It’s more than a year since the 2023 bushfires and Barry and Donna Aitken are now rebuilding their cattle operation and preparing for the possibility of future disasters.
During a week they’ll always remember, an orange haze blanketing neighbouring properties swept closer to their cattle station.
The extent of the bushfire threat wasn’t clear, however, until a flurry of orange uniforms arrived at their door.
“When the Rural Fire Brigade started convening here on my patio – and had all their laptops out and were radioing – I thought it must be bad up the back of the property in the Carnarvon Ranges,” Donna said.
The 2023 northern and southern Queensland bushfires burned across more than 750,000 hectares from the Cook Shire to the Southern Downs, impacting agricultural operations such as the Aitken’s cattle station “Boxvale“ on the Upper Dawson.
“We just hoped it would burn itself out, but it just wasn’t going to do that,“ Barry said. “There was too much fuel … I think it’d been three years since the previous fire and we’d had a lot of rain in those three years.
“We hadn’t burnt any country at all in the two or three years prior to that.”
Once firefighters contained the blaze, the Aitkens surveyed the damage, anxious to find out the impact to their livestock and infrastructure.
“We found some dead cows and then we ran into the problem of cows in areas where there was nothing to eat at all,” Barry said.
“The difficulty is a lot of those areas you can’t get to. There were probably 20 kilometres from the nearest road in a lot of places where the cattle were.
“The fence that was burnt was really burnt completely and probably 80 per cent of the timber posts were burnt.”
The Aitkens accessed an Extraordinary Disaster Assistance Recovery Grant and Disaster Assistance Loan from the Queensland Rural and Industry Development Authority (QRIDA) to buy hay, rebuild their herd and replace damaged fencing.
“We were calling our QRIDA representative about another matter we already had with QRIDA and we were telling her about our predicament,” Donna said.
“She asked us if we knew there was assistance available from QRIDA, which we didn’t, so she was really helpful and told us how to apply, what the criteria was and sent us all the forms.”
Donna said QRIDA’s disaster financial assistance application processes were easy to navigate.
“When we were applying, we took photos of the burnt out fences and burnt out posts and where the fence had all fallen down,” Donna said.
“We’ve had nothing but support from QRIDA, like 110 per cent support.”
Twelve months on from the bushfires, lush greenery has re-emerged at Boxvale with improved weather conditions as Barry and Donna now focus on rebuilding their herd.
“We’re lucky, we’ve had rain early this year,” Barry said.
“We’ve increased our cows a lot and we did that by reducing our sales earlier in the year, so we’ve got a lot more breeding females that were retained.”
The Aitkens have also employed more stock people to help at the station.
“We have put on a fabulous young couple who we are training up and Barry loves to mentor people so he’s loving that and they’re sucking it up like a sponge,” Donna said.
This time around, Barry and Donna are feeling much more prepared for what the disaster season may bring, after carrying out climate resilience activities on their property.
“Just by having a little more manpower, we were able to grade and clear our tracks right around our property and internal roads that we were never able to do,” Barry said.
“It’s not the first fire we’ve had and it won’t be the last.
“We had a huge expense losing cows and losing infrastructure, so it’s whether you spend your money beforehand and benefit out the other side.”
