We have toiled with the question of whether to blog or not to blog for quite some time… years in fact!
Do we want to share our lives on social media? What will we blog about? Have we even got time (given we are run off our feet as it is)? How little or how much do we share? Will people read it, will they enjoy it? So many questions!
The answer is simple – How will we know if we never try?
So here I am, typing our first official ‘Katherine Outback Experience’ blog not knowing where this will lead. But that’s okay, because while asking the above questions I realised this whole ‘blog thing’ would be an ever evolving beast – much like Katherine Outback Experience.
Having thought long and hard, I have come to the realisation our blogs will cover a whole range of topics including:
- What we get up to on a daily basis
- Exciting adventures, places we visit and great activities the whole family can enjoy
- Products we love including fashion and homewares that I love (lets face it, this isn’t really Toms forte)
- Horse and dog bloodlines and training
- Interesting people we meet along the way
This certainly won’t be a ‘how to’ or a place to make political statements – more just the things we love and the things we get up to. It will encapsulate our core vision which is the engage, entertain and educate people about life in the outback by sharing our stories and adventures.
Before we get ahead of ourselves, let me introduce who we are. My name is Annabel McLarty and my partner is Tom Curtain. In addition to being a professional horse trainer and accomplished singer/ songwriter, Tom is the founder of Katherine Outback Experience, a 90 minute show that celebrates life in the outback through real horse training and working dog demonstrations, live Australian music and humorous bush tales. Currently in its fourth season, Katherine Outback Experience is based in Katherine, NT from April to the end of October, and the south-west of WA from November to March.
For those of you who follow ‘Central Station – Stories from Outback Australian Cattle Stations’, you may be aware this is not technically our first blog per se as we hosted Central Station for a week in 2016 and more recently in March 2017.
Rather than re-inventing the wheel, we thought a nice way to kick things off would be to revisit these previous works (with a few tweaks to make them relevant to the present). The 2016 installment was written by Tom and provides an insight into his upbringing on a peanut farm in Kingaroy, QLD, moving to the Territory, his music career and how Katherine Outback Experience came to be. The 2017 chapter was written by me, outlining my family’s history in the WA beef industry, meeting Tom and throwing in my city life to move to the outback for love.
We hope you enjoy our adventures and stories, and we would love to hear your suggestions. For now I leave you with some of my favourite images from Katherine Outback Experience!
Enjoy!
Annabel
Katherine Outback Experience
