Get a look inside Australia’s Mount Isa Mines Rodeo and meet the Aussie athletes who bring the night to life.
When I landed at the Mount Isa airport in Australia’s remote outback country of Queensland, my first impression of the red-dirt mining and ranching town was that I had stumbled on to a film set for a remake of Back to the Future. There is a definite edge-of-the-known-and-the-beginning-of-the-unknown Burke and Wills (the Lewis and Clark of Australia) kind of frontier vibe to the isolated hamlet 1,130 miles inland from the state capital of Brisbane. The weather that time of year is actually fairly mild since Australia is south of the equator and summer doesn’t start there until late December. I was lured there in August of 2023 by a rodeo, then celebrating its 64th year, that rightfully calls itself legendary. Mount Isa Mines Rodeo is Australia and the Southern Hemisphere’s largest and richest rodeo, with almost 1,000 contestants and $300,000 in prize money last year.
The “Mines” are the town’s zinc, lead, silver, and copper operations. But since this was the start of rodeo week, the miners’ hard hats were quickly being replaced with American-style cowboy hats or the short brimmed low-crowned Akubra-made fedoras preferred by older Aussie stockmen. For four days every August, Mount Isa is all about bronc riding, bull riding and roping, not mining.
10-year-old Byron Kirk is Australia’s junior bull riding sensation.
It was a long road to get there — almost 8,200 air miles from Los Angeles to Brisbane and finally Mount Isa at the northern end of the rugged Selwyn Range in Queensland. Despite layovers, I was still lucky I got to fly in, since for many of the contestants that were entered it was anywhere from 1,600 to 2,000 miles and 24 to 48 hours’ drive time on rugged roads with long desolate stretches between infrequent pubs or petrol stops and isolated cattle stations. Cattle station is Australian for ranch, of which there are many — and many huge ones at that — Down Under. Anna Creek Station (established 1863), South Australia’s largest, is bigger than New Jersey. Queensland’s largest, which includes Davenport Downs and Springvale Station (established before 1878) is 3,730,000 acres, with the second largest, Marion Downs (established before 1878) not far behind at 3,080,000 acres. And then there’s Academy Award-winning actress Nicole Kidman’s relatives, who are reported to be amongthe largest landowners on the planet with 24 million acres of farms and ranches courtesy of Sir Sidney Kidman (1857– 1935), commonly known as “the Cattle King,” who started his empire working as a drover after running away from home at 13 with just five shillings and a one-eyed horse named Cyclops that he’d bought with his savings. You get the idea. Running cattle and sheep since the 1880s when America’s Old West was going strong, the huge island continent has its own serious cowboy culture. So I was keen to see how they rodeoed Down Under and get up close and personal with the stockmen of Australia.
As my plane began to descend for landing, I noticed the native white ghost gum trees and yellow green spinifex grass giving way to Mount Isa’s cowboy camp, an organized sprawl of hundreds of rodeo families’ canvas tents, long-bed trucks, vans, campers, gooseneck fifth-wheelers, and horse trailers. Those temporary living quarters were well-organized in the Buchanan Park Events Complex, once the gathering place for the Kalkutungu people who first inhabited the area some 12,000 years ago. The renovated park boasts a Thoroughbred racetrack, the rodeo’s up-to-date permanent bucking chutes, roping boxes, announcer’s booth, and spectator grandstands.
As we left Mount Isa Airport, Dean, my burly but affable rodeo driver and chaperone, couldn’t wait to introduce me to Australia’s national dish — the Aussie meat pie. The national food from which “meat-pie” western films, aka kangaroo westerns (Australian westerns like The Man From Snowy River), get their nickname is handy, miner-friendly food. Think a pot pie you can hold in your hand stuffed with beef or lamb in a savory sauce. At what looked like a converted 1950s American donut shop, I quickly settled on a beef and onion pie. I was soon won over not just by the meat pie but by the friendly locals in this Outback oasis of 25,000, Australia’s most famous rodeo port of call.
Luggage dropped off at my hotel, Dean then quizzed me about what I wanted to see first. Cowboy Camp seemed the best place to start. “Is there anyone there in particular that I should talk with first?” Dean didn’t miss a beat and grinned: “Bob Holder, mate. You’ll know why right away.”
Indigenous rough stock riders watch the first day’s action.
At 92 years young, Australian rodeo hand Bob Holder is universally recognized as the oldest competing professional rodeo cowboy in the world. Still lean and fit-looking, he could easily pass for 65. Nicknamed the Cootamundra Cat after the New South Wales town he grew up near, he won his first bronc riding contest at 14. At Mount Isa last year, he roped in the senior division team roping with stock contractor and two-time Australian bull riding champion Darren “Brandy” Brandenburg, 30-some years his junior. Holder made his head catch, but Brandy missed the heel loop for a no-time.
As I visited with Holder, he reminisced about being in the first group of Down Under cowboys to be invited to compete stateside in 1959. “Those American horses we were being introduced to back then were educated bucking stock. We started in Big Spring, Texas, and wound up at Madison Square Garden. And I’ll tell you what, all those Yank cowboys we met were great fellas. None ever gave us bad information on a draw and were always there ready to help us out.”
At Mineral Wells, Texas, Holder says, he thought he was going to ride a saddle bronc. “But when I got to my chute, they had run in the biggest bull I had ever seen. I didn’t think I was going to make it back to Australia alive. I didn’t make eight seconds that day, and none of us Aussies won much that whole trip, but I made a lot of great friends, including Jim Shoulders, Casey Tibbs, and stock contractors Bennie Beutler and Harry Knight.”
Holder promised to be back at Mount Isa this year, saddled up and ready to rope. What propels him to keep competing in his 90s? “My old bones can’t take the broncs or bulls anymore, but I can still handle a good horse and a rope,” he says. “There’s nothing like it. The element of danger just adds to that.” He grins like a 5-year-old. “And I like to win.”
Despite the nearly 1,000 rough stock riders and timed-event contestants entered there, the Mount Isa Mines Rodeo still has the authentic feel of an American rodeo meets a great in-your-face cowboy song like Tom Russell’s Tonight We Ride with a bit of an Australian edge. Just like at any American rodeo, there was a lot of national pride displayed both in the arena and behind the bucking chutes. I noticed more than a few chaps adorned with cutouts of carved leather kangaroos, small maps of Australia, or the distinctive Australian seven-point Commonwealth star.
Maddie Gray, Miss Rodeo Warwick, carries the Australian national flag in the opening ceremony.
Maddie Gray, the skilled horsewoman from a mere 1,100 miles down the road at Warwick, was 2023’s proud bearer of the Australian national flag during the opening ceremonies. It was the largest flag I’d ever seen carried horseback at any rodeo I’d ever been to, but she handled her horse and that long, flowing banner with the utmost skill and grace. “When you’re carrying a flag that big around a long arena like here at Mount Isa, you need to build your speed up before you make your turns into the straightaways,” she said when I caught up with her after the grand entry. “You want the breeze to keep the fabric spread out, so it doesn’t wrap around you or your horse.”
If Mount Isa reminds me of any rodeos in the States, think of the sheer size and number of regular contestants at Cheyenne Frontier Days meets the down-home feel of the Pendleton Round-Up, both rodeos where Indigenous tribal history and culture meet rough stock and timed events. The 2023 bull fighters at Mount Isa were headed by respected part-Indigenous bull fighter Darryl Chong, who is retiring after 17 years as one of Australia’s top bull fighters. There were certainly some rough and tumble near-wrecks as his team of bull fighters aggressively protected downed bull riders.
While watching the bull riding from above the bucking chutes, I witnessed one particularly stormy bull-fighter-versus-bull dustup as bull fighter Jayden Hakaria was tossed a good 10 feet in the air followed by a hard landing on the arena floor. Helped behind the chutes, he doused his head with a couple of bottles of cold water, took a minute to clear his head, and then got right back into the arena ready to protect the next bull rider.
As Bob Holder had pointed out to me, top Australian bronc and bull riders have been coming to American shores to compete since the late 1950s. By the 1970s, great Australian rodeo hands like the Chinese-Australian saddle bronc rider Darryl Kong, barebackbronc rider Jimmy Dix, and 1988’s PRCA All-Around Cowboy, “the Lone Roo” Dave Appleton, routinely crossed the Pacific pond to make their marks at our Wrangler National Finals Rodeo numerous times. A few years later, Aussie cowboy Glenn O’Neill won the PRCA’s 2002 World Champion Saddle Bronc title and Down Under Bull Rider Troy Dunn became the PBR’s top bull rider.
Then there is the PRCA’s new 2023 World Champion Bull Rider Ky Hamilton, who hails from Mackay, Queensland, Australia. Because of his incredible grit and determination at last year’s NFR, legendary announcer Bob Tallman nicknamed Hamilton the new “Man from Snowy River.” On the other hand, back when the PRCA was still known as the Rodeo Cowboys Association, 1972 Bull Riding World Champion John Quintana moved to Australia and made quite a name for himself as a major cattle-station owner.
I’ve been behind the chutes at rodeos many a time, years ago as an amateur bull rider, sometimes as a friend, other times professionally as a writer. I’ve seen some really bad wrecks here and there. But that first go-round of regular 2023 rodeo action on the Friday night opening at Mount Isa unfortunately featured one of the worst injuries I’ve ever seen up close.
Australian bull rider Lane Hanush-Bowen rides Ariat’s End Game for 78.5 points.
I was standing by the bucking chute fence line just to the right of the chutes when a bull rider in his early twenties bucked off right out of the chute gate. One of the bull’s rear hoofs came down hard and smashed through the rider’s helmet face cage, breaking his jaw and ripping up the side of his face. The paramedics were right there, but the stunned bull rider wouldn’t get on their stretcher. It’s an old rodeo cowboy superstition that unless you’re completely incapacitated, no matter how badly you’re hurt, you walk out of that arena.
Once he was behind the chutes and into the ambulance, a Medivac helicopter took him to the Townsville University Hospital 600 miles away. I later heard he was looking at some serious reconstructive surgery.
On the flip side of bull riding, the regular Mount Isa Rodeo’s Champion Bull Rider for 2023 was 18-year-old Boston Leather (yes, that’s really his name), from Calliope in coastal Queensland. He was the only bull rider to cover all three of his bulls, winning $30,000 AUD — $20,000 USD. Boston is one of 13 siblings with an older brother who is currently the leader in the Australian Professional Bull Riders (PBR Australia) standings, which sounds a lot like an Australian version of Stetson Wright’s rodeo-family dynasty in the making. The human drama of Mount Isa rodeo is a refrain shared wherever folks have saddled up to compete and test their mettle. It’s the exaltation of a great ride and the torment of a serious injury — guaranteed both have been on display here every August for generations.
What’s relatively new in the history of the storied Mount Isa Rodeo is the Mount Isa Mines Indigenous Rodeo Championships, which entered its second year in 2023. There were over 125 Indigenous bronc, bull riding, steer wrestling, and roping contestants, a few of whom also qualified for the rodeo’s regular Australian Professional Rodeo Association-sanctioned events.
In 2021, Patrick Cooke of the Mona Aboriginal Corporation, which encourages Indigenous businesses and employment, partnered with Mount Isa Rodeo’s chief executive officer, Natalie Flecker, to get an Indigenous Rodeo Championships night off the ground. The idea attracted immediate positive attention, and now Cooke has his eye on even bigger international Indigenous rodeo aspirations. “My goal is to eventually have a global First Nations rodeo championship, with our Indigenous riders, Inuit riders, Native American riders, and Canadian First Nations competitors,” he says.
Rodeo CEO Flecker was more than pleased with the cooperation the new event has received from everyone from top stock contractors like Darren and Dakota Brandenburg and Dittmann Bucking Bulls to Indigenous bull fighter Darryl Chong, as well as many of the more experienced Indigenous contestants. “It’s been great to see the current generation of Indigenous riders helping the next generation coming up through the ranks,” she said.
Indigenous bull rider Lee Gilbo stands behind the chutes.
That’s a long way from a shameful history that might sound familiar. The brutally enforced displacement of so many of Australia’s Indigenous population during the 19th and early 20th centuries, known as the Stolen Generations, wasthe Aussie version of our own tragic Trail of Tears. Still, the pride from working on the isolated cattle stations has been handed down through tribal families and has been a passionate vocation for many proud people.
During the early 20th century, while Australian competitive rodeo grew in popularity, so did Sunday afternoon competitions — known as bushmen’s carnivals — among Indigenous stockmen working on cattle ranches. But tribal station hands weren’t obsessed with chasing a championship around the country’s vast states and territories. Racism certainly played a part in keeping tribal workers down on the cattle stations, yet as far back as the 1920s there were the occasional talented Indigenous or multiracial “buckjumpers” who broke out and competed against the English, Irish, and Scottish immigrant horsem*n who dominated early Australian rodeos.
Despite Australia’s once-strict official racial divisions that lasted well into the early 1970s, several generations of intermarriage between colonial cattle-station stockmen and Indigenous women gave birth to many talented mixed-race cattle-station hands.
Behind the chutes I wound up talking with two-time Mount Isa Indigenous Steer Wrestling Champion Shilo Gosbee. His grandfather was of part English and part Kalkadoon tribal descent, a tough but fair stockman who made Shilo and his brothers toe the line. “He didn’t want to see us drink or party. If we had time for that, then we had time for rodeo practice,” he says. “We learned to work with the horses and cattle. That gave of us a sense of accomplishment and discipline that I’ve handed down to my own children.”
Gosbee says that even if he hadn’t won the first two years of the Indigenous Steer Wrestling, “the best thing was having my son Cordell hazing for me. Though he’s working toward a degree at university in Brisbane, he still comes home to practice his steer wrestling and help work the station.”
Jason Craigie was the 2023 Indigenous saddle bronc and bareback bronc rider champion; he also won the 2022 MountIsa Rodeo Superhero saddle bronc riding, a wild spectator favorite imported from some stateside rodeos like the Red Bluff Round-Up’s Wild Ride, where saddle bronc riders dress up in the craziest costumes they can put together to blow out of the chutes in. Craigie won the 2022 Superhero ride by dressing up like Elvis Presley, doing a flying dismount, and then taking an Elvis-like stance. The crowd loved it.
Rodeo clown “Big Al” Wilson gets ready for his cue.
With a thick chest and strong arms, Craigie is built less like Elvis and more like the classic bareback bronc rider — one who leans way back, throws caution to the wind, and always marks his horses out. For the 2023 Indigenous Championships, he went back to concentrating on just his regular saddle bronc riding and the bareback broncs to take the Indigenous titles in both of those events, making him one of the top Indigenous rough stock riders now competing Down Under.
Indigenous Pitta Pitta saddle bronc rider Peter Jupiter from the Northern Territory unfortunately didn’t make it to eight seconds as his horse buck-jumped across the arena and bucked him off into the spectator stands. While there was no score for Jupiter, it was still a spectacular, if unintentional, dismount, luckily with no injuries to rider or spectators.
Darcy McBean, a Walpira tribal descendant cowboy from Katherine, Northern Territory, rode Brandenburg’s bull Dacky, winning the 2023 Indigenous bull riding crown.
Halfway through Indigenous Rodeo Night I noticed two fit and professional-looking security types in slacks and dress shirts sans cowboy hats approaching the chutes. Like most all rodeos, Mount Isa requires hats, jeans, and longsleeve shirts for anyone behind the chutes or in the arena. So, something was up. Suddenly my friend Dean was at my side: “Don’t go far — there’s someone coming who we want you to meet.”
A few minutes later, I found myself shaking hands with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Though he had visited the Queensland Outback several times, the primeminister is a dyed-in-the-wool city slicker from Australia’s largest city of Sydney, and this was his first visit to the Mount Isa Rodeo. The prime minister also made a point of shaking hands with Mount Isa’s resident 10-year-old junior bull-riding sensation, Byron Kirk. Already a celebrity Down Under, in a few more years the charismatic youngster may prove to be another Ky Hamilton, the Aussie who just won the PRCA’s 2023 World Champion Bull Rider title at the NFR.
That the prime minister would show up to glad-hand and take in some rodeo action spoke volumes. Seeing generations of Aussies competing together and passing the torch to a new generation — or, in the case of nonagenarian Bob Holder, not being ready to pass the torch quite yet — drives home just how much rodeo history Australia proudly lays claim to.
The Murphy brothers, Tyler, Ashley, Tommy, and Dallas, might be future rough stock riders and ropers.
One of the really great things about the Mount Isa Rodeo is the sense that what you’re seeing is unvarnished — the people are real, without any pretense, and so is the rodeo action. That feeling of authenticity made me curious about something that didn’t seem to fit the tone of everything else. I half-teased the prime minister about it. Why, I wondered, wasn’t Aussie bush poet Banjo Paterson’s beloved “Waltzing Matilda,” the most famous song in all of Australia, the country’s official national anthem instead of the rather stilted “Advance Australia Fair.” It turns out that in 1977 there was a country-wide vote for national song and “Matilda” lost out to the staid and proper “Advance Australia Fair.” In 1984, “Advance Australia Fair” replaced “God Save the Queen” as the official national anthem. That was the prime minister’s take. From my perspective, “Waltzing Matilda” is kind of like our “Star- Spangled Banner.” If you want to stop a fight in a pub in the Outback, just get the band to start playing “Waltzing Matilda.”
But which song comes across the loudspeaker at the rodeo doesn’t matter all that much. Even if it was “Advance Australia Fair” that the arena solemnly stood for, you’re there to see the hard-riding boys and cowgirls of Australia. And regardless of the tune that ushers them in from the chutes, as far as Down Under patriotism and spectacular arena action go, there’s nothing like the Mount Isa Rodeo.
Mount Isa Mines Rodeo 2024
The Mount Isa Rodeo set a new attendance record in 2023 with over 40,0000 rodeo fans who came from as far away as Germany and Japan, and this year promises an even bigger show. In 2024 Mount Isa Mines Championship Rodeo runs August 8 through 11, and the Mount Isa Mines Indigenous Rodeo Championships takes place August 8. There will be “Australian rock and cowboy country music concerts” nightly. For more information, visit isarodeo.com.au.
From our July 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Peter Wallis, Stephen Mowbray, Mount Isa Rodeo
HEADER IMAGE: Jarrod McKane, the 2022 Australian National Champion Bareback Bronc Rider, waits for his draw (horse) to get settled into the bucking chutes.
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