NQR 130: When Cyclone Ted left carcases across "thousands of square miles" from Blackall to Jundah and the Gulf

Images of cattle and sheep perishing in thick, dry mud.

It paints a picture that has a striking familiarity to the north west monsoon trough floods of 2019, but almost 40 years earlier farmers were faced with similar scenes of devastation when Cyclone Ted struck.

Catastrophic floods in 1974 were thought to be big, but nothing could compare to the loss of millions of dollars of stock from "the worst cyclone ever to devastate the area".

A meeting with 37 property owners found at least 32,000 sheep and 5100 cattle were dead. Families were either forced to leave their homes because of the rotting carcases or because their businesses would be broke.

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Doug Logan at Arjuna, south east of Richmond, lost 3500 of 5000 sheep and Norm Bucknell's Sarre Station, south of Richmond counted 5000 from 7000 gone, the North Queensland Register reported on January 8, 1977.

Mr Bucknell lost 92 per cent of December-shorn sheep and 250 of them were dead within a square metre area in front of his house.

"I don't know whether we will be able to carry on or not now," he told the Register.

He'd lost 700 of 2000 cattle with two paddocks still to be mustered.

What made the cyclonic impacts even worse was the fact graziers had already faced a long series of disasters including drought, which had forced many to raise loans to switch from sheep to cattle.

As a result, the Queensland Cattleman's Union feared graziers were already paying a lot of interest and could not afford new loans to restock.

They called on the government to offer loans of up to $40,000 for graziers, which would be interest-free for the first year and then subject to three per cent interest thereafter and a 75 per cent subsidy on rail and road freights.

Premier Joh Pjelke-Petersen said state government finances were limited.

But he still held discussions with Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser who was expected to pay out more than $14 million to assist producers at the time. The state government was said to chip in around $2 million.