Correct. This Old Bloke Limping Slowly Through The Buderim Shops Is A Recently Retired Central Queensland Cattleman

ERROL PARKER | Editor-at-large | Contact

Suspicious Buderim locals have had their suspicions confirm this week after a new face in town was outed as a recently-retired cattleman from the state's heartland.

After working out which modest hinterland Queenslander he'd traded for his medium-size holding somewhere out the back of Blackall, the Buderim rumour mill has this morning locked in the final details on the bloke in the pressed work shirt who has been doing slow laps of the shopping village since Easter.

Local intelligence had been building for weeks.

The boots. Then the belt. Then the forearms, which are the colour of a Thargomindah gibber plain to a hard, polar white line just above the elbow. Shirtless, it's as if he's wearing a Swans guernsey.

But it was the limp that sealed it.

"That's not an old man's limp," says Buderim resident and retired Rockhampton stock and station agent Peter Whitely, who claims he can pick a Central West grazier at 200 metres .

"An old man limps because of horses, yard work, motorbikes and not knowing or caring for physiotherapy."

The Advocate can confirm the man in question is 68-year-old Sandy, who spent 41 years running a mixed Brahman-cross operation on the Blackall Road not far out of Isisford, before handing the whole thing over to his eldest son, who has already changed the ear tag colour and started talking about "regenerative ag" and "going organic".

Kevin has adapted to coastal life with the grim discipline of a man completing his destiny, wanted or not.

He is up at 4:10am, for no reason. He is at the end of the driveway at 4:40am. He is home before the joggers and road cyclists. He has already formed a low opinion of both. He's trying to quit smoking, he's down to one a day. Which he very much enjoys.

By 7, he's read most Beef Central updates online, checked the weather and predicted rainfall for the next month and driven to the shops for one item. Usually some cow milk or rolling papers, which he purchases over the course of 45 minutes because two separate people asked him where he was from. And he tells them in great detail.

His wife Denise, meanwhile, has assimilated completely. She's in the garden club, she's got a Pilates thing on Tuesdays and she is currently three weeks into learning French for no particular reason. She says there's other retired farmers in the area, he just needs to get out there. But yes, none of them went to TGS like Sandy.

Sandy has been invited to bowls twice. He has said "yeah righto, sounds good" both times, which locals have correctly interpreted as a firm no. He wonders how the Yaraka Gymkhana went the other weekend.

He is instead spending his afternoons standing at the fence of a macadamia orchard down from the house, watching a contractor operate a harvester, forming opinions he has not been asked for and will not be sharing, on account of the fact that he is a guest here. This must just be how they do things down here. And it's the first time he's ever seen a machine like that in the flesh.

As evenin edition of The Advocate goes to print, Sandy had been observed at Kawana Beach, looking out at the breakers and shaking his head.

More to come.