Shared value

Fourth-generation farmers on Callubri Station, Mike and Angie Armstrong have diversified the operation to make it more resilient.

Story + Photos Andrew Hull

The tree-lined Bogan River is only just gaining its legs as it wobbles past the stacked pine and corrugated iron sheds and buildings that make up Callubri Station’s homestead complex, navigating an unlikely path north west to its confluence with the Darling.

This is a course that is shaped by geography and time, sometimes by opportunity, occasionally by necessity, and always by the interconnecting cycles of weather and climate as they make their inexorable, multi-generational impacts on lives that are lived in years, days and moments along its banks.

For the Armstrong family who lives and works on Callubri, there are four generations that have taken nourishment from the Bogan’s waters as they carved out their place in what is still classified as the Central West, but is more characteristically western NSW, on a mosaic of blacksoil floodplain and the loamy red soils of the Bogan Shire.

“My great-grandfather moved here in 1878, so we’ve been here for nearly 150 years,” explains Mike Armstrong, who runs the mixed cropping and sheep operation with his wife Angie and son Eamon. “I’m fourth generation, so Eamon is the fifth, and it’s just been a family farm all the way through.”