Sometimes all it takes is an Australian to show just how far out of the norm things can be. Years ago, I met Jonathan Chester, whose photography company was called Extreme Images.

I thought this was a bit of braggadocio on his part until I saw his pictures of blizzard-swept Antarctic peaks, storm-tossed sailboats, climbers so frostbitten they looked like extras from "Night of the Living Dead"... and penguins, the tuxedoed birds that live in the most extreme environments on the planet.

For this expedition, we'll venture with Chester back to his home country, where he honed his skills as both explorer and photographer, and rub elbows with crocodile hunters and shark wranglers, helicopter flyboys and balloon jockeys, jackaroos and jillaroos.

	Yahoo! News Wrotham Park Lodge manager Mat Daniel and our guide, Cam Harms, wear their weather-beaten Akubra hats with distinction. Click photo for larger image.

WROTHAM PARK STATION, Australia -- We find ourselves in the antipodean bull dust, careering down a muddy, bumpy road from nowhere to a place I've never heard of.

Young Cameron Harms is driving "flat to the board" at 50 clicks an hour, grinding past goannas (the lizards of Oz), parrots, plovers, bustards, wallabies, dingoes and broadsides of "beasts," as Harms terms cattle. We're headed toward the homestead to meet the head jackaroo -- or top cowboy -- of Wrotham Park Station.

The station (what I'd call a "ranch" anywhere else) assigned Harms to be our guide. I'm not sure if he qualifies as a jackaroo. At this point I'm not even sure he knows how to drive.

"You ever get bogged?" Chester asks Harms. Australians are known for illustrating conversations with grand gestures, and almost at once the car comes to a stop and starts to sink.

It all seems eerily familiar. Some years ago, I made a 1,900-mile off-road drive from Cairns to Darwin, going across the only country in the world that is itself a continent --and the driest, flattest, hottest country on Earth. Somewhere in the middle of nowhere I got stuck in a patch of gummy black soil, and despite my sand ladder and winch (which wouldn't reach to anything but a termite mound), I couldn't get out.

Then out of the haze appeared a man on a motorbike chasing a lone Brahma bull. He veered over and together we were able to rock the car out of the rut. When I offered him remuneration for his help, he refused. He just tipped his Akubra, the signature hat of the Outback, and rode off into the sunset.

Chester and I have shared a few expeditions, in Africa and the Antarctic and the Annapurnas, all of which he covered photographically. As I describe my previous Outback encounter and marvel at the risk quotient of the modern jackaroo, Chester waves a dismissive hand.

"Australia is the land of extreme jobs," he says.

Chester knows a thing or two about extreme jobs. As a young man in Adelaide, he played Australian Rules football, the most brutal and unprotected team sport ever concocted, and was repeatedly crunched and damaged. He gave up football on doctor's orders, and became a diver, where he had close shaves with sharks, stinging sea coral, deadly sea snakes and a too-close squeeze with a blue-ring octopus, which injects venom more violent than any known in land creatures.

Working as a full-time diver left him wincing at the thought of pulling on a wetsuit on weekends, so he picked up climbing. And from there, his career path found its way to photography. He owns a company called Extreme Images, and wrote a book called "Going to Extremes," and a new one called "Extreme Digital Photography." (Do you detect a theme?) He's also written or photographed several books on penguins, and has taken stunning images of almost all the penguin species in the world ... except, ironically, the Little penguin, found near Melbourne. Perhaps on this trip he'll complete his portfolio. If we ever get out of this billabong.

Wrotham Park is a 1.5 million-acre working cattle station in the Outback of North Queensland. When we met the staff, we notice they look pretty parched; several have chap-splits in their lower lips. Turns out they have been isolated from the closest pub, some 80 miles away in Chillagoe, for six months.

David Roberts is the manager for this 35,000-head station, and he's just returned from a stockman's holiday at a cutting camp. He throws a saddle on his black stallion, Uluru, remembering what it was like to be a jackaroo in "the good old days."

"A quarter-century ago, they used only horses to muster the cattle," he says. "The jackaroos would ride about for two months with nothing but swag on their backs and tucker in the saddle bags."

It was never easy work: Even though he was riding from the age of 4, more times than he can recall he has fallen off his horse while mustering, and once broke his leg.

Today's jackaroos use motorbikes, quads (ATVs) and helicopters to round up cattle. Roberts figures this increases efficiency and helps meet budgets, but he owns up that it "feels a bit like cheating." And it's more dangerous. With all the machinery in the chaotic midst of moving cattle, the injury rate is higher, and jackaroos don't last as long, and it is increasingly hard to hire new ones. "They'd rather work in the mines," he notes.

One more thing. When Roberts first mustered it was solely in the company of men. Now a broader net is cast, and about 30 percent of the wranglers are "jillaroos."

We decide to meet one of these modern-day musterers, chopper jockey Matt "Heliwood" Wright. Wright flies a Robinson R22, a doorless bird the size of a go-cart. They call him "Heliwood" because he wants to be in pictures, and he's got the looks to make the dream possible.

Mustering is what brings Wright to Wrotham Park now, along with his two mutts, Diesel and Sky, who are trained to leap from the chopper on command and corner a stray bull. When Wright lands he'll race to the beast, tie it to a tree and radio in the location. More feral cattle are found this way than in the past, but the hazards are definitely higher. Wright volunteers that the bloke with this job before him "wrote off" three helicopters in a year. The pilot before that lost seven.

We unsuccessfully resist the temptation to "go for a fly" with Wright. But once aloft it's like the realization of some sort of Kafkaesque nightmare -- waking up as a mosquito. We buzz and swoop, dip and dive, somersault and cartwheel, defying the laws of sanity and gravity. We vacuum up the Outback, scare sulfur-crested cockatoos, chase jabirus and drop down next to a wild boar, so close I can see the sweat on his bristle. Wright sees a lone bull behind a paper bark tree, and prods it out into the open savannah with the chopper's nose.

This guy is good. This guy is gutsy. If Wikipedia needs a picture to illustrate "macho," I volunteer Wright's split-lipped mug.

"Helicopter mustering -- you just cannot beat it," he says.

When he isn't herding cattle from the air, Wright engages his machine in his hobby, collecting crocodile eggs from gramineous and toothily guarded nests. Two weeks ago, when Wright was flying low, looking for his usual quota of jaws and claws, he spotted a crippled kangaroo by the side of the road, probably hit by a truck. He reached into the mother marsupial's pouch and pulled out a big-eyed baby. He brought her home to be raised until she could return to the wild. He named her "Gucci," after his fashion-model-girlfriend's favorite brand.

That night over XXXX Gold -- Australia's third most popular beer, and a favorite here on the ranch -- Wright shows off one of his home videos. Hearing that we're from L.A., he hopes to interest us in a pilot for a TV show, starring himself, artfully wardrobed in ripped shirt and sweat-stained hat, fending off a mother crocodile, with a .357 in one hand and a flimsy eucalyptus branch in the other.

I am ready to place bets that Matt Wright won't die of old age.