Bob Holder takes a break after a long day mustering and feeding his cattle, plumping them up before he leaves the farm to ride in an outback rodeo.

The 95-year-old cowboy won’t rest for very long. He never has.

Working on the land, under the sun, alongside animals is exactly what has kept him going strong for close to a century.

“You’ve got something to do every day and you’re doing it yourself,” Bob said from his property at Cootamundra in the NSW Riverina.

“I’ve got something in my life, I haven’t just wasted my life or walked around drinking grog all my life.”

Bob rode with the rope and tie team at the Mount Isa Rodeo in outback Queensland in August, having competed in thousands of events across Australia and overseas for eight decades.

Long known as the “Cootamundra cat” for his lithe riding skills and straight-talk, he is thought to be the oldest competing cowboy in the world.

He began at Tumut rodeo in southern NSW after working with his drover father to break in rogues for farmers to ride.

By 14, Bob had little interest in calming the animals. He much preferred the wild ones.

“I really like bucking horses ... so I thought, ‘I’m gonna be a cowboy’,” he said.

“It gives you a thrill to stay on them, they’re tough.

“I love a horse that gets right up in the air and really bucks.”

In his first decade of competing, Bob was a regular feature on the pages of the Cootamundra Herald, which proudly tracked his every move in the rodeo world.

He made page two in a 1954 edition for winning a bareback championship and earned the affectionate description of “our local roughrider” when he set out for Queensland’s Warwick Rodeo later that year.

One of his early wins was relegated to the end of a story about a rare “lady rider” under the headline ‘Girl rider delights rodeo crowd’.

Bob has seen plenty of welcome changes in the sport since those days, including the specialised breeding of rodeo horses that are treated with the same reverence as thoroughbred racers.

After suffering minor riding injuries in his 50s and 60s, Bob’s peers urged him to retire.

“They’d say, ‘you have to give it up, you shouldn’t be doing this kind of thing at your age’,” he said.

“Oh, go away — it was a couple of broken bones, that’s all.”

He has outridden those pleas by four decades and missed only one Mount Isa Rodeo in his storied career.

“It’s the best rodeo in Australia and any outdoor rodeo in the world,” Bob said.

“It’s well-run, perfect bucking stock, all spectators can get a hell of a good view, nobody can miss anything or get jammed in a corner.

“You can’t wish for anything better than that.”

The biggest rodeo in the southern hemisphere, itself a 65-year institution, was bolstered by a $1 million Queensland Government lifeline after it went into voluntary administration in late 2024.

It prides itself on outback traditions, while giving young and Indigenous riders their start.

Alhough Bob has shared plenty of wisdom with those up-and-coming riders, their influence on him is just as vital.

“You get too old too quickly if you start mixing with older people,” he said.

“You mix with young people and you live longer.”

— AAP

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Wednesday, 20th October 2027

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