Nyanda Station's cattle thrive, tours to resume post fires and floods

The 15,580 hectare property, located in the Carnarvon Gorge region of central Queensland, was hit in October last year by blazes that lasted 10 days straight.

Christian Bom, who lives and works at the property owned by his wife Caity's grandfather, John O'Neill, said thanks to two weeks of rain following the fire, the vibrant green of the bush came back in full force.

"John, who has been here 60 years, said he'd never seen that much rain around that long before," Mr Bom said.

The heavy rainfall following the fire meant they were able to hold onto their roughly 2000 head Droughtmaster breeder herd at the time.

"If that rain didn't happen it would have changed things for quite a while here, so that rain was a godsend," Mr Bom said.

"We've had pretty good follow up rain since then and we thought it was almost over as it started drying out a bit, but then we had another just under 200mm in the last couple of weeks."

Most of the rain came the week before Easter, with around 120mm of light misty rain of over four or five days before 56mm came in one big deluge overnight on the Thursday of that week.

"The ground was already so wet and fully saturated that the water just ran straight down into the creeks and the creek came up just over eight metres at our crossing here," Mr Bom said.

"Eight metres of water moves a hell of a lot of sediment, so there was a big clean up to do after that."

In 2022 the Boms launched a small business from the property called CQ Nature Tours, leading driving and hiking tours on the property.

The fires last year cut their season short, but they had been expecting to be able to reopen the business to tourists in March.

The recent flooding event however meant their season had to be pushed back further, and they'd lost bookings over the Easter holidays.

"We still can't access the part of the property that we mostly do our tours on," Mr Bom said.

"I went up the other day and went to fix the roads and clean up the creek crossing with the tractor, but I got the tractor bogged, which is not an easy task.

"I had done it weeks ago, but it needed doing again because it rained again after that. We'll have to give it a little while as the ground is very wet.

"It's been a tough start to the [tourism] season, a tough few months."

Bookings had been slower than this time last year, but Mr Bom was hopeful for the season ahead having recently noticed the Gorge getting busier again.

"The business will pick up, especially as all the grey nomads start making their way up from NSW and Victoria there will be a lot of people coming through," he said.

"It might even be better than we expect because people might have delayed their trip a bit since it's been so wet, so we're hoping there's a big lot of people on their way."

The future plan for the business was to set up a wash station to protect their property from weed and seed biosecurity risks and invest in a vehicle they could run tours from.

Despite the rain being a bit of a burden for the business, Mr Bom said the cattle were loving all the grass and were looking very healthy.

He said the damp ground and cooler weather coming through would also likely mean the ground would hold moisture for a while.

"The grass was just starting to hay off, just starting to get dry, but now it's looking nice and green again."

They were planning to muster all the cattle next month as it had been too difficult to do a proper muster over summer as there was just so much green grass around that the cattle were spread out around the property.

"They're just everywhere. They're up in the mountains and in spots you can't get them out of very easily," Mr Bom said.

"I'd say there will be some big calves that we'll have to brand, and everything is so healthy, all the cattle are looking really healthy at the moment."

He said overall the property had recovered really well except a couple of patches up on the ridges that had struggled, but he'd noticed a change in the last couple of weeks.

"I've just noticed that there's a lot of new shoots coming out of those big old gum trees up on the top of the ridge line, so the recovery in the areas that were worst hit is starting to become visible now," he said.