"There's nowhere in the world I'd rather be"

Girlie Goody has run her Central Queensland cattle property solo for 45 years, battling through drought, disbelieving bank managers and broken bones. And in this tough environment, she’s thrived, blazing a trail for women on the land.

- JESSICA HOWARD

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 handprint on the western side of the Great Dividing Range. It was virgin forest when her father, Hector, selected it in 1928. He cleared a pad and built a basic house with scavenged fittings, and with his wife, Dorrie, set about filling it with children. Girlie was the fifth of six, born Elma Joyce, the only girl, which is perhaps how she earned her moniker.

“I think it was my father who gave it to me,” she says, “probably because he couldn’t remember my name.”

“He’d muster all week,” Girlie recalls, “and on the weekend, canter into town and get a couple of starts at the races with last week’s sweat all over him. Then he’d come home and do some more mustering.”