A student looks on as Mading completes a circuit.
Refugee students enrolled in a 12-week agricultural studies course at the Warwick TAFE, an Australian tertiary institute, file onto their bus as they are given a tour of a cattle station in the Darling Downs district of Queensland state.
The students — new immigrants from such war-torn countries as Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and Somalia — are trained in the use of tractors, forklifts and four-wheel motorbikes, as well as shearing and horse-riding.
The students get hands-on experience at a cattle weighing station on the campus of Warwick TAFE.
Students ferry a bull calf to a castration station at the on-campus farm on Warwick TAFE.
Magar "Benny" Mading, 21, jokes with fellow students while on a field trip to a cattle station in Australia’s Darling Downs region.
Selvakathiramalay Muthiah (centre), from Sri Lanka, watches on with fellow students as they are shown the ropes in the cattle yard.
Sri Lankan Suthakaran Sutha (centre) looks out over the cattle yards of the Warwick TAFE campus.
Selvakathiramalay Muthiah, from Sri Lanka, mans his post at the cattle weighing station on campus at Warwick TAFE.
Mohammed Karimi, from Afghanistan, and Suthakaran Sutha of Sri Lanka successfully goad a cow onto the weighing platform.
Duncan McMaster, 49, a teacher at Warwick TAFE, explains the business of rural Australia to his class while out on a field trip.
Thanseevan Nadarasa, 18, of Jaffna, Sri Lanka, wipes away weariness in the cattle paddocks behind Warwick TAFE.
Mading, from Kenya, wrangles a calf at the on-campus farm of Warwick TAFE.
Mading, 21, wipes down Dolly, one of several horses the students are using for riding lessons at Warwick TAFE.
Mading saddles Dolly before his riding lesson. “This country is a great country. Yeah, you do go through a lot of bad and good, but that’s what life is like," he said.
Thanseevan Nadarasa, 18, from Sri Lanka gets a riding lesson in the indoor arena.
Thanseevan Nadarasa, 18, from Sri Lanka, and the others are plugging a gap of young labor in Australia’s agricultural industry left by the exodus of a generation of young Australian farmhands to the coastal cities or otherwise lured by large wages in the country's booming mining sector.
Geteye Fantabil (centre), a native of Eritrea, has been in Australia three years after arriving from a refugee camp in Ethiopia.
Mading gets a riding lesson from Kellie Monckton (in red) at the indoor arena at Warwick TAFE.
A student looks on as Mading completes a circuit.
