Outback station owner Andrea Speed is trying to get her young family's life back to normal after record-breaking flooding inundated western Queensland.
But she is not sure how that will happen when the roads surrounding her property have been destroyed by raging floodwaters.
"There's a lot of bitumen torn off the sides, there're sharp drops and culverts washed out," Ms Speed said.
The Department of Transport and Main Roads (TMR) says the full extent of damage to public roads will not be known for weeks, but almost 5,000 kilometres of roads across its network have been closed or restricted since the flood emergency began last month.
Additionally, more than 8,300km of private roads have been affected, according to the Department of Primary Industries.
Isolated for weeks to come
The damage is so bad at Ms Speed's Retreat station that she cannot make it down the kilometres-long driveway and out her front gate.
And even if she could, it is another 300 kilometres to the nearest town, Longreach, making grocery shopping or taking her six-month-old child to the doctor even more challenging.
In this part of the world, roads are "absolutely crucial" for landholders' personal lives and business.
Retreat station's cattle are trucked hundreds of kilometres to their central Queensland feed lot each week.
Ms Speed said to avoid damaged roads, trucks would have to take a 500km detour.
She said it would be a huge cost to factor into the budget.
"We're going to be doubling our freight bill just to keep things rolling," Ms Speed said.
Improved rebuild
Down the road at Thylungra station, George Scott has spent the past week hosing mud out of buildings and dropping feed to isolated cattle by helicopter.
Mr Scott said he had seen floods before, but the destruction and power of this one left him speechless.
He said the floods had sounded the "death knell" for one of the region's most important corridors, the Diamantina Developmental Road.
"There're huge bits of it washed away. It's in a pretty rough state and it's going to take some serious infrastructure spending to get it back to being serviceable," Mr Scott said.
The 1,300km road connects Mount Isa in north-west Queensland to Charleville in the south-west.
Mr Scott said the road had been in poor condition for 20 years and was so rough in sections it threw livestock off their feet.
"It's not good for animal welfare when the roads are so rough," Mr Scott said.
He said there were not "too many votes" in the remote region to entice politicians to spend money on the corridor.
TMR said emergency works were under way on sections to try to keep parts of the Diamantina Developmental Road open.
Getting cattle to market
Dalene Wray, managing director of OBE organics, a company that regularly trucks cattle along now flood-damaged roads, agreed western Queensland's roads were not "up to scratch" even before the natural disaster.
"There are tens of millions of dollars of export revenue generated from the livestock and tourism industry in western Queensland," Ms Wray said.
She said once floodwaters went down, repairing key access routes should be a priority.
"The grass is already growing so we're going to be getting fat cattle that need to be trucked to market," Ms Wray said.
Road recovery works are jointly funded by state and federal governments through the Disaster Recovery Funding Arrangements.
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