It's here in the country we pull up for a visit with Mitch Russell, his ruggedly handsome profile blending into the endless green paddocks and rising ridgeline to the north. He's mending a fence, right next a pen of two-year-old bulls.

Russell isn't alone. His trusty farm dog sits in a cage on his ute. And his four-year-old son Max is darting about, playing in mud puddles, hopping on his own quad, checking on the bulls, asking dad about the visitors, and answering a few questions himself.

Between them, father and son have got everything under control. It's sunny winter day and everything and everybody is where they should be.

It's the quiet season for Russell, 33. Raised in West Wallsend, where his dad was involved in cattle, greyhounds and trotting horses, Russell has been living in Melville for the last 12 years, working as a stockman and cattle buyer.

The 50 two-year-bulls in the pen in the paddock near us look timid enough, but they are young. There's another 50 bulls feeding in nearby paddocks, mostly older ones. What they all have in common is that they are bred to work as bucking bulls on the rodeo and bullriding circuits.

For Russell, raising and training bucking bulls is part and partial of his cowboy life. His other passion is working as as rodeo clown, as in protecting bullriders from these 750-kilogram beasts once they fall off a ride in an arena.

The combination of those two hobbies, plus his work as a stockman and cattle buyer, means he spends seven days a week with cattle. It's just those weekends when he's right there in the ring, smack in the middle of the action when the gate opens a bull charges out, bucking with a rider holding on for dear life, when his relationship with animals get a bit more intense than his daily chores.

His job: as soon as the rider comes off, he and his two fellow "protection athletes", as the clowns are called these days, get to work quick distracting the animal and leading it away from the downed rider before anybody gets hurt.

"It's good," Russell says without the slightest hint of bullshit. "It is the best seat in the house. I've probably spent more money than I make. I just love it."

He started when he was 17, jumping into a rodeo ring in Coonamble when a friend got injured and getting them safely out of danger.

Despite three knee reconstructions, knocked out teeth and broken bones, he's never wavered from the task.

Russell will be in action when PBR Monster Energy Tour Newcastle Invitational comes to town on August 3 at the Newcastle Entertainment Centre. Russell will be teamed up with Geoff Hall and Clint Kelly as protection athletes. Not only do they do this work together, they are mates, in the best of country tradition.

In this particular line of work, the friendships surely have sprung just as much from trust.

A rider has to stay on a bull for eight seconds to gain points for a ride, just to remind you how tough this sport is. The chaos starts when the gate swings open and the ride begins, the bull trained to jump and contort to the best of its ability to throw off whatever is on its back.

"They're weirdos," Russell says of the bulls.

"They are mad to a degree. But they gotta be smart as well as mad. They gotta know what they're mad about."

As for how Russell feels at that moment, when he and the other two have to spring to action to control the situation, well, there's a calmness, a level-headedness present.

"Just going to rodeos is like going to work, it doesn't worry me," he says. "When I used to ride it scared the crap out of me, getting on 'em. Just doing the bullfighting doesn't worry me."

Russell considers the bull an athlete, too, all 700-plus kilograms of it. They don't get hurt much (he's seen maybe two bulls injured by falling at the top level PBR in his eight years of working in the ring).

But the danger for the riders and clowns is ever present; movement and behaviour is unpredictable and there's not much room or time to escape.

"I get a little bit nervous just before grand entry," Russell admits. "Everyone is there. But as soon as the bulls are in the shoot, we're talking.

The guys I'm working with, Geoff and Clint, they are the best I've ever worked with. Just easy. You don't think about anything else that happens. Everyone does their own thing. It just happens."

That's easy for him to say. The action happens in a matter of seconds, in real time.

"You see a guy knocked out. You talk. Set up a plan - 'You stay', you go'.

"If a guy gets a hand stuck, the first guy will get the bull's attention. At least if the bull controlled, the other one can jump up on his [the bull's back].

"We don't talk about that. We just do it as it happens.

"When a hand gets stuck, all it is is the rope goes around twice . . . When it's stuck, the hand rolls over, they cant get their fingers open . . . a lot of time it's just a matter of straightening the hand, when pressure is on em, it just pops out. You can just hit their hand and it pops out."

Sometimes the only reason the rider's hand is still wrapped around the rope is fear, Russell says.

"Fear keeps them hanging on," he says. "When you think about it, you let go."

He knows from first-hand experience.

Russell has worked in the PBR finals, the top of the bullriding game, for the last seven years. His goal is to work at 10 in a row.

"It'll be eight this year," he says. "I'm 33. Plenty of guys gone longer than that. I don't want to be the guy everyone's talking about shouldn't be there still. I wanna be able to say, 'he was at the top when he was finished'."

The inevitable question comes up: are you uninsurable?

Russell laughs it off, saying his wife makes sure he's covered.

"I used to ride bucking horses," he says. "She'd rather me doing this.

"The way she sees it: we control it. It doesn't faze me too much. That's another thing. When I quit, it will faze me. I will be dreading going out there. Now, it doesn't. Once I start thinking about it, and all that . . ."

Clearly, he'd rather be on the ground, face to face with bulls, than trying to ride one.

"They say bullriding is 90 per cent mental, 10 per cent physical," he says. "I reckon this [clown work] could be 98 per cent mental. Sometimes I go somewhere and don't even know a bloke and I gotta stand there and get a hooking for him. It takes a bit of mental . . . You have to be pretty mentally fit to do that. Stand there and get hooked, and know you're gonna be sore the next day and cop that."

The last time he took a bad hit was in Cairns in 2018; a bull stood on his foot and broke some bones and he got a jabbed in the hip with a horn - but he back in the ring the following weekend, albeit a little sore.

In 2017 a bull got between his legs "and did some damage". He missed a bit of time after that one.

Early in his career, he missed two years when he injured his ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) in a knee. Then he injured the ACL in his other knee and missed a year. "But I haven't missed a beat since then," he says.

It's a top winter day and Russell and his animals look healthy. He introduces us to one of his stars, Train Wreck, isolating it in a pen and giving it extra feed, along with Popcorn, the two-year Friesian Jersey cross his son Max bucket reared.

He's keen for the Newcastle event, and the start of the spring rodeo and bullriding season. He'll be running bulls and working rings from August until almost Christmas. Like his bulls, he'll probably have a spring in his step as it warms up.