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"It's a challenging job.
Ah... you gotta be,
not blowin' me bags, you gotta be
pretty resilient; you gotta be somebody special that does enjoy bein' out here.
We are
forming up the road which hasn't been nothin' done to it for quite some considerable time.
It's a lot lower than the rest of the country which means that it acted like a big drain
when it rained.
It's, it's a lifeline between Maree and Birdsville and ah...
we're forming it all up, compacting it to a standard
and then we've putting extra material on to built it up so
we can maintain it and patrol it with watercarts and graders you know as it needs be."
"My name's Craig Stephenson, uhm
they call me 'Cowboy'.
At the moment we're on the uhm...
Belkanoona to Yunta Road.
We just finished fifty-two 'k' south of here
and we've been on this road since 2010
and we've done another hundred and
hundred and three kilometres or somethin', so."
"When I was a kid I used to play in the sandhill in the sand pit and build roads
when I was six years old and you know
I enjoy it. It's, yeah, uhm...
I'm very passionate about it you know
very; I, I'm
pride myself on trying to make the
the best job out of
sometimes some of the material
or some of the products are
really bit of a battle but we try and do our best."
"It gets well up into the forties
we get a lot of dry heat up here, uhm...
so it just gets hot.
You know you can't tell the difference
between uhm... say ninety degrees and a hundred and fifteen, and a hundred and twenty.
You can't tell the difference; it's just hot. So uhm, yeah."
"We work eighteen days and then go home for ten.
we can't complain; we've got tele...
four channels of television, we've got
air conditioning; we have three good meals a day.
We've, yeah got a
magic cook;
bloody brilliant cook actually."
"They like a roast; uhm
anything that's roasted they like. Yeah...
I get a bit of help from all the guys and uh...
one old guy helps me with the dishes every night, and
yeah, no, they're a good mob."
"I like, I like the outdoors stuff; that's
uhm..., I was brought up in the country, so
takes a lot to get it out of your system."
"I just love bein'
out in the outdoors,
been brought up in the country.
There are things you see out here that you don't see anywhere else."
"I'd like to get some of them blokes down in Adelaide to come up and
try and build a road out of this stuff."
"The think I don't like is flies!"
"For me this is God's own country; yeah
wouldn't be anywhere else actually."