Don’t bend that bar,” Girlie Goody teases, as I bounce like a human pinball around the cab of her Toyota LandCruiser with a white-knuckle grip on the safety rail. We’re lurching into a washed-out creek that cuts through the hills of her cattle property near Monto, 150 kilometres south-west of Gladstone in Central Queensland, and we’re on the hunt for cattle hiding in the scrub.

Peering over the wheel, Girlie reaches down to “add more horses” and knock the ute into four-wheel drive. She’s covered this track almost daily over every one of her 83 years – first in a saddle, then later on four wheels, when her joyrides became matters of business – and she knows this country as well as she knows herself.

Girlie’s property, Malakoff, is a 3200-hectare tract of land like a