In 1953, a remote Northern Territory cattle station was treated to a strange sight — a load of bulls walking out the nose of two Bristol freighter airplanes.
The bulls were flown to Brunette Downs Station, 850 kilometres south east of Darwin, for what's believed to be the NT's first ever stud bull sale.
Despite the NT's first pastoral leases being granted in 1863, for the next 90 years cattle producers had to travel interstate if they wanted new genetics.
In an effort to increase productivity in the NT's cattle herd, the Commonwealth government sponsored the sale, organised by the Shorthorn Society of Australia.
Thirty-one bulls were loaded into a number of Bristol freighter planes and flown from studs in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland, to the Barkly Tablelands property.
Retired cattlemen Ian McBean, now in his 90s, was a young man who had worked in the NT for a couple of years when he attended the Brunette Downs bull sale.
He said the Shorthorn bulls sold that day were much better quality than most of the bulls he had seen on Territory stations.
"When I saw these Shorthorn bulls that came off the plane, they were very different to the cattle that were on Brunette in those days," he said.
"Although [the old station cattle] were still Shorthorns, they were scrubber Shorthorns — they were the old cattle that Nat Buchannan brought up in the 1880s.
The 31 bulls sold from between £50 to £400 each — around $1,800 to $14,500 in current-day value.
Eva Downs, Woodgreen, Hamilton Downs and Narweitooma stations were among the buyers.
Big bush event
In the lead-up to the event, a newspaper article in the Centralian Advocate claimed the airlift of the bulls had "attracted world-wide interest, with headlines in leading newspapers in Britain, USA, Canada and South Africa".
The bull sale was a big event for the region, with around people 700 attending the sale and the two days of bush races that followed, according to a contemporary article in Pix Magazine.
On the way to Brunette Downs, people reportedly lined the airstrips in Longreach and Cloncurry to look at the bulls.
Articles in the Centralian Advocate declared the bull sale a success, however ABC Rural was told the bull bought by Woodgreen only lasted six months, before dying in a drought.
It's unclear if the 1953 Brunette sale was the last sale where bulls were flown in.
The member for the NT, Jock Nelson commented at the time that a stud bull sale might be better located in Central Australia.
"It is likely that competition for stud bulls would be keener at a sale held in an owner-managed station district like Alice Springs than in a company-operated district like the Barkly Tablelands," Mr Nelson said, according to the Centralian Advocate in 1953.
