By around 2pm, the streets surrounding the Dungog Showground were lined with cars. More were streaming in every hour to the Showground proper to find a park among the trees and the stock floats - horses unloaded and saddled - ready for the town's first rodeo in two years.
There was an unmistakable energy about the place - a kind of unspoken, but collectively understood urge to knock off two years of pandemic-accumulated dust and to pick up we're we had left off.
At the end of 2019, the Dungog Rodeo Committee was on a high. It had just spent around $20,000 on an entirely new chute for the bull- and bronc riding. New stadium lights had been installed a few months later, but within only weeks of the 2020 rodeo, COVID shuttered both it and the local show - two of the biggest annual events on the small Hunter Valley community's calendar.
The new chutes, unused until this weekend, were put into storage. The lights would not officially illuminate the arena for another 12 months. Both were finally christened on Saturday, as riders came from all corners of the state, and beyond, the try their metal against the best of local bucking stock provided by Branxton contractors, the Fitzsimmons Brothers.
Jake Swan, a young bullrider from the tiny village of Mendooran, about 70 kilometres outside Dubbo, was the first to post a score in his age division at the weekend. At just 16, he has already collected three titles from three years competing in ABCRA shows, as well as several other circuit titles, intermingled with a brief stint competing in the US with the Youth Bull Rider World Finals series in Texas in 2019. In January, he was nominated to join the Australian PBR's Rising Stars program, a boot in the door to the professional league.
He's a stripling - small and wiry-tough in the way bullriders tend to be. And he's fearless. As he clambers down into the chute, he blocks everything out. He lays his rope across his open glove, stiff and sticky from the rosin, clamps it shut and finishes wrapping the tail end. There's a moment of quiet focus before he nods his head, and the chute gate cracks open.
"You have to block everyone else out, and do your own thing" he says, "It's a bit harder on these younger bulls - they're a bit hotter and they look around a bit - but you just have to take your shot and get out into the arena."
What happens next takes only a few seconds. But for the spectators, including Jake's mum, Natasha Swan, watching on from outside the ring, it feels longer. In 2018, at only around 14, Jake broke three ribs, partially collapsed a lung and lacerated his liver when a bull stepped on him in a practice ride at their home on Fairview - their property outside Mendooran. It took him more than six months to recover and around a year before he could fully return to his sport.
"It is a bit nerve-wracking (watching him ride), because he is fearless," Ms Swan says Saturday afternoon. "He started when he was nine and even from a young age, he had no fear. Whatever would run up the chute, he wanted to get on it. It's in his nature to be very determined and really go after what he wants."
The accident may have rattled his confidence, but it seems there was nothing that could kill his hunger for rodeo. Moments after posting his 71-point ride at the weekend, as he raced over the rails with a bull on his tail, he was buzzing; at the height of his powers.
Asked if he felt any fear: "Not one bit."
Asked where he's headed next, he replies, never missing a beat: "I've got Tamworth PBR next weekend. I want to go to America and be the best."
Inside the ring, bullfighter Corey Duncan of Singleton was already limbering up and ready to catch the next cowboy as they break out of chute. Dressed in a pair of runners, long socks under his shin guards and an oversized rodeo shirt that hides his vest, he describes himself as a kind of "moving decoy". His job is to put his body between the rider and the bull and get the cowboy over the rail without injury to them, himself, or the animal.
"I did get on a few," he says, "But I figured to travel down the road all the time, you might as well be out there and get an adrenaline rush for the whole day, rather than just one bull."
The fighters work in teams and on foot - they're quick and agile and when you see them leap over a bull's thrashing head to rescue a rider hung up on his rope, you might think they're indestructible too. They linger about the arena as the riders tie down and snap into action the moment the chute gate bursts open. At the sound of the buzzer, they leap into a mess of rampaging stock and flying cowboy to separate the two and get the rider to safety.
At one point, as a young competitor reaches the fence that surrounds the arena and their bull makes a beeline by them for the gate, Duncan instinctively steps between bull and rider, and shelters the cowboy at the rails with his body.
"You have to want to do it," he says, "It's a lot of practice and a lot of talent. It's not as simple as coming in and getting on one and hoping for the best.
"There are lot of really talented kids (here). The good ones have practice bulls at home that they'll get on through the week.
"Some people will say it's crazy, but we just love the adrenaline, I suppose. The feeling of walking out of the arena after just saving someone from getting hurt - and not actually getting hurt yourself because you know where you have to be, and you have faith in who you're running with - that helps a lot."
As the bullriders fall back behind the chutes, where they hang about waiting for their next event, Singleton horseman Michael Mapp prepares for the team roping. A mate from Beaudesert, Brad Henry, has come down for the weekend to compete with him and maybe make a little fuel money for the trip home to The Hollow - a cattle station where he runs and breeds mostly Charbrays.
Record rainfall over the past few months had seen his property come out of one of the worst droughts he had seen, and into one of the best seasons he has have ever had. The cattle market is strong, he says, and it's helping his industry recover.
The rain also brought flooding to parts of the state, before eventually coming down the coast to drench the Hunter, but in Mr Henry's words, "we can put up with flooding".
"We'd rather put up with that than the dry," he says. "It's a tough game. Anything in the rural and primary production industry is a tough game. But that was my dad's advice: you're in it for the lifetime, not the money."
When the steer breaks away and dashes across the arena, Mr Henry ropes the horns while Mr Mapp tries to get a line around the back legs. It's a complicated, fast-paced and technical event that takes a pair of riders and their horses working seamlessly in unison.
Mr Henry is an ex-steer wrestler but, now semi-retired from the rodeo circuit, he occasionally travels to compete in the team roping with his creamy palomino pony Amigo.
"It takes a lot of patience," he says, "But it's a great team sport. It's something you can do with your friends or your kids. Michael has a couple of boys in North Queensland now doing really well. They're probably some of the best boys in the country. And he's got grandchildren coming along that probably won't be far behind them."
As the crowds spill out of the stands and over the grassy embankment that surrounds the arena where the hot chip van does a steady trade, hat vendors Anne and Stewart Guest have made their first trip up from the Central Coast in two years. Their stocks have been in storage since the pandemic struck and Mrs Guest was worried their business might have fallen out of style.
"Two years is a long time," she says, "Fashions change. I was worried - a lot of people have gone to caps - I thought we might have gone out of date here, but business has been very good."
A sunny and warm day after weeks of rain has the couple doing a roaring trade between their Australian-made and US-imported hat-wear.
Secretary-treasurer of the Dungog Rodeo Committee Carol-Ann Cummings says it was shaping up to be a bumper crowd late Saturday afternoon as spectators were still pouring through the gates ahead of the open riders events in the evening.
"I thought our 2019 was huge," she says, "Because we haven't had any events, people are keen to get out, but rodeos seem to be getting bigger and bigger."
The Dungog Rodeo began in the 1960s as a fundraiser for returned servicemen and women, committeeman Peter Carlon explains, back when it was known as the Dungog Diggers Rodeo. As a younger man, he tried his hand a bullriding, but says he fell out of it not long after.
"My father said if I got hurt, I still had to go to work," he laughs, "He said I had to make a decision: ride and get hurt and then go to work. Or don't ride ... and go to work."
Over the years, the annual rodeo became a fixture on the Dungog calendar as the committee invested its annual takings back into the community through local clubs and volunteer organisations like the RFS and Westpac Helicopter Service, who worked the gates at the weekend.
"We always try to keep our money in the town," Ms Cummings says, "That's what got us our new chutes, and extra panels. It's just donating our money back into the community is what we're all about."
