Sisters Amanda Loader and Heather Wieland run an all-girl mustering crew

It turns out that growing up doing cattle work with six older brothers was perfect training for Amanda Loader and Heather Wieland. Today, the sisters — who are the youngest of nine kids — run CPP Rural Contracting, an all-girl mustering crew.

Heather, 28, lives in Central Queensland’s Emerald with her husband Peter, a teacher, while Amanda, 29, manages Mount Lebanon, a property about 40 kilometres west of Moranbah.

Amanda: We didn’t get along as kids at all, not for a long time. We used to brawl and squabble. It wasn’t until I came back from Canada when I was about 21 that we started to catch up a bit. By then, Heather had left home and was working on a property. She’d come down and see me and bring Chinese food from the shop in Theodore. We actually became friends.

It’s good working with Heather. A lot of families don’t get on, but we just poke along and are happy to help each other out. It’s been great having her, because she has a pretty similar mind to mine. She gets it and is very keen to get the work done. I think we’ve had a good run; she knows what I’m thinking without me having to tell her. I mean, we’re family.

I can’t remember when I first started doing cattle work, it was just something we always did. I enjoy doing weaner education, it’s my favourite thing in the world. The cattle just didn’t want to be with you at a lot of the places I worked at. You’d drive into the paddock and they’d just disappear. Then I did a Neil McDonald [dog training] school and that changed everything.

I realised I had no idea about dogs or how to work cattle properly. The difference after I did that course was huge: they [the weaners] want to be with you and you don’t have to push them or make them stay together. They are so happy to be with you. Why would anyone ever want to have them where they just hate being with you?

Probably the person who has had the biggest influence on me is Richard Cox [of Cracow station]. He was the first person who explained things differently to me — how you need to control the mind of your cattle.

He taught me that there is more to it than just putting a cow in a yard. In the first few days I was with him, he sent me to do a low-stress stock handling course. I also did the Neil McDonald course while I was with him.

It doesn’t seem easy for some men to work under women. I don’t know why. They always ask me if I’m the wife of the guy running the contract.

We just ended up being an all-girl crew. It wasn’t deliberate. There was a fella that we got a new contract with. When I was talking to him about it, he asked about the crew and I said that it was all girls.

He was like, “Oh, I don’t know how you guys are going to be able to keep up.” He was pretty sceptical. But at the end of it, he wanted us back and we did two rounds for him this year so that was fantastic.

The fella that I work for now, Jeff — we were there in January when it was very hot and humid — he was like, “Jeez, you girls can work!” His wife told me recently that he used to call us the McLeod’s Daughters because we were an all-girl crew.

Heather: When we were growing up, I think we kind of had the mentality that we had to be a bit rough and tumble because we’ve got so many brothers. We do have one older sister, Mel, but she was grown up and gone so we lived in the house with just the boys. You had to be as tough as they were to survive!

Amanda and I really didn’t like each other for a long time. But when we were adults, we got to know each other again. I was going through a hard time on a property where I was working at the time. It wasn’t good for me mentally. Luckily, she wasn’t very far away and she supported me through a lot of stuff. From then on, we became much closer.

Looking back, our relationship sort of fell apart when we were teenagers. When we were little kids, we used to always be up in the morning before anyone else. We loved riding our ponies, galloping around the garden and trying to break our necks jumping over 44 gallon drums.

I was working as a teacher’s aide when Amanda called me up to say she needed a hand doing a job up at Clermont. It nearly killed me that first week, because I hadn’t ridden a horse for three years.

I had gained a fair bit of weight and I think I went down about seven jeans sizes! I realised that I missed doing stuff like this with my horses. I only had pet dogs at the time: I didn’t have a team of dogs, but three weeks later Amanda’s dog had a litter of pups and she gave me two. (Amanda doesn’t like Teddy, my sausage dog, very much; she reckons he’s very impractical.)

Every time we’d get to a property, we’d be fighting the whole “Oh, these are all girls. Can they do it?” thing. One manager wasn’t sure about an all-girl crew, but at the end of the first day, he was saying, “I will never doubt you girls again.”

Having six older brothers helped make us like this, but I also think it has a lot to do with our dad. He wanted us to be the best so we always put our best foot forward, even with so many people doubting we could do the job. Amanda is such a hype girl. She is always like, “Just get up and get going.” If we ever have a problem, there is no coddling; it is always tough love. She is a great person to have on your side.

I think the secret to our relationship is that we aren’t afraid to scream at each other when things get too much. If we do get frustrated, we don’t just blank it out — we communicate.

If we’re ever moving a mob places, we always do two-way karaoke or, if the mob’s small enough, we just sing out loud, harmonising across the cattle. We always kick off with ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’. The people we work for say, “We can hear you guys from the yards” and we’re like, “Yeah, we’re just serenading the weaners.” Who’s the best singer? I don’t really want to say, because I think we both have our strengths. Amanda is good at all the deep stuff.

I’d like to think Dad is proud of us, but he doesn’t show it very often. He and Amanda are similar in many ways: both are good at tough love. He always tells other people how great we are and then they tell us, so that’s pretty good.

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