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.
Bush Journal is a quarterly newspaper that explores rural life through a creative lens.
To read more stories, or subscribe, visit their website below.