In an era of increasing pressure on Australia’s live-export trade, we take a close look at the treatment of Australia’s cattle once they reach Indonesia.
Story + Photos Ken Eastwood
It’s early Wednesday morning near Panjang Port in southern Sumatra, Indonesia, but it’s already around 30°C and sweatingly humid under thick grey clouds. Chickens and small cats scurry across the heavily potholed, wet roads, dodging a steady stream of motorbikes, laden with entire families or building equipment such as wheelbarrows or goods to sell. The land is lush and green, with thriving banana and rubber plantations, corn, coconuts, cacao, sorghum, rice paddies and tapioca. Out of some of these fields rise tall, rectangular concrete structures, which house nesting swallows, used for bird’s nest soup. Beautifully painted mosques, in blues, greens, whites and gold, stand out in villages of single-storey houses and shacks.
At the port, the Devon Express is disgorging its load of 2,700 Australian cattle – about a dozen at a time – onto small trucks. In Darwin, when they were loaded on Friday night, they would have been on 6-deck road trains, carrying 180 at a time. Below decks are similar temperatures to outside – 30–32°C with 79% humidity, and the cattle are quiet and obedient. There were zero mortalities on this trip, but one will have to be put down onboard, as its back was broken when another jumped on it on the way into port.
Once the cattle are unloaded, the 116m long vessel, crewed by 25 people – mainly Filipinos – will return to Australia empty for another load – part of this vital trade both for Indonesia and the cattle stations in the north of Australia. Last year alone, 540,000 head were transported from Australia to this country of 285 million people, in which beef consumption is growing by 5% a year.
Predicted by PwC to have the world’s fourth largest economy by 2050, Indonesia’s 17,000 islands include Sumatra and Java, which has the highest population density of any island in the world. Beef consumption has grown over the past 10 years or so from 1.6kg per capita per year to 2.5kg, but that is widely variable depending on region.
Indonesia is our largest market for live cattle and, after domestic production (with a herd estimated at about 15 million), Australia is the largest contributor to that country’s beef consumption. In October last year, a monthly record for boxed beef imports from Australia was set at 11,026 tonnes.
But it’s the live-export trade that generates the headlines. Since live cattle exports were temporarily stopped for 2 months in 2011, the industry has not only adopted higher standards of care, biosecurity and treatment of people, but has encouraged cultural changes in Indonesia that see better, ensured treatment of Australian cattle from port to table.
From the port, the bulk of the cattle on the Devon Express travel about an hour to the largest of 28 feedlots in Indonesia, Juang Jaya, 90% owned by the Australian Consolidated Pastoral Company (CPC) and 10% by local shareholder Dicky Adiwoso. With up to 24,000 head at any time, it fattens 60,000–75,000 head a year from arrival weights of around 330–380kg to 500kg. CPC also owns a second, smaller feedlot in the north of Sumatra, and exports up to 40,000 head a year to other Indonesian feedlots.
Listen to our interview with Ken Eastwood, talking about his Indonesian assignment, on the R.M.Williams OUTBACK podcast.
This story excerpt is from Issue #160
Outback Magazine: April/May 2025
