Most people wanting to take their children for a swim in the afternoon don't have to worry about a dead cow hanging in the tree above them.
It's just one of the many reminders the Anderson family is dealing with as it comes to terms with the aftermath of February's flooding and exposure.
"You're blocked from what you'd normally like to do," Rachel Anderson said. "The creek's full of dead carcasses. The water may or may not be contaminated, we really don't know so we can't really be swimming in it."
The rawness of the whole experience is still very evident at Eddington, 20km west of Julia Creek where Ms Anderson's husband Anthony lost a large proportion of his Droughtmaster stud cattle and all the genetics that go with it.
"He was 15 years into his own stud genetics," she said.
"It takes 12 to get purebred registration for your own genetics so we were just hitting our feet with that.
"It's pretty much back to square one. He's not sure where he sits with that at the moment."
In a terrible twist of fate they were due to bring some of their stud cows home from agistment just before the monsoon bore down but they'd started calving so they left them there.
"We were just a couple of weeks too late," Ms Anderson said. "We lost nearly every one of them in that paddock."
In the months since the waters swept through, they've been frantically fencing to have enough secure paddocks to bring agisted cattle home in the face of property owners selling up.
All up, they estimate they've lost 1800 head of cattle, around half their herd, and thick piles of still-boggy silt dumped across their paddocks are not growing a lot of feed.
Ms Anderson said adding all the flood recovery work and applications for assistance on top of their usual work meant life had become frantically busy.
Related: Life slows after frenzy of flooding
"Even the kids are commenting on how fast the year has gone. For them to say that, it is obviously having an impact on them."
She said while they did shelter the children from a lot of the horror in the immediate aftermath, they had seen the dead cattle on the property and understood why they were rearing 18 poddies.
"We were devastated and gutted and I didn't want that for them," she said. "They know it's going to have an impact on our livelihood for quite some time."
On the flip side are the letters and cards still coming in from complete strangers, saying that the author is thinking of them.
"Some days you have bad days when you just think, why don't we just sell and go somewhere else where we don't have to live a life like this," Ms Anderson said. "Then you open one of them and it's beautiful."
Another person near Clermont sent up two staff for work plus a box of food and a little note.
Speaking about it starts the tears and Ms Anderson confessed that it still overwhelmed her.
"It's so nice to know that you're still in people's thoughts," she said.
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Sally Gall
Based at Blackall, CW Qld, where I've raised a family, run Merino sheep and beef cattle, and helped develop a region - its history, tourism, education and communications. Get in touch at 0427 575 955 if you've got a story idea for me.
Based at Blackall, CW Qld, where I've raised a family, run Merino sheep and beef cattle, and helped develop a region - its history, tourism, education and communications. Get in touch at 0427 575 955 if you've got a story idea for me.
