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Nick Squires

They are the cowboys of the Outback, the embodiment of Australia's frontier spirit.
But jackaroos, who spend their days on horseback mustering cattle and sheep, are being pushed out of the saddle by their female counterparts - jillaroos.
A record number of young Australian women are forsaking the comforts of city life to become jillaroos, a job  that requires them to fix fences, check remote waterholes, and herd unruly mobs of livestock through some of the world's toughest terrain.
The women have been given a chance to enter what was until recently a staunchly male domain because outback 'stations', or ranches, are facing dire recruitment problems.
Lured by the prospect of tripling their wages, jackaroos are flocking to the mining industry, which is booming on the back of  China's demand for raw materials to feed its surging industrial development.
With Australia's buoyant economy into its 17th consecutive year of  growth, the country is experiencing its lowest unemployment  in more than 30 years.
And as the mines suck up labour from other industries, shortages are being created. One example is in the farming industry.
As the men leave the land, the women are stepping in to fill the breach.
'Back in 2001 we wouldn't have had a single jillaroo - the only girls we hired were cooks or governesses,'  said John Bennet, personnel manager for Jumbuck Pastoral, which runs 12 sprawling sheep and cattle stations.
'Now, more than half our outdoors staff are girls. At our station on the Nullarbor Plain [Western Australia], we have one bloke and three jillaroos,' Mr Bennet said. 'At a stock camp in the Kimberley [Western Australia], six out of nine of the station hands are women.'
Hours are long and irregular and the work is often exhausting, Jumbuck's managers warn prospective jillaroos and jackaroos on the company website: 'The extremes of temperature, dust, flies and mosquitoes may be a far cry from the life you have been used to.'
Despite the rigours of the job and the fact that annual salaries start at just A$30,000 (HK$221,800), drop-out rates for jillaroos are no worse than for jackaroos.
Rinnah Ward, 24, is one of Australia's few female overseers, or head stockmen, having started out as a jillaroo at the age of 18. She manages a team of jackaroos but says she rarely encounters sexist attitudes or remarks.
'There was an old fella I knew whose attitude was that women belonged in the kitchen. He came around a bit when he realised I wasn't some stupid floozy,' Ms Ward  said.
'You get some young blokes who think they're better than you, but you just have to show them who's boss and demonstrate that you have the skills to do the job.'
Originally from Queensland, she loves life on the land, herding 30,000 sheep on a  3,100   sq km station in the arid interior of South Australia.
The property, called Bulgunnia, is so vast that mustering is done with a Cessna aircraft and motorbikes.
'These days there are more females on the stations than men. I don't doubt the mining boom has something to do with it,' Ms Ward said.
It is not every young woman's idea of a dream job. The nearest town - the opal-mining centre of Coober Pedy, where searing temperatures mean some people live underground in dug-out homes - is 170km  away down a dirt track.
But the wide-open spaces are appealing to women sick of city life, as is the opportunity to ride horses.
While many outback ranches muster livestock with helicopters and motorbikes, those in more rugged areas still rely on old-fashioned horse power.
The women are often better with machines, too. 'You put an  18-year-old bloke on a motorbike and he'll spin the back tyres and see how fast it can go. The girls tend not to abuse the machinery - they'll drive more carefully,'  said Terry Omond, human-resources manager for one of Australia's legendary cattle companies, S Kidman and Company.
The firm owns 14 huge stations, including Anna Creek in South Australia, which at  24,000 sq km   is the world's largest cattle station, but is in the midst of severe drought and has been forced to sell stock and suspend operations.
'At the moment about 60 per cent of our applicants are female,'  Mr Omond said. 'The women tend to civilise the men a bit and make them less inclined to head to the pub.'
Some budding jillaroos are attracted by romantic notions of sleeping under the stars and meeting ruggedly handsome cowboys, ideas fostered by a popular television series, McLeod's Daughters, about women running a cattle station in South Australia.
The reality often turns out to be a bit different. 'They get very disappointed when they get out there and find blokes with their front teeth missing or with personal hygiene problems,'  Mr Omond said. 'But most of them don't quit.'
Jillaroos may not be as physically robust as their male colleagues, but brute strength is not as important as it once was.
Instead of wrestling steers to the ground with their bare hands, a lot of stockmen now use mechanical metal cradles  that grip the animals and enable them to be tagged and branded.
'In this day and age you can't ask someone to carry two bags of cement on their shoulders or hoist a 44-gallon drum into the back of a truck - OHS [occupational health and safety] won't allow it,'  said Mr Omond.
'Being a jackaroo was once a male bastion, but not any more. I honestly can't think of any downsides in having more women in the industry.'
A report  last week said  Australia's mining sector would create another 90,000 jobs by 2020, draining the pastoral industry of even more workers.
As young men head into the pits, more and more girls will have the chance to saddle up and ride off into the sunset.



Women take the reins in the Outback