The saltwater muster

Updated

The herd is on the move. Welcome to Tasmanian cattle country, dubbed the coastal outback.

They are scenes that could be from a blockbuster movie, but it's real life.

The pictures of a cattle muster on a unique and spectacular Tasmanian property tell the story of a proud tradition of moving cattle between island paddocks.

"We probably do a dozen of these rides — maybe not the same amount of cattle, sometimes we might take some bulls over or we might take some cold cows off — but we do it quite regularly and we've got a good core of locals that like to do this," farmer John Hammond said.

"It's good fun, we've developed some great friendships and it's probably the aspect of the job that I really enjoy the most."

The cleanest air in the world

John and Keith Hammond are an institution in north-west Tasmania.

Their American drawl stands out, a leftover of a childhood spent on the Hammond's broad-acre wheat farm, in an area known as the Oklahoma pan handle.

But they are fourth generation Tasmanian farmers; in their early 20s they swapped the windswept plains of Oklahoma for the windswept islands of their mother's land.

It couldn't be more different — Robbins and Walker islands are perfect beef country, with a system of natural sandbars and tidal channels that allows the Hammonds to work cattle between them.

"Fifty kilometres north, at Cape Grim, they've got one of the five baseline air monitoring stations that are positioned around the world and when the air is blowing from the west it's the cleanest air in the world," John said.

"It's cleaner than what they measure in Antarctica, that's what they say and they've got the best instruments in the world to measure it."

The cattle have been enjoying the good life on Robbins Island over Summer, but the good life for this mob is coming to an end.

They are leaving their isolated island home for the Hammonds' Montague farm on Tasmania's mainland.

"This is what I call ice-cream country, because a lot of the time of the year it's pretty soft for cattle," John said.

A posse of local stockmen and women are willing volunteers, and today they are moving a mob of 800 along the 11-kilometre route that sees the cattle winding their way between pooling seawater and a rushing incoming tide.

"We were the first ones to figure it out," John said.

"Nobody had taken cattle along here — mainly because the mouth of the Montague River gets very, very soft up there and probably anyone who had tried to ride a horse through, bogged it as I did the first time I tried. So we just moved further out and explored around.

"[We] found if we came halfway out to the main channel we could cross the channel without much trouble."

Local cowgirl Jocelyn Flint is a regular Robbins Island musterer and loves the chance to work the cattle and gallop on her trusty steed.

"You never get over the scenery, it's beautiful. It's just so different every time," she said.

"These cows are good today, sometimes they're totally feral and we've got to chase them full-bore to slow them down and turn them ... it's never the same, it's never boring."

The caviar of the beef world

The Wagyu cattle are special — they are known as the caviar of the beef world. They fetch top dollar at market and this mob is worth more than $3 million.

That is why these brothers first went into Wagyu more than 20 years ago.

They were lucky to get the genetics back in the early 1990s.

The breed had only ever been farmed in Japan, where Wagyu is considered a national treasure.

The Wagyu genetics were not cheap, and they came with no guarantees.

Just 50 per cent of those initial embryos survived.

"Initially we concentrated on pedigrees and marbling and producing genetics that would suit what would be profitable in Japan, whereas in recent years we're looking more towards what is more suitable for us in Australia as well as still the export market and the Asian market," Keith said.

While the Australian market for Wagyu beef is growing, the Hammonds are exporting 80 per cent of their Wagyu.

In the early days the cattle were sent live to a Japanese feedlot. Today it is processed locally, boxed and branded as Robbins Island Wagyu, and sent across Asia.

"Singapore and China will be the two main ones, Korea is a new customer that has just come on board," John said.

It has taken more than 20 years to build up the numbers to a herd of 7,000, with 2,000 breeding cows.

In 2016 there is a new push by the family to introduce polled or cattle without horns, into the herd.

"From a management point of view and from an animal health point of view and we think in the future at some point, having horned animals in Australia might be quite hard," Keith said.

Invitro-fertilisation is a big part of the Hammonds' operation.

"What we've done is we've marked all the calves and tagged them, and then we've mothered them up to the mothers so we know the genetics of every calf," he said.

"Then we'll follow that through to when they are slaughtered, and the reason is that with Wagyu it's so important to try and identify your best producers because there is such a variation in price received."

It can be thousands of dollars, so tracking each individual animal is vital to a healthy bottom line.

"If you have a marbling score of nine, the current grid is $13 a kilo dressed, so for a 400-kilo-plus dressed animal you're looking at a $5,000 carcass whereas one that doesn't marble, you could have a $3,000," Keith said.

The marbling score is a fat standard set by Meat Standards Australia, and measures the level of thin spidery webs of fat throughout the cut.

They say the marbled fat in the Wagyu beef has a lower melting point, which when cooked tends to infuse into the meat.

A score of nine is high — either way it translates to an expensive steak with a price tag of $100 in a top Australian restaurant.

For a job well done

The Hammonds like to cook their Wagyu beef on the barbecue.

"For Wagyu beef I don't think there's any real trick," Keith said.

"Some people turn it once either side, others turn it once.

"We like it sort of medium, enough for the fat sort of melts through and you get the taste of the beef with the fat melted a bit through it."

For the weary and hungry drovers there is plenty of Wagyu for dinner, payment for a job well done and the verdict is positive.

"It's juicy, it's a beautiful steak," Jocelyn said.

The cattle may change over time, but this Tasmanian tradition of island farming will live on in this spectacular region dubbed the coastal outback.

"We need a base on the Tasmanian mainland and we need to be able to go from the island to here," John said.

"If we didn't have that 3.5 metre rise and fall in the tide ... well [on] Hunter Island they use a barge but they can only bring about 30 head at a time. We had 800 head of cattle and we did it easy, so we're very fortunate that nature lets us do that."

Topics: rural, livestock, beef-cattle, tas, australia

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