The Buffalo Hunters

As a teenager, Judy Anictomatis and her five sisters used to drive out into the bush several times a week to hunt wild water buffalo. Wielding .303 rifles, they would find a good-sized beast and most days bring it down with a single shot. Wielding extremely sharp knives, the sisters would then work together to skin it, remove the legs and as much meat from the carcase as they could, and take it home. Judy was born a long way from buffalo country, on an irrigated sheep and wheat farm near Rochester, in northern Victoria. ‘A drought came on and my father made the big drift into the centre in 1949, when I was only six or seven months old,’ she says.