The crowd at the Mount Isa Rodeo is leaning forward, beaming with collective expectant delight as the red dust swirls in the floodlit arena and a country music song thumps out the glories of “playing our music loud, and the roaring cheers of a redneck crowd”.

Hot Rod, with his shiny black and white hide stretched tight across his muscled frame, massive eyeballs rolling manically inside that prodigious head, looks not so much a bull as a chief bouncer trying to eject Bean from some bovine nightclub.

A few seconds earlier he was just another docile mammal, waiting patiently in his cage after strolling up through the “race” – the cast iron rail network corralling livestock up towards the blazing lights of the arena.

Even as Bean hovered above him on the rails, Hot Rod, like most of his Bos taurus colleagues on this glorious August night, appeared sanguine about his place in the universe.

It was only when Bean gingerly lowered his buttocks onto Hot Rod’s back that the bull was transformed into a deranged hysteric, shooting out of the gate like a cork from a champagne bottle to bounce around the arena.

Bean clings on for “the most dangerous eight seconds in sport” (the minimum time a rider must stay aboard to register a score), cheating death and injury to reach a qualifying round. The crowd delivers a full-throated roar of approval.

God is in his heaven and Bob Katter is pulling beers at Curly Dann’s Bar under the stadium.

Fifteen years into the 21st century and that primal theatre of “man versus beast” is still playing out beneath the cold white stars hanging in that ancient western Queensland sky.

“BRODIE?” I VENTURE TENTATIVELY THE following day as Bean sits amid the saddles and ropes and dust behind the corrals, smoking a roll-your-own. “What’s it like to ride a bull out there?”

Here at the 57th Mount Isa Mines Rotary Rodeo, the biggest in the southern hemisphere, the richest in the nation, masculinity holds dominion. But don’t dare saddle these guys with that old Australian term “ringer”.

They are cowboys. Cowboys like Central Queenslander Stuart Frame, who will finish second in the Open Bareback Bronc final, one spot better than last year.

Or Northern Territorian Bean, for that matter, who will finish joint winner of the Open Bull Ride.

These cowboys could be descendants of the vaquero – the hard men of the 19th century Mexican cattle industry who rode up the Santa Fe Trail to Missouri, merging with the young American ranch hands they met along the way before swinging eastward toward Madison Avenue to give the world “Marlboro Man”.

Marlboro Man was always just a little more cowboy than John Wayne, and Bean is a lot more cowboy than Marlboro Man (that is, at least, the one played by William Thourlby who was actually a non-smoking, non-drinking Los Angeles restaurateur and male model).

So that makes Bean a genuine blue-blood of the doma vaquera tradition – a rootin’ ’tootin cowboy who could make Slim Dusty’s “Trumby” tremble like a nancy boy with one crack of an embroidered leather whip.

“What’s it like?” Bean repeats slowly, gazing down at the dust with a deeply meditative air. “I reckon it’s a lot like trying to explain sex to someone who has never had it,” he says finally.

“There’s a lot of adrenalin, a lot of excitement, but it’s just sort of … you know … it’s actually just very hard to explain.”

It is, all things considered, an insightful answer to a stupid question. What prompts a young man to risk a premature death by placing a bull between his legs and attempting to stay put for eight seconds is simple – the exhilaration and glory accompanying any endeavour involving the potential for serious physical injury.

But to ask a man to explain the experience of stepping out every few weekends to dance with the Angel of Death is to break the code.

It’s assuming a familiarity in a fraternity where you don’t belong. It’s gauche.

Far better to simply strike up a conversation with a rough rider and allow him, as he will most assuredly do, gradually thread into the conversation details of wounds incurred in battle.

Even Blue, the rodeo clown, can conjure up unspeakable horrors with one casual aside. Leaning against the railings during a break, Blue casually gestures to a scar on the side of his right eye where 20 years ago a bull’s horn excavated a bloodied hole large enough to accommodate an index finger.

“Oh yeah, it can be dangerous, no doubt about it, but you get to know what you’re doing out there,” Blue says, the weathered face smiling through the clown paint.

RODEO IS HUGE IN AUSTRALIA. IF YOU LIVE in the inner city you may be unaware of it but in regional centres such as Warwick, Mount Isa and Mareeba, rodeo riders regularly elbow aside football heroes in terms of localised status.

The Isa rodeo, held since 1959, this year attracted upwards of 30,000 people over the week-long festivities leading up to the August 7-9 event.

And for energetic rodeo manager Natalie Flecker, the decade ahead holds great promise. The glitter surrounding the behemoth that is American rodeo is starting to float down into the southern hemisphere, gracing what was once just an excuse for a booze-up at the local saleyards with its red, white and blue charisma.

Mount Isa officials have already held talks with the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, one of the biggest rodeo events on the globe, which in 2013 pulled a crowd of more than 2.5 million.

“We are looking at a few things like rider exchanges between the events and building a partnership to help us grow,” Flecker says.

“We know Australian rodeo is going to grow rapidly in popularity over the next decade, and we are going to grow with it.”

For Miss Rodeo Australia, Toowoomba’s Danika Boland, 25, Mount Isa has already created the blueprint for Australian rodeo’s 21st century revolution.

Highly articulate and oozing confidence, Boland has visited the mega rodeos across the world in her year-long reign, including the massive Cheyenne Frontier Days in Wyoming and “Billy Bob’s” in Fort Worth, Texas – a huge country music honky-tonk complex with an indoor rodeo arena – all with a view to bringing Australian rodeo to a wider audience.

She sees the increasingly polished and choreographed Isa event as a prime example of a spectacle which, perhaps more than any other, harks back to ancient gladiatorial arenas.

“The Americans have made rodeo an extraordinary experience, with thumping music accompanying the rides and a lot of patriotism and flag-waving,” she says.

“But here in Australia, I think we can better develop our own brand of rodeo excitement, and in many ways we’re already doing that here in Mount Isa.”

Money, as always, is one of the keys. The $200,000 cash pot spread across two days of events at the Isa rodeo wouldn’t raise the eyebrow of Silvano Alves, who walked away with $US1.27 million after winning the Professional Bull Riders world title last year in Las Vegas. But Australian rodeo, which encompasses the “southern run” in the summer and northern meetings in the winter, is becoming increasingly lucrative.

A Mount Isa rough rider who wins a championship might take home $15,000, along with the coveted Isa belt buckle trophy that is its own letter of introduction to the lucrative American circuit.

As hundreds of thousands gathered for same-sex marriage rallies in the capital cities over the second weekend in August, the Isa hosted what in political and cultural terms might represent the other side of the equation: that elusive tribe known as the “real people”.

The boilermakers, roof tilers, mechanics, miners, drillers – the people who do the nation’s grunt work (who North Americans might call “roughnecks” rather than the derogatory “rednecks”) – packed the Isa stadium, their hard-working lives reflected in the sponsors’ posters: North West Crane Hire, Straitline Drill and Blast, Fast Scaff (the Total Scaffolding Specialists).

The Katters, the senior, federal Independent Bob, and the junior, state Member for Mount Isa Robbie, never miss the rodeo.

This year, neither did Pauline Hanson, that perennial candidate who once terrified mainstream political parties with her ability to harness the disaffiliated vote that still swirls around Queensland politics after Clive Palmer roped it in 2013, then let it go.

A Friday night guest in the Fred Brophy boxing tent, sipping a rum and coke, Hanson also received a few rousing cheers in the Friday night parade held in the carpark adjoining the stadium. Bob Katter might have also won first prize in the “most popular barman stakes” at Curly Dann’s, but there is never any doubt as to where the chief drawcard lies in rodeos, from Montana to Mount Isa.

Barrel races, steer wrestling, “ladies breakaway roping” all command an attentive audience and polite applause, but it is the rough riders who are the undisputed top guns.

And, much like the young men who make up fighter pilot squadrons across the globe, they are overwhelmingly in their twenties, in good physical condition and blissfully unacquainted with their own mortality.

At the University of Calgary, in the Canadian city that is home to the Calgary Stampede, sports epidemiologist Dale Butterwick recently crunched the numbers on rodeo injuries and came up with some interesting bookmaker odds.

If you enter a rough-riding rodeo competition, your chance of receiving a catastrophic injury (a fatal or significant life-altering injury) is about 20/100,000.

That might not look so bad at first blush but consider this. In American football, internationally recognised as a dangerous sport, the rate is 1/100,000.

And the Butterwick figures go nowhere near collating non-lethal injury rate numbers, which kick in almost immediately after every rough ride.

Riders limp out of the stadium, often clutching a forearm, while bruises and sprains are attended to by an open-air massage parlour. Many return for a second ride just hours later.

FOR ONE OF THE YOUNGEST CHAMPIONS ever to win the Australian Professional Rodeo Association bull riding championship, 27-year-old Rhys Angland, injury is a work hazard, and not just when he’s in the arena. Angland, who took his first title when he was barely 18, chases bulls when he’s not riding them.

Widely recognised as one of the most gifted riders of his generation, he has travelled the world via his sport since winning his first championship in 2006, including stints in Brazil and the United States.

He supplements his rodeo income by working as a subcontractor chasing down wild bulls on the tip of Cape York, leaping from his bike when he corners the bulls and wrestling them to the ground. “I just love it, love the life, love chasing bulls and love riding them,” he says.

To Angland, bull-riding is a combination of art and science – anticipating the animal’s movements and mentally telegraphing a message to the bull’s brain early in the encounter are elements to success.

“When you ride them, you really have to send them a message that you are not intimidated by them, that they are not totally in charge,” he says.

And there is an aesthetic element to the performance. Some might view rough riding as a multifarious dance where a rider’s ability to maintain a synchronicity of movement with the animal is vital to his success.

But, if we are to view rough riding as dance, then bull riding is like doing the rumba with a homicidal maniac with two daggers strapped to her head.

The smorgasbord of ways in which bull riding can kill you is vast and deeply unpalatable, but to the amateur’s eye it’s the bulls horns that strike a deep primitive terror into the heart.

A bull can crush your skull with any one of his four hoofs or pin you to the wall with his one-tonne frame and pulverise your ribcage into little splinters.

He can toss you as high as four metres in the air, then deftly move to the right or left, allowing you to break your back on the unforgiving ground.

If he is feeling truly innovative, he can use those razor-sharp dewclaws hidden at the back of his legs to rip your belly open.

But those two knives on top of his head? If he gets you on the ground he can simply lower his massive head and propel himself forward with his muscular body, using his horns to stab you to death.

Darren Brandenburg, one of the nation’s foremost contractors for rodeo livestock and himself a former world champion bull rider, counts off about 12 men he has known who have been killed or critically injured in the ring, both in Australia and overseas.

“It’s strange, you are just talking with them one minute and the next you look out and they are down.”

But Brandenburg, like everyone involved in rodeo, passionately believes the risks are worth the glory.

“Footballers have to be pretty tough but this is as old as mankind itself – it’s man versus beast.”

THE BEASTS AREN’T IN A POSITION TO GIVE their view. But while animal rights activists might have concerns about cruelty, the most cursory examination of the life of a rodeo bull suggests he might have won the bovine lottery.

A bull like Gotcha Rockin, generally regarded as the meanest in Australia, might fetch $100,000 on the US market. Even his sperm could be valuable enough to generate a reasonable weekly income.

As Brandenburg points out, were Gotcha Rockin living the way nature intended, he’d be regularly obliged to fight another one-tonne bull to maintain his territory and his herd of females.

Instead, he doesn’t merely avoid the hard years of drought but has his food intake monitored by a nutritionist, while his drive to reproduce will be accommodated by a never-ending stream of females.

All Gotcha has to do is attempt to dispatch an 80kg cowboy from his back every few weekends, and that’s just what he did in Mount Isa.

The eventual second-place getter, Bowen’s Beau Willis, climbed aboard and lasted a matter of four or five seconds as Gotcha set the tone for the rest of the Bos taurus gang, who cleaned up the rough riders in the final open bull ride.

No rider could stay on for the required eight seconds. It was rare but not unprecedented, and the crowd loved it.

Man opposed beast and, this time, the beasts won..