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A young Peter Ritter stood in the back paddock of his family’s Moree farm - neck craned as a gigantic Hercules aircraft blocked the sky above him. “It was a bit of a training ground for the military,” he recalls. “They’d fly down in fighter jets and have fake wars over the top of our property.”
When he wasn’t on rouseabout duties in his uncle’s shearing shed, Peter was chasing goats in the scrub on his motorbike, and hanging out for the spray planes that swooped deeply like tin magpies in mating season. “The plan was always to fly,” he says. “That was about as much planning as I put into it.”
That’s until his boots hit the dirt at a remote cattle station in the Northern Territory - where, surrounded by the thundering hooves of thousands of Brahman cattle, and the whir of a mustering helicopter overhead, an idea began to take shape. Peter Ritter wanted to become a mustering pilot. But it would be years before he got behind the controls, and he’d have to leave the bush to do it.
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