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Rob Hulme can only dimly imagine his grandfather's farm life, reliving it by poring over his diary: "At 3 am, I released the 40 horses from the fence, then I fed them before I led them to pull the plough." The diary was written in the 1920s.

The 1,200-hectare farm that Hulme's family owns has passed down through five generations. But of course the days when horses were the busiest laborers in these sprawling fields in southeastern Australia have long since disappeared. They have given way to combine harvesters that spare man and beast the backbreaking work that took weeks, and that can harvest hundreds of hectares of wheat in just a few days.