As far as getting a feel for cowboy culture, I'm not sure how you do that any better than driving around, looking at the landscape, and stopping in certain small, old towns. There are some 'dude ranches' of course, but those are more like holiday camps than anything realistic, and there are riding stables that will let you ride sedate, old horses through the ceders.

If you're based in Austin you should take a couple, three days and drive on back roads towards Fredericksburg, and stop at the Lyndon Johnson State Park; it's still a working ranch and you can walk through pastures, look at cattle and kick cow chips all you want. They've also rebuilt Johnson's grandparent's nineteenth century house, but I'm not sure how different a Texas dog-trot cabin on a cattle ranch is from what the dog-trots Australians built on sheep stations.

Once you get to Fredericksburg, they've worked hard to save a lot of the old German buildings (yeah, there were a lot of German cowboys), and there's some good German restaurants too. There's also the Nimitz Museum (You might know that name because he was in overall command of Allied Forces, Pacific (including ANZAC troops) in WW2, and he was born in Fredericksburg, so there's a naval history museum in a German/Texas town about four hundred miles from the ocean.

You can also get an idea of cowboy culture, or at least the ways we celebrate it now, by eating lots and lots of barbecue - what you call barbecuing isn't barbecuing, it's grilling and eating real barbecue is a sacred activity - here's a kinda recent list of the best shrines. And by going to some of the old dances halls and doing the Cottoneyed Joe and Texas two step on a wooden floor (that's about the only time any of us wear those boots anymore). Some of the best are the Broken Spoke right in Austin, Gruene Hall in New Braunfels, and Luckenbach (the whole town is the dance hall, and it's near Fredericksburg too.).

Damn this got long - I guess I like the topic.