Feature
Issue No. 33 - February/March 2007
Outback cattle drive‘s $8m bonanza
The Great Australian Outback Cattle Drive this May will see visitors from across Australia and around the world drive 500 head of cattle and 150 horses hundreds of miles - the experience of a lifetime.
More importantly the visitors, many of them foreign press and tour operators, will likely drive business our way after recreating a spectacular part of SA's history.
The romance of historic cattle drives through the red centre was first recreated in 2002 as part of Year of the Outback. It was staged again in 2005 and became a biennial event. This year's event will follow the Oodnadatta Track from William Creek to Marree, a course of 390km, between 21 May and 10 June 2007.
Guests will ride with some of the country's premier drovers to experience what was an integral part of Australia's commercial development. The visitors will have opportunities to go on side trips to area attractions such as the Great Artesian Mound Springs, Lake Eyre and the Anna Creek Painted Hills.
The Drive was conceived as a vehicle to market tourism opportunities in the Outback of South Australia to the rest of the country and the world. It's an enormous exercise in stock movement involving drovers, stockmen, station owners and cattle, but it generates a huge amount of international media exposure.
And a measure of how well the effort has paid off is global TV enterprise The Discovery Channel being attracted to the spectacle.
The Discovery Channel launched the documentary Outback Cowboys - The Great Australian Cattle Drive in Adelaide last November. A co-production of Tourism Australia and the Discovery Networks, the 60-minute documentary profiles Australian outback characters, based on the Bell family from Dulkaninna Station and their preparations for the Drive.
The program is expected to reach more than 300 million homes worldwide. To date it has been screened on The Discovery Channel in Australia, New Zealand, USA, UK, Ireland, Ch...
