You get five days of rain up here and we’ve had two so far this year.” – As Murphy’s Law would have it, Irish Country Living is here on one of them.

We’ve landed in Coral Bay, Western Australia, at Warroora Station where Tipperary man Wesley Cooke and Kilkenny woman Carol Phelan are telling Irish Country Living about the climate in their adopted home.

Warroora Station is a 265,000-acre beef cattle farm which looks out on to the Indian Ocean. There are 20 beaches on Warroora, so it also has a campsite and accommodation. Wes works on the farm.

While Carol also does some farming, she works mainly on the tourism side of the business.

Farming in Western Australia is very different to farming at home, and cattle mustering was just one thing the couple had to get used to.

“You’ve got planes in the air and bikes on the ground – you’re working from sun up to sun down,” says Wes.

“A guy comes and he’ll get up in the air and we’ll all be on the motorbikes. He’ll be radioing down to us, telling us where there’s a couple of cattle. We’ll then buzz off and find them. It’s brilliant craic. The neighbours come in to help each other do it and it’s all really exciting.”

There are 700 cows at Warrorra station and they are mainly the droughtmaster breed, which was developed in Queensland at the turn of the last century. They are a cross of the Brahman and British Beef Shorthorn breeds. Wes says these cattle can be live exported or they can go into the domestic market in Perth.

“The main income earner for cattle is young bulls – one-year-olds. A good 350kg animal will make a thousand bucks. It’s good money.”

He says they are very defensive mothers but very docile as Australian cattle go, and they live off what they can graze from the orange earth surrounding Coral Bay.

This, for the most part, is buffel grass, which was introduced to Australia thanks to camels that were brought in from the Middle East in the mid-1800s to do transport and heavy work in the harsh conditions and blistering heat of the outback. The saddles the Afghan camel drivers brought with them contained buffel grass for padding, and the seeds escaped.

“Australia is covered in buffel grass,” says Wes. “Farmers love it but environmentalists hate it because it’s toxic to other plants, so when it gets in it just pushes all the other stuff out. However, it’s really, really good feed. It loves the heat. It gets roots down six metres.”

Wes and Carol explain there are lots of bushes the cattle eat as well, such as bush beans which are like pea plants.

But not everything that grows here is good for the cattle.

“There is one toxic weed we actually have a lot of called balsam,” says Wes. “It’s got a sap in it that causes paralysis. The older cows sometimes get a little nibble of it and they figure out that it’s toxic and they don’t go near it again. But young heifers get it and they just keep walking and walking and they get exhausted as they walk further away from water and they perish, so there are some losses to that.”

700 cows on 265,000 acres works out at 400 acres per cow, but Wes informs Irish Country Living the true figure is actually 210 acres per cow: “Because we’re using just over half the station at the moment.”

Even half of this station is a vast land area and one that requires quite a lot of fencing posts. They set quite a big distance between the stakes – something Wes struggles with: “There are like 25 metres between posts and I’m like: ‘I can’t, it’s too far!’”

He says kangaroos can get through any fence.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of fence you have ... they can hop under, through, over. Emus as well. Emus just smash the fence as hard as they can ... they just run – 40km an hour, bang, fall over – and if they’re still alive they cross the road.”

There’s a shark in the water!

Kangaroos and emus are just some of the wild animals the couple has encountered during their time in Australia. The other is a shark.

“I was just out in the water one evening after work, at about five o’clock,” explains Carol, “and this fish came up behind me. I was facing the shore and this fish just came through my legs and grazed down and kind of bit me on the side of my knees ... I was terrified.”

Wes was on the shore, calling Carol to come in as he could see the big fin circling around Carol.

They went straight into town to the nursing post in Coral Bay and Carol was stitched up.

“The scars aren’t too bad but it’s funny because they’re like three little scars in a row and it’s like a drag down kind of scar.”

In retrospect, Carol surmises the shark was showing “a bit of aggression” because she was in his territory – and she also picked a very bad day to swim.

“That time of year in the water corals spawn. It’s like spring for the ocean –it’s all growing again and there’s a lot happening, so when you have that happening you get a lot of activity ... so we went down a couple of days later and it was literally like 10 dolphins, turtles, manta rays, sharks – everything was out in the water.”

“They do actually recommend you don’t go swimming during coral spawning but sure we’ve learned that now,” says Wes.

Cyclones are another exotic feature of this region and Wes and Carol were in Coral Bay last year for a category four cycle (category five is the highest).

“We got the eye of it,” says Wes. “There were 350km/hr winds and we got two years worth of rain in a day. We all just bunkered into the house for the night. Every other building bar the house we were in had roofs blown off, windows gone, flooding. Australians are so professional about it – there’s no messing. It’s like martial law. You’re off the roads. Everything is shut down and you have to be in a building. If you’re not then you’re going to be put in a building. You get arrested if you’re doing the wrong thing. A water tank blew 60km in the air and landed outside. It nearly took out one of the houses and there were five more in the ocean.”

Coral Bay is very remote. Wes and Carol are an 11-hour (1,100km) drive from the nearest city Perth. In fact, it’s such a small place that there’s no school in it (though there are much, much smaller places in Ireland that have a school). The closest primary school is in Exmouth, which is 210km away .

“It’s like the wild west, isn’t it?” says Carol. “It is the wild west,” concludes Wes.

Since Irish Country Living met the couple in Warroora, and after three great years for them there, Carol and Wes have moved to Bindoon, which is just north of Perth. They are moving home to Ireland in August and have set a date for the wedding.