Tom Curtain: How a skint, unemployed cowboy built a Territory tourism icon

In the early 2010s, Tom Curtain was a broke cowboy singing four nights a week at the local caravan park. Now he helms one of the Territory’s most successful tourism ventures and spends six months a year on the road.

Golden Guitar winning musician Tom Curtain, who owns and operates the Katherine Outback Experience alongside wife Annabel. Picture: Supplied

It’s hard to believe now, but Big Rivers businessman and Golden Guitar winning country musician Tom Curtain, who is midway through the ninth annual national tour of his renowned Katherine Outback Experience, was once a skint cowboy performing to audiences of nobody.

The year was 2011, Kingaroy-born Curtain tells this masthead from somewhere in the Murray Valley near the NSW-Vic border.

He came to the Territory in 2001 chasing mustering work, the rhythms of which left a “lot of time on my hand to write songs,” Curtain said.

“My old fella told me how to play a guitar, taught me three chords.

“I’d sit around the campfire and practice.”

During this time, Curtain’s reputation for being a master horse whisperer grew, and by 2010 he had purchased a block at Katherine from where he could operate his own independent business breaking in horses for large stations across the NT.

But just a year later, with the imposition of the Gillard government’s live export cattle ban, his flourishing career was nipped in the bud – the stations destocked, the horses stopped coming to Uralla.

“I was singing at the caravan park four nights a week,” Curtain said.

Tom Curtain at the helm of the Katherine Outback Experience. Picture: Supplied

“Then those people said to me, how about an outback show?

“No one turned up to the first show.

“A lot of my mates in the early days laughed, ‘Tom, no one is turning up to your shows, give up mate, it’s not going to work’.

“But I had a gut feeling. I kept persevering. It slowly built.”

A key development along the way was meeting his wife Annabel (Curtain hitched a ride with Annabel’s old man in southern WA and the rest was history), a town planner who turned out to be a marketing whiz, adding strategic nous to her partner’s unpolished edges.

These days, the Katherine Outback Experience is a cultural icon and tourism powerhouse. During the Territory dry, Curtain hosts hundreds of shows in the Big Rivers capital, as often as three times a day.

Golden Guitar winning musician Tom Curtain, who owns and operates the Katherine Outback Experience alongside wife Annabel. Picture: Supplied

Then, come the wet, he takes the show on the road, performing 60–70 shows in far-flung corners of Australia, leading a caravan of five to six vehicles containing musicians, horses, working dogs, equipment and a transportable stage.

Cementing its reputation as one of Territory tourism’s most bankable attraction, the Katherine Outback Experience picked up two more gongs at Saturday night’s Brolga Northern Territory Tourism Awards, winning the tourist attraction category for the sixth consecutive year, and claiming the chairman’s award for the second time.

Curtain said he thought Australians were drawn to the authenticity of the Katherine Outback Experience, featuring as it does animals who are in real life training (Curtain purchases untamed animals for a song, trains them up via his shows, then sells them back to farmers at good profit).

Such business acumen has allowed Curtain to invest back into Uralla, most recently via establishing an on-site cafe.

Originally published as Tom Curtain: How a skint, unemployed cowboy built a Territory tourism icon