Bulldust In My Bra is a witty and rewarding account of a couple’s life-changing year traveling and working half a world from home.  A dream year of working in outback Australia offered more than Rebecca Long Chaney had anticipated. She had more heat and dust, more exhaustion building fence, more hours herding berserk feral cattle, more snakes and spiders in her sleeping quarters—and more adventure than she’d ever imagined! 

Bulldust In My Bra is the lively, funny true story of a brainy and brave woman who took a hiatus from her career as a successful agricultural journalist to travel with her husband into the farthest reaches of the Outback. Their objective: find a cattle station that would accept them as ranch hands and work till they dropped every day. Chaney had grown up on a dairy farm and traveled widely reporting about the agricultural industry. Her husband Lee was the herdsman on a dairy farm. But they wanted a new challenge, and what would be better than the Australian Outback? 

On the way to Australia, the Chaneys stop in Tonga, New Zealand and Papua New Guinea for escapades hiking and exploring, but their real adventure began when they arrived in Western Australia with their eager faces and American accents. They both understood the difficult challenges around livestock, and a rancher on a “rough-as-guts” station offered a season of tough manual labor and an Aboriginal shack to sleep in. At Ashburton the Chaneys enjoy several months of hard work and deep satisfaction. 

The job is brutal at times—setting posts and unrolling fence wire for long days in the baking heat, shoeing horses, and preparing vehicles and equipment for the great cattle musters. Their “home” was a ruined shed with wide cracks to the wind and stars, a drippy shower over a mud hole, and lizards that darted across the walls. Chaney soon got over her dismay and came to love their primitive conditions, including a poisonous huntsman spider who was their “shack mate.” Her anecdotes, both amusing and sad, are full of vivid detail and exude the love she felt for the rough landscape and hardworking people who live there. Her understanding of herself changed, as did her relationship with her husband. 

The highlight of their months in Australia is the lengthy task of gathering and processing the thousands of cattle that ran wild on the tens of thousands of Ashburton acres. Over several months, the crew chased them on horseback and with adapted cars called “bull buggies.” There was tagging, dehorning and castrating to be done in the cattle yards. Bulls were separated and hauled in multiunit “road trains” to the shipping yards. The hundreds of running cattle churned up the dry earth into a fine “bulldust” that settled on everything—the mark of long days in the bush. Chaney describes their mustering days with such verve that the grueling work seems more like adventure sport than the life work of an Outback station.