Sarah and Ben Dunsdon are raising their young family on a sheep and cattle station near Cunnamulla in South-Western Queensland.
Frankie Dunsdon jumps out of the car and immediately starts gathering a bunch of wildflowers from beside the road. She may only be five years old, but Frankie displays wisdom way beyond her years as she identifies the paper daisies and foxtails in the bunch. The endearing moment illustrates all that is remarkable about Frankie’s world. Growing up on Francvillers, a sheep and cattle station just south of the outback Queensland town of Cunnamulla, Frankie and her little brother, Henry, aged three, have 50,000 acres (20,234 hectares) to call their backyard. They are completely immersed in station life, with chickens and poddy lambs Spot and Sandy to feed and dog Belle and cat Smoky to care for. Even at their tender ages, they have a deep appreciation for life on the land, and the plants and animals that sustain them, not to mention the rest of the nation.
Frankie and Henry’s parents, Ben and Sarah, moved to Francvillers, shortly before Frankie was born in 2019. They run the station in partnership with Ben’s parents, Don and Deb Dunsdon, who bought the property early in their married lives in 1976. Don grew up on Nulla station to the north of Cunnamulla and he and his brothers followed in their father’s footsteps, developing a number of properties in the district, primarily growing Merino sheep for wool. These days, the Dunsdons run mainly Angus cattle and their sheep are Dorpers — Don was an early adopter of the South African breed after the wool market crash of the early 1990s. Don and Deb live in a cottage on Francvillers, while Ben and Sarah and the children live in a nearby homestead, which was built in the 1950s. Sarah grew up on a property growing cotton, fodder crops and table grapes at Surat, went to boarding school in Brisbane and worked as a veterinary nurse until she met Ben, who had also done his secondary education in Brisbane and was doing a diesel fitter’s apprenticeship.
After school, Ben worked FIFO near Innamincka in remote north-eastern South Australia for a year, then completed his diesel fitter’s training before moving back to the Cunnamulla district. Sarah followed in 2012 and worked in the local medical centre for a while, then took time out to help Ben on the station where they were living. “I got a bit tired of the 120-kilometre daily round trip to town,” she says. “I helped with mustering and lick [feed supplement] runs and really enjoyed the work.” Sarah adds that they have settled easily into the community and have been joined by lots of people of a similar age and stage, who have spent time in the city and returned to the bush to work on the land and raise their young families. “At one stage, the Paroo shire had the highest birthrate in Australia,” she says. “There would be at least 50 children in our friendship group, so the kids will grow up with lots of friends. My mother always says the further west you go, the friendlier the people are, and we’ve found that to be very true. People think nothing of travelling hundreds of kilometres for a barbecue and go to a lot of eff ort for social events and community fundraisers. We’re lucky that we live close to town, so Frankie and Henry will go to primary school there.”
Inside the homestead, Sarah and Ben have rearranged some of the spaces to make it more conducive to raising a young family and contemporary living, opening up the kitchen and dining area and turning what in the past was probably staff accommodation into guest rooms. They’ve added a spacious undercover entertaining area and installed a pool, which is a godsend in summer when temperatures in the high 30s to low 40s are common. Sarah, who inherited a green thumb from her mother, has devoted considerable time to the garden, which was established by Deb. It’s always a challenge in a climate of extreme temperature range and the ever-present threat of drought. When Australian Country visited, the country was emerging from a fairly benign winter, and the roses were in full bloom, as well as oleanders underplanted with society garlic, callistemon, masses of mauve pigface and magenta bougainvillaea.
Sarah also shares some of her plant knowledge through a business called Outback Flora, which sells plants and helps people with garden design and maintenance. She’s also in the process of adding cut flowers to her offering and is trialling various cottage garden plants in raised beds beside the house. Ben is similarly in perpetual motion, juggling station work with his role as a helicopter pilot, mustering livestock on stations throughout the region. In their “spare” time, Ben and Sarah have established four camping grounds on the property, which are becoming increasingly popular with self-sufficient campers. Three of the sites are located on waterholes, while the fourth is perched on a ridgetop, perfect for capturing sweeping views of the often spectacular sunsets.
The Dunsdons have installed outdoor bathtubs complete with “donkey” wood-fi red hot water systems, so their guests can delight in a good soak while enjoying the night-time spectacle of the Milky Way. The beauty of these bush camps is that each set of visitors has the entire site to themselves, so they can enjoy birdwatching, fishing, yabbying and the baths in truly splendid isolation. “We realise we are very lucky to live in this part of the world,” Sarah says. “It was an obvious decision to share it.” Meanwhile, guests who are lucky enough to have Frankie as part of the meet-and-greet team might end up with a personally curated posy. All botanically identified, of course.
