Wide brown land a dream beyond reach

Soaring property prices sour the outback land rush.

Sheree Pratt, with daughters Abbie and Bronte, outside the Julia Creek post office she runs while husband Tim transports cattle. Picture: Lyndon Mechielsen

You can understand the frustration of would-be buyers: every time they get close to breaking into this red-hot property market, the price ratchets up another elusive notch.

The boom, though, isn’t taking place in the leafy suburbs of Sydney or Melbourne.

It’s Australia’s other land rush, unspooling in hot and dusty locales such as Julia Creek in northwest Queensland, the remote beef town where the dream of owning a cattle station has never been further out of reach.

Priced-out buyers are settling for the next best thing – running stock on someone else’s land as a stepping stone to purchasing.

“For the likes of us, it’s a long, hard slog,” said cattle truck operator Tim Pratt, whose family has 300 head on agistment in Charters Towers, 500km to the east.

“To get into the property game nowadays you need to be fortunate enough to receive a very hefty inheritance or be born into it. A lot of people are in the same boat as us – they have got the dream … but it’s slipping away.”

Mirroring the property boom in the cities, farmland has hit 30-year highs across the nation, with the median price increasing by 12.9 per cent nationally to $5907 per hectare, according to the latest report from the Rural Bank.

The black soil plains around Julia Creek are prime grazing country that command about $700/ha, locals say. Before you get too excited, there’s a caveat. The carrying capacity is such in this arid reach of the outback, where January temperatures soar to 42C and above, that 4000-8000ha is the minimum going concern.

The cheapest property sold last year by Matthew Kennedy, of Kennedy Rural in Julia Creek, fetched $4.1m. The most expensive, the 180,000ha station Strathpark, 140km north of Richmond, came in at an eye-watering $25m.

Mr Kennedy said record cattle prices supercharged property values, which received an added rev-up when interstate investors looked north for opportunities. Broadly, land prices have doubled since the region was hit by a monsoon disaster in 2019 that killed more than 500,000 head of stock.

“It started with supply and demand issues for cattle and now it’s a supply and demand issue for property,” he said. “There are simply not enough sellers … no different to what’s happening in the residential property markets in the cities.”

The Pratt family haven’t given up, putting away every dollar they can for a deposit. With Mr Pratt, 43, on the road six days a week transporting cattle, wife Sheree runs the Julia Creek post office and a 1000km mail run deep into the Gulf country. Somehow she also finds time for her Australian-made bush clothing line, Draft & Co, and volunteering on the local sports association.

When the kids are home from boarding school, they help out with the family’s 10 horses, stabled near the cattle yards outside the town of 511. Abbie, 16, Sam, 15, and Bronte, 9, are paid-up members of the enterprise to build a life on the land. Abbie plans to spend a gap year as a cattle ringer before heading to university to study business or veterinary science, skills she can use back home. Sam wants to earn a trade qualification in diesel fitting or as a boilermaker before going to work with Dad, while young Bronte is finding her feet as a nationally ranked multidiscipline dancer.

“It’s a big idea in the end,” Abbie said of the family’s property ambitions. “Even if us kids have left school by the time mum and dad get something it would be amazing for all of us.”

Ms Pratt, 40, said owning cattle was the next-best thing to land, an investment in the future because the small herd could one day be a nucleus for stocking their own block – not to mention a useful money-spinner in the meantime. “We just enjoy working cattle, we enjoy all working together,” she said. “We know getting our own block is a long shot given the price of land around here, but we’re not ready to give up on it yet.”

Running stock is a popular sideline in Julia Creek among local business operators hoping to secure a toehold in the multimillion-dollar grazing industry.

A motel owner, asking to be named only as Michelle, leases a paddock from the shire council for 100 head and doesn’t resent a minute of the time this adds to a long workday.

“I would love to do it full-time,” she said. “It’s still the dream.”