 0 degrees Celsius in winter to 47 degrees Celsius in summer.

This relic is aging in the sand near the ruins of the Annadale Homestead on Adria Downs Station. It was used for pumping water back in the early 1900s.

In the early 1980’s a photographer for the National Geographic magazine came to Birdsville to shoot some images of the outback. I took our twins Dalene & Deon out to the ruins of Annadale and he shot a series of images, including this one. You can see the old stone chimney in the background. This photo still hangs in my office in Birdsville. Our son Deon died in 1996 in a helicopter accident. Dalene named her son, our grandchild, after him; Joshua Francis Deon Wray. Another of our daughters, Karen, has a son called Louis, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Deon. This photo was taken in the 1980’s.

We buried our son Deon in the Birdsville Cemetery in 1996. The cemetery houses many old gravesites, bearing witness to the people who lived and worked in and around Birdsville in the early 1900s through to today.

We’ve planted some trees in the years since he passed, and we go there often to remember him.

Sometimes we sit on his gravestone like our daughter Jenna is doing in this photo.

His headstone reads, ‘Some people come into our lives, leave footprints on our hearts and we are never ever the same.’

This is where the bitumen ends near Carcory Homestead Ruins on the road to Bedourie from Birdsville, which is a distance of 180kms. Since I took this photo, the Diamantina Shire Council has sealed more sections of the road and the only section that remains unsealed is the Cuttaburra crossing of Eyre Creek, south of Glengyle Station.

Our family bought Kamaran Downs Station in 1975. It runs about 7000 head of organic livestock. It extends west from Bedourie towards the Simpson Desert and the Mulligan River traverses the western side of the property.

The property is managed Damian & Emma Clarke.

If snakes like these come close to our home in Birdsville, it’s our daughter Jenna who gets rid of them now. Some are deadly and some are harmless pythons. She seems to know the difference.

My granddaughter Ella joined 4000+ others at the Big Red Bash on Adria Downs Station in 2022 to break the Guinness Book of World Records for the largest ‘Nutbush City Limits’ dance! The achievement featured on TV news channels around the world. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/D-Iv1S3BFck

My Dad, Bill Brook, was a short man. He was a successful bush jockey in his younger days. He’s pictured on his favourite horse called Alert. This photo was taken in the 1930’s in our backyard in Birdsville.

Whilst Kevin (Spinny) Monaghan now bides his time riding plant horses on cattle stations, he was a successful bush jockey back in his day. He is being weighed out by the stipendiary steward in charge of the Birdsville Races. This photo was probably taken back in the 1970’s.

In July 2021 the Wangkamadla people’s rights were formally recognised in a native title determination.

The native title encompasses seven cattle stations (including parts of Kamaran Downs Station) one-fifth of the Munga-Thirri National Park and parts of the Simpson Desert, Cravens Peak and Ethabuka Nature Reserve.

A celebration was held in August 2022 at Craven’s Peak and Nell and I flew north in our Cessna 210 to join the ceremony.

The ceremony included a Welcome to Country by Aunty Isabel Tarrago, a smoking ceremony by Trevor Dempsey, speeches and formal presentations.

Cravens Peak Reserve has been renamed as Pilungah Reserve. Learn more here https://www.bushheritage.org.au/blog/introducing-pilungah-reserve

This is all that is left of the house that Nanna lived in. My Mum was named after this place. She was named Dorothy Annandale Gaffney. She married my Dad, William Francis (Bill) Brook in Adelaide. Mum died when I was eight years old.

This photo dates back to about 1910 when my Nanna lived there. You can see multiple buildings in this image, so I guess a lot of people would have lived there at that time. All that’s left standing now is the old stone chimney.

A golf course in the desert means we putt on oil greens.

We were excited to see the Birdsville Dunes golf course being built after so many years of planning. This steel frame was welded together so that we could make the tees for the course.

My wife Nell and Sam are active members of the new ‘Birdsville Dunes Golf Club’ which is located just out of Birdsville. Nell thinks most days are a great day for golf!

Expect to be challenged by crows. They can beat you four nil on the first two holes.

We move cattle around our organic cattle stations depending on the seasons. If we’ve had rain on one station and grass response, we can move cattle from a station that’s missed out on the rains.

On this occasion, we asked Mostyn to move heifers from Murnpeowie Station in South Australia, north, to Alton Downs Station to benefit from the flooding in the Diamantina.

Murnpeowie is located approximately 96 kilometres (60 miles) east of Marree and 102 kilometres (63 mi) north-east of Lyndhurst in South Australia. We bought the property in 1988.

It is managed by Joyleen and Bully Booth. Bully and Joyleen look after the cattle, the land and its history.

This photo of Bully and I, is on the wall of the Birdsville Hotel. We were much younger then! Bully and his wife Joyleen now manage our organic cattle station, Murnpeowie, in South Australia. Bully and his late father Frank, have worked on and managed cattle stations all their lives.

I think this photo was taken near Reuben’s Yard on Adria Downs. It’s hard to tell, but the country looks familiar.

We are slowly removing windmills from service and replacing them with solar pumps.

Rhonda Heslin was the cook at Adria Downs Station for over ten years. Nell and I were always warmly welcomed by Rhonda in her kitchen. She’s retired now. We’ll miss her.

This bronco panel was used up until about the 1950s at Neliaka Yards. Neliaka Yards were part of Glengyle until the early 1980s. In the background you can see old posts on the ground. A flood went through these yards and washed most of the posts to the ground.

Bronco Branding is Australia’s traditional method of branding cattle in the outback. This unique method of branding cattle has been practised on most of the cattle stations throughout Australia. It involves the stockmen mustering the mob and holding them, whilst the catcher, usually the head stockman or experienced ringer, ropes an unbranded beast (clean skin) from his horse. The catch is pulled to the bronco panel or a tree, leg ropes are applied and used to secure the beast to the ground. Source Bronco Branding, Sport of the Outback | Bronco Branding SA

Alton Downs Station is situated approximately 50 kilometres south west of Birdsville and 250 kilometres north west of Innamincka. My Uncle Jack Gaffney lived in these buildings in the early 1900s.

I found this old photo in one of Mum’s albums. The caption reads, ‘Just ready to start from Marree to Birdsville. Jack & Mother in car and myself holding Mrs Gordon’s baby Bob Gordon. 1925.’

Mum would have been 14 years old in this photo. She was born in 1911. Jack Gaffney was my uncle. He owned Alton Downs Station.

I’ve inherited various photo albums from my parents, Dorothy & Bill Brook. The images contained within these albums provide an incredible look back at Birdsville’s history in the early 1900s. Here’s an image of the South Australian Pastoral Commission on a visit to Birdsville around that time. You can see the Birdsville Hotel on the right.

I captured this image of Don Rayment showing Jimmy Crombie his cow hide ropes. I think that they were comparing notes. This one is a three-strand rope with a keeper at the top. They take about a week to make.

This article appeared in the Adelaide Stock and Station Journal on the 5th June, 1957. It tells an incredible story of Len Evans who drilled Coochie Bore on Adria Downs Station for my Dad, Bill Brook. He went down 900m to find water.

‘At the going down of the sun, we will remember them’

We put in a double ramp at the house yards on Adria Downs to ensure livestock can be loaded and unloaded off trucks as easily as possible without the need to walk up or down steep ramps.

These cracks appeared in a road on Adria Downs after rain. The road will need to be repaired using heavy machinery. At a minimum, a grader is required. We’ll probably need some clay too.

Don Rayment manages Adria Downs Station, which means he makes all the decisions on the day to day running of the station as well as planning longer-term improvements to infrastructure. When I get out to Adria, we talk about what is going to happen, what we want to happen and how much it will cost.

Adria Downs Station is located west of Birdsville on the edge of the Simpson Desert. It’s an organic cattle station. This desert country is a mix of sand dunes, rivers, flood plains and gibber flats. Roads go over sand dunes on Adria Downs so that trucks can get to cattle where they are grazing, instead of walking cattle long distances to station infrastructure.

Over the last 20 years of so, my wife Nell and I have been lucky enough to travel around the world, promoting OBE Organic beef from pure heart of Australia. No matter how many times we see our organic beef on the shelf, it always makes us proud!

Ramadan is the ninth month in the Islamic calendar. It is a time when Muslims around the world focus on prayer, fasting, giving to charity, and religious devotion. OBE Organic supplies Muslim consumers around the world, from as far as Riyadh in the Middle East, Indonesia in Asia and as close to home as Western Sydney. We recognise days of significance to our employees and customers, including Ramadan. A couple of years ago, we made a video for social media to share at the start of Ramadan. Our son Anthony participated in the video with a message all the way from the pure heart of Australia. You can watch the video here.

It’s not often we have 16 decks ready to load at one trucking yard. We load about 18 – 20 head per deck. On this day, we were selling about 300 head of fat cattle to OBE Organic. These are usually a mix of steers, heifers, cows and mickey bulls.

Property improvements come in all shapes and sizes. Sometimes we have to spend millions to sink bores and sometimes tens of thousands of dollars are invested in equipment likes motor vehicles and bikes. A crucial tool to improve our properties and to minimise the unnecessary movement of livestock around the property is to build cattle yards. This photo shows a loading ramp under construction at a new yard called Wompanannie on Alton Downs Station. It was built in February 2020.

We’ve been processing OBE Organic livestock at the same processing facility for over 20 years. It’s conveniently located on the East Coast of Australia, meaning we have easy access to airports and seaports to move our certified organic beef around the world. Back in the late 1990’s, the facility was called Valley Beef. Whilst it’s called Stanbroke Beef now, there are many people who have played a critical role in our weekly productions over the years. Jim Friis is one of them. He’s the Plant Manager. I try to catch up with him a couple of times a year to say thank-you.

It’s not often we have 16 decks ready to load at one trucking yard. We normally load about 18 – 20 head per deck. On this day, we were selling about 300 head of fat cattle to OBE Organic. These are usually a mix of steers, heifers, cows and mickey bulls.

This road traverses sand dunes so we’ve had to clay the top of some of the dunes to make them trafficable for trucks.

Nell and I dropped in to see Joyce and Karen on one of our trips to Longreach. We talked about the upcoming Birdsville Races and the idea for a ‘Fashions on the Field’ event featuring outfits created by local artists in collaboration with Red Ridge the Label. You can learn more about the label here Red Ridge the Label

Crotalaria cunninghamii, also known as green birdflower, birdflower ratulpo, parrot pea or regal birdflower, is a plant of the legume family Fabaceae. Crotalaria cunninghamii is known as Mangarr to the Nyangumarta Warrarn Indigenous group. ^Source Crotalaria cunninghamii – Wikipedia

Norman is a bit younger than me. We’ve known each other all our lives. I ran into him recently at the Innamincka Hotel. He works on Durham Downs Station now. When he was younger, Norman served in the Australian Army.

This solar array doubles as a shelter for cars parked at the motel around the back of the pub. These solar panels generate enough power to run the business for about 16 hours a day.

I took this photo as I was flying south from Birdsville to Innamincka.

The Coongie Lakes is a freshwater wetland system located in the Far North region of South Australia. The 21,790-square-kilometre (8,410 sq mi) lakes system is located approximately 1,046 kilometres (650 miles) north of the Adelaide city centre. The wetlands includes lakes, channels, billabongs, shallow floodplains, deltas, and interdune swamps. It lies on the floodplain of Cooper Creek, an ephemeral river flowing through a desert landscape in the Lake Eyre Basin which rarely, after occasional large floods, empties into Lake Eyre. The wetland system has been recognised both as being of international importance by designation under the Ramsar Convention with a listing on 15 June 1987 and being nationally important within Australia with a listing in A Directory of Important Wetlands in Australia (DIWA). Its extent includes the regional town of Innamincka, the Malkumba-Coongie Lakes National Park, the Innamincka Regional Reserve, the Strzelecki Regional Reserve and the Coongie Lakes Important Bird Area. Source Coongie Lakes – Wikipedia

If you look closely, you’ll see the old crossing over the Diamantina River at Birdsville. It’s only a half a meter above the bottom of the river. It was our only access over the Diamantina from the south until the mid 1980’s when a new bridge was built. The new bridge sits about seven meters above the bottom of the river. We are campaigning to have the Old Crossing repaired as you can’t drive over it anymore. Locals go there to catch yabbies.

I took this photo of the Cuttaburra Crossing while flying south from Bedourie to Birdsville. It’s a compelling image, showing how roads that are built up without adequate culverts can slow or halt the flow of waters which are making their way south to Lake Eyre.

We use our Cessna 210 aircraft to more around our cattle stations. Sometimes the animals like to come and meet us to say goodbye before we take off, back home to Birdsville!

Nell and I purchased our Cessna in February 1981. We bought it from Peter Taylor of Rex Aviation for $125,000. They stopped making these Cessna’s soon after. We use it to fly around the properties and to Adelaide. We’ve had it for forty years and together have done about 10,000 hours. Nell is a pilot too.

Back in early 2021, OBE Organic started a campaign to save 1000 Lives through blood & blood product donation. I gave my first donation last year. I was a bit nervous but did it anyway. To-date we’ve encouraged 292 donations which means we’re just 41 donations shy of our target. So it will be early next year that we expect to hit our target … that’s unless we can encourage more of our community to donate before Christmas!

Did you know that anyone who donates between now and Christmas Day will receive a gift tag from Lifeblood, that they can gift to another person to say the donated on their behalf. The need for blood doesn’t take a break, some centres are open on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. To help patients in need during the holiday period, please visit www.lifeblood.com.au and book in to donate.

People are always interested in how OBE Organic began, so I took the opportunity a couple of years ago to record my memories of how OBE Organic began, in the late 1990s.

I don’t really like being in front of the camera, but people tell me it’s important.

We did the same thing ten years earlier. We recorded short interviews with the producers and team members of OBE Organic at the time.
We then created a video series called ‘The people behind OBE Organic’. You can watch it here https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLUviV6IwtW9r8MQgh1J81_EGtds3NSc6S