WHAT is that smell? "It's the smell of money," says Bourke goat farmer Robbie Newton, NSW, who is surrounded by wild goats rounded up by farmers on neighbouring properties.
Smell seems too polite a word for something that clings to clothes and permeates taste buds long after Bourke is left behind.
The hundreds of goats jostling in Mr Newton's holding yard, before heading to an abattoir in Queensland for export and to Nyngan to be slaughtered for halal butchers and restaurants in Sydney, smell like a field of overripe French chevre festering in the Australian heat.
Mr Newton's former sheep farm, Summerville, generates up to $5 million a year from the sale of 150,000 to 200,000 wild goats. Ninety per cent are exported.
Goat prices are also at record highs. Mr Newton buys wild goat for about $1.70 a kilogram live weight, while the export price is about $4.20. With the average goat selling for about $55, these one-time pests are a rare source of income for many drought-struck farmers in Bourke and other areas.
There are about 6 million wild goats in Australia - and it is the largest exporter of goat meat.
About 90 per cent of all goat sales come from rangeland, wild or feral goats. These are mustered in places like Bourke in arid or semi-arid regions. Since 2004, Australian exports of goat meat have more than doubled to 35,800 tonnes in 2014. Most is sold to the United States. Live goat exports have jumped from 50,500 head to 88,500 in the same period, a recent report by Meat & Livestock Australia shows.
State MP Kevin Humphries, whose Barwon electorate includes Bourke, said income from goats and opals was holding together many communities in the region.
Bourke resident Phillip Parnaby said: "If there were no goats, we'd be in dire straits."
For Mr Newton, goats were a sideline 17 years ago. They now represent 80 per cent of his business. He rounds up goats on farms and in national parks under licence, or has them delivered.
Depending on goats for a living was precarious. "People may go out and not see one, or they may go out and find 100."
Rounding them up was difficult.
"They get big and old for a reason," he said.