This week Penny Button will do something no one in her family, in more than a century on the land, has even had to contemplate: she will sell every last cow in her possession.

Button’s Crossmoor property lies on the Thomson river just outside of Longreach, the outback Queensland town hardest hit by the state’s most widespread drought on record.

Crossmoor may be just the latest in a long line of family-run cattle operations in this district to be forced to fully “destock”. It’s wise to preserve country and sell stock while they’re still in good shape. But that makes it no easier for Button.

Selling up is made all the harder by the fact it means the end of the continuous bloodline of Santa Gertrudis bulls and calves imported years ago by her father-in-law, Viv Button.



“That’s 60 years of genetics gone – that will take years to get back,” Button tells Guardian Australia from the deck of her homestead.

The majestic tin-and-timber house, more than a century old and grandly proportioned, is set in an oasis of trees. Beyond the green, the desiccated country all around can just be glimpsed.

It is not the end of the line for Button as a farmer. But it is the beginning of the kind of extraordinary hiatus that drought inflicts on farming families in this region. Here families are forced to make do with virtually no income when the drought hits hard.



This is the kind of hunkering down that can either prove a farmer’s resilience to herself, or sadly push those whom Button describes as the “gentler souls” to breaking point. “My attitude is that the captain goes down with the sinking ship and you never give up,” she says.

“You’re dealt a hand and at the end of the day it’s up to you. I would hate to see generations of hard work just lost.”

In these times you live on borrowed money. You keep the banks at bay by paying the interest on your loan. You live like a miser. And you wait for rain, if not this summer or the next. You wait for the grass to grow again, so you can buy back the bones of a new herd. Then you hope that in two years’ time you will have something to take to market and income will be a part of your life again.

So this is not unprecedented, a farmer selling her stock. But this drought is now unprecedented in scale – affecting a record 80%-plus of the state, or nearly 1.5m sq km – and its impact on one of Australia’s rural heartlands is building.

While the “millennium drought” ran for the better part of eight years up to 2009, no individual region suffered more than two failed summers in a row. Now the spectre of a fourth dry summer is looming in places such as Longreach and the paralysing effect on the state’s $1.2bn-a-year livestock trade is provoking deep concern. Can the outback communities that survive largely on beef and wool money survive this?

A sheep skull lies at the edge of a dry dam on the property Rio Station in Longreach. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

The sale of Button’s remaining herd this week could be the family’s last source of cash flow from cattle for a year or more.



Crossmoor lies off a dirt road about 70km north of Longreach, the self-styled “gateway to the outback”. Longreach, about 1,100km north-west of Brisbane, is a magnet for “grey nomads”, middle-aged travellers passing through on caravan odysseys. Backpackers from Paris and London on working holidays pull beers at the local pubs. The funk of animals held in trucks and train carriages lingers on the edge of town. The sun is scorching even in winter.

Bureau of Meteorology figures indicate Longreach and its surrounds are suffering worst of all in the current drought. There have been drier places over the past two years, namely the perennially parched Birdsville and Boulia on the fringes of Australia’s red-desert centre. But in Longreach just 312mm of rain fell in the 24 months to April – 64% below its long-term average.



Thus Longreach appears “the town that is furthest below normal”, according to Blair Trewin of the bureau’s climate-monitoring section.



A local agriculture department expert, David Phelps, says while Longreach folk may not be aware of the statistics, a visit by the prime minister, Tony Abbott, (who copped a serve in the Longreach Leader newspaper for failing to cover up with a broad-brimmed hat) was enough to indicate they were at the “fair dinkum epicentre of the drought”.



The warnings over climate change raise the prospect of more frequent and prolonged droughts like this. But the stoic attitude of many farmers to this kind of future is typified in the views of another Longreach grazier, Phillip Owens: “We certainly live in an arid part of Australia and we have come to expect floods and famines. Climate’s certainly continually changing and I don’t think we can ignore the science behind it. For whatever reason it is what it is and we’ve just got to learn to cope with it.” Owens and his wife Lyn de-stocked their property Dundee some time ago.

In fact only a smattering of beasts remains throughout the entirety of this famed cattle and wool district, which lies almost exactly at the centre of Queensland.



From the air, the plains around Longreach are now a patchwork of burnt orange and charcoal swirls. The orange is the dirt, the swirls are patches of native Mitchell grass, dead or dying as roots two metres deep grasp vainly for water.



A dam bottoms out on a cattle property in Longreach. Just 312mm of rain fell in Longreach in the 24 months to April 2015 – 64% below its long-term average. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

In better times, the Mitchell grass serves as what a stock management consultant, Desiree Jackson, describes as “meat and potatoes” for cattle on the plains. Two and a half years of no rain to speak of has reduced the grass to dark stubble with the nutritional value of cardboard. Only winter rain can spark the growth of “herbages”, which Jackson says is like “ice cream” for cattle.

Not that there will be anything much apart from kangaroos to enjoy the ice cream. Kangaroos, the symbol of Qantas, the national airline born in Longreach, are regarded as pests by local farmers who can see the quick-breeding marsupials wipe out their cattle fodder before they can even get hoofs back to pasture. Jackson says the shotgun remains the most humane method available of controlling the kangaroos. A farmer might gain a permit to shoot 1,000.

For now, many kangaroos are dropping dead of thirst and hunger around Longreach’s drier parts. But Button estimates there are at least 10,000 on Crossmoor alone, where they can avail themselves of what Button describes as “an abundance of beautiful bore water from the Great Artesian Basin”. But no amount of water infrastructure can provide enough irrigation to revive the Mitchell grass on an 80,000 hectare property. For that, the heavens are required.



Showing how quickly fortunes can turn, Button says 2013, owing to rain the previous year, was “still quite a good year”. There has been no rainfall of note since then. Button, who has herself run cattle properties since 1971, has never encountered a dry like this.



At the beginning of 2014, she had 1,800 breeding cows. Within months the family made the decision to get them all off the property into agistment – paying to graze them on greener routes elsewhere. Another dry summer has forced their hand. Last Thursday they sold “preg-tested” breeders and trucked them away. This week they will muster their final 500 cows and calves in two sweeps of Crossmoor.



Cattle at a molasses supplement feed station at a drought-hit property in Longreach. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Button took over the property in 1991 with her husband, Ian, from a partnership that included a Brisbane chemist. They had run a cattle and sheep operation 20 years earlier on a property called Welford, further to the south-west near Windorah. It was drier but more provident country for grazing, Button says. They lived in a formidable mud-brick abode which featured built-in shooting vantage points – relics of an earlier time of warfare between white settlers on the frontier and the dispossessed Indigenous people of south-west Queensland. The founding property owner, Richard Welford, the son of an English barrister, was murdered by an Indigenous employee while building cattle yards in the 1880s.



The couple shifted the Crossmoor homestead from near the front entrance to the property just off the road to a hill 8km back. Button wryly recalls the blunt country humour her husband invoked at the time: “You don’t want your house near the main road. People might steal your tools and take your wife. Then you’d need to lock up your tools.” Since Ian’s death in 2006, it is his wife who runs the whole operation with her son Hugh and his bride Amanda.

Dressed in a white T-shirt and jeans, Button has a worldly, cultivated air and an eye for aesthetics. “I am determined to have a standard of lifestyle here that people can have in the city, a nice house and garden, and whatnot,” she says.

The hallway in her homestead is the size of many city living rooms. “The old boys were pretty generous,” Button says.

The magnificent home and the outdoor adventures that beckon beyond it make up what she says is “a lovely life, and a lovely life for kids”. The family loves to have friends visit, especially with children from the city. Button’s rose bushes are a casualty of the big dry but the grass lawn stands up still to the salt of bore water. The pool remains full.

The homestead once hosted a dozen employees who worked the property. A long wooden table on the veranda that Button dug out for a dinner party – once used to feed all those men – is a relic from that past. Now the farm is run by the most efficient unit imaginable: a three-person crew of Button, Hugh and Amanda.



Asked about running Crossmoor, an 32,000 hectare expanse with its boundaries stretching up to 20km from the house, Button jokes: “It’s just a little place, this one.” Welford was four times the size.



Button concedes that were the money there for it, more workers would be welcome. “Ideally we’d like to have a bit more of a hand because we just don’t draw breath,” she says.



“We still have a lovely life but there’s lots of weekends we do a lot of work. We spend an enormous amount of time on maintenance. Fences, yards, vehicles, motorbikes, it all needs maintenance.”

Graziers like Button can expect at best around $2.20 a kilogram for every beast of theirs that winds up in a meatworks. At the other end of the supply chain, a punter buying a steak in a restaurant in Brisbane would easily pay the equivalent of $160 a kilogram. Like all graziers, Button wonders where the margin goes in between.

“We’re probably bad businessmen,” she says, adding that hardly any of this class of “price takers” competes among themselves. But she says: “We’re very independent. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”



Asked if a life of physical work keeps her young, she replies, amused: “Well I don’t know. Sometimes I don’t think so. But the doctor told me I was in the top 30% of my age the other day. I was pretty chuffed about that.”



Button oversees the musters herself from the cockpit of her Cessna light aircraft, performing a role filled in times past by four men on horseback. She normally relishes the experience, which begins in the “early morning daylight”.



Another day begins in Longreach, with the sun set to scorch the earth once more. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

“The weather is just ideal as far as the coolness, the clear morning, it’s just perfection,” she says. “With me the only person in the plane, the plane flies so easily. Because you’re not in a built-up area, it’s very relaxing, there’s not too much radio procedure. And if you have a visitor that comes in a plane, they can just taxi up to the back door. That’s pretty nice.”



Spotting the cattle from overhead, Button relays positions to Hugh and Amanda on the ground on their motorbikes, who bring in the beasts with the help of a team of six kelpies.



Though some graziers’ children are discouraged from staying on the land, Hugh chose at 21 to give up life as a builder in Brisbane to return to the family farm. Through him, Button can see past the drought to the continuation of the family’s life on the land.



“He’s keen as mustard and it’s just wonderful he wants to do that,” Button says. “Hugh’s a new-wave grazier, well-educated, fresh and modern ideas, and can see a real future on the land.”

Unprecedented though the drought may be, Button says it was one of the “foreseeable” factors for graziers. “Somehow we have to all just suck it up.”



But an unforeseeable event, the Gillard government’s banning of the live cattle trade in 2011 after revelations of cruelty in Indonesian abattoirs, was one of many factors contributing to a perfect storm conspiring against the rural economy, Button says.



The influx of those beasts to domestic markets reduced prices by about a third, limiting returns at a time when farmers were trying to bounce back from the “millennium drought” – and unknowingly on the verge of something worse.



David Phelps says three-quarters of the Mitchell grass is likely to be dead. The rest could take two summers to recover, assuming the rain comes. For the plains around Longreach to have taken on this hue of “deathly grey” for more than two years is uncharted territory, he says.

Most people have become very resilient – they have to be. It is an amazing feature of rural people Penny Button

Some graziers thought they were “drought-proofing” themselves by buying properties as far apart as Mount Isa and Longreach, Phelps says. But the breadth of this drought has put paid to that.



Those who expanded through bank loans when the last drought broke “didn’t get to breed or trade their way out”, he says.

Mark McGovern, an economist at the Queensland University of Technology, says the willingness of banks to lend during an outback property boom made for a “textbook” subprime mortgage crisis.

As property values drop, triggering loan-to-valuation ratios that prompt banks to step in, a handful of graziers in Longreach and more elsewhere have gone to the wall.

Button is confident her family farm, now stripped of its productive income, has the ability to pull through. Her sympathy goes out to the others who, having overextended financially in a forlorn attempt to expand, will find it harder to survive.

The Queensland Liberal National party senator Barry O’Sullivan says he expects more farms to fall and he sees moral hazard in an attempt by government to save them. Locals talk of banks already sizing up repossessions even as a moratorium on seizures is under way.

Some see glimmers of consolation. Phelps says family operations that have voluntarily given up income by unloading their cattle have made the right choice, allowing land the time to properly recover. Longreach in the 1960s was “by all reports a dust bowl”, when drought-stricken farmers allowed cattle to eat up virtually every last stalk of grass, he says.



Button says she feels “both sides of politics” have let rural Australia down. She says the absence of any real plan to develop outback Queensland – the last major dam being five decades ago – overshadows any number of drought-relief loan schemes of dubious value to savvy rural operators with an eye on horizons longer than five years.

But Button says it is inevitably the graziers’ responsibility to put enough away in good times to hold on in the droughts they know will always come. If nothing else, droughts could be an opportunity for a farmer normally bound by the routine of working the land to “go away and do something else, like take a holiday”, she says.



“You mustn’t get too consumed by it,” she says. “Most people have become very resilient – they have to be.

“It is an amazing feature of rural people. People are determined to survive and determined to make the best of the situation. Resilience comes with time and because people have to be. But that is easier for some than others.”

