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people operating the train (which is the fastest in Australia) were really accommodating. As soon as we got on board they told us they had arranged for me to be up at the front with the driver. The train is powered by electricity and very quiet; so quiet, in fact, that the driver told me it sneaks up on you before you know it and people at level crossings have to be careful. It can clock 160 kmph and sucks the juice from the tracks as it accelerates, then puts some of it back again when it slows down. I could just about take it all in, but I was still feeling pretty queasy, and after half an hour or so I went back to our compartment and, closing my eyes, dozed for half an hour. By the time we made Rockhampton I was feeling much better, and with almost a thousand kilometres covered since we left Watts Bridge airfield, we’d made quite a leap up the Australian coastline.
    We were heading for Cairns to hook up with the flying doctors, which I was really excited about. Our plans beyond that had changed a tad, though. Apparently there was a big festival taking place in Papua New Guinea and we wanted to try to make it across to Port Moresby a day earlier. But first we had to get to Cairns.
    Some time ago I’d heard about the ute culture that is so popular in Australia. Utes are pick-up trucks, many of them styled like cars only with truck beds, tailgates and fibreglass covers. Their owners like to customise them by lowering the suspension, changing the wheels and supercharging the engines. We thought it might be fun to travel some of the way in a customised ute, so we had been in touch with the website Utez.com before we left London. Three guys had agreed to meet us at the Old Station, a cattle ranch which was fifteen minutes by plane from Rockhampton.
     
     
    The Old Station is exactly what it sounds like, one of the oldest cattle ranches in this part of Australia. It was first established 140 years ago and is home to a nice guy called Rob, who runs it with his wife Helen and their two kids Samantha and Matthew. We’d been invited to breakfast with them, having spent the night in Rockhampton, and drove up to the Aero Club to meet Rob and his Cessna 185.
    ‘G’day, Charley,’ he said as he came round from the pilot’s door. ‘How you going?’
    He was in his thirties, lean and sinewy, wearing a baseball cap and jeans. I’d flown in a few planes that were not dissimilar to this and I have to say it was much more my kind of flying: six-seater, with me alongside the pilot instead of being crammed in the back like I had been in the fighter.
    Rob loved to fly, but this wasn’t just a hobby. His plane was a working vehicle on the cattle station - he said the place was so vast there was no more efficient way to cover the distances.
    ‘How big is it then exactly?’ I asked him when we were up in the air.
    ‘We own twenty-six thousand acres and run about three thousand head of cattle.’
    ‘Wow, that’s enormous.’
    ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You can see why we need the plane.’
    The property was gorgeous, surrounded by scrub hills and situated in the middle of a stunning basin, fed by a creek that flowed even during the summer. The station had five separate irrigation licences which meant its pastures had water all year round, which was vital. Australia is the driest continent in the world, and when we were here the last time, we had seen what happens to a cattle station when there is no water.
    Interestingly, from above the land looked quite wet: great swampy areas and tributaries seemed to drift out from the river. Crossing a line of hills, Rob told me that the Old Station covered the entire valley below; it was lovely country with good grazing and ragged hills covered with spindly trees.
    ‘This Cessna’s a tail-dragger,’ he told me. ‘You saw that just now, right? You want the two-wheels configuration at the front because it makes it easier to land in the bush.’
    We put down on a rough strip close to a clutch of