"You know it doesn't rain out there very much."
That's one of the comments Andrew Hacker gets when he tells friends he's left a well-paid job with a large resource company in the Maranoa and headed west beyond the Barcoo.
Some would say it's madness, but for Andrew, who grew up at Muckadilla, and his wife Sally, originally from Goondiwindi, and their two young children, buying 8095ha Hazelwood at Isisford was an opportunity they couldn't pass up.
Beyond the feed offered by a rain reprieve in autumn 2018, the property was part of an exclusion fence cluster, land prices were a fraction of what they were further east, and Sally's parents had paved the way in 2016 with the purchase of Westfield Station south of Longreach.
It was also an opportunity to consolidate - they had been leasing then buying country at Goondiwindi, buying cows and breeding up numbers, and agisting more land - and so western Queensland, regarded in recent years as drought central, has become home.
It was the dream of owning his own place that outweighed the job managing Santos's cattle operations in the Roma district, Mr Hacker said, and he is open to whatever off-farm income opportunities present themselves in the west.
He is no stranger to the ups and downs of rural life - his parents John and Kerri Hacker would normally run Merinos, cattle and grow crops at Muckadilla but their operation has been dramatically reduced by the lack of rain - and he feels strongly that buffering a straight ag income with 'off-farm' work is essential to survival in rural Australia these days.
"Especially with young people in ag, to be able to soften the blows when it doesn't rain, I'd like to see myself working 50pc on the farm and 50pc on some sort of off-farm show," he said. "Whether it's in the livestock side of things, doesn't worry me too much."
For the next 12 months, that's going to involve a lot of internal fencing and home renovations as well as managing whatever the weather might bring.
They have also inherited the previous owners' Dohne stud and been very impressed with their performance, especially in the area of getting lamb weights up.
"It's a good balance because you've got a Merino ewe cutting you a fair bit of good quality wool and you've also got the Dohne influence in the lamb coming through," Mr Hacker said.
They want to pursue a more traditional Merino path for now, monitoring lamb weights and survivability as they see where the weather takes them.
"We really don't know, we haven't been doing it long enough out here to know," he said.