Halina Baczkowski

Australian tea-tree oil producers are facing a crisis with one of the industry's major customers - the European Union - planning to declare tea-tree oil a toxin, unsafe for humans. Australian producers say this could spell the end for their aromatic trade.

The first thing to notice is the silence. It's quiet as calm cattle are loaded onto a truck on a grazing property in far north Queensland. It's in stark contrast to the loud, unpredictable and sometimes dangerous scenes that accompany the transport of roughly 40 million sheep, cattle and goats every year around Australia. Instead of the usual narrow loading ramp the design has extended the ramp to 1.7 metres wide.