He first made his living as a kangaroo shooter in outbackQueensland where he learned about and fell in love with emus, Australia's largest native bird and the second largest bird in the world after the ostrich.
But head inland into Queensland and into the outback and the contrast cannot get sharper: Giant excavators, three stories high and weighing hundreds of tonnes, work at mines of Brobdingnagian proportions.
Their ranks were swelled by football teams from Sydney, Perth, Adelaide, the Gold Coast in Queensland and Forbes, an outback town in New South Wales, celebrating the end of the Australian football season.