The drover's life and his dog

When on the track the drover's home is a small covered van 6 ft. long and 4 ft. wide. Not only does this van carry the bedding and food supplies for two but all the other gear needed on the track as well, from hessian and stakes to make. temporary yards, to dog muzzles and horse hobbles, and from chaff to a camp oven.

Most of this gear is carried in the roomy compartment underneath the false bottom of the van. Food supplies are carried in a big stout box across the front, which also serves as a seat for the driver. During the day the bedding is carried on a shelf in the rear of the van body at night it is unrolled along the floor.

When a drovers turnout is loaded for a long trip it becomes an object lesson of packing and stowing reduced to a fine art. Any article needed can be obtained Without delay, whether it be the shotgun to shoot a rabbit for the dogs or the hammer and nails to shoe one of the horses.

The sheep are counted out of the paddock or sale yard when the drover arrives; as soon as the tally is found to be correct he takes delivery by signing a receipt, and until he gives delivery at the destination those sheep are in his charge alone.

The destination may lie 10 miles away or it may be 500 he may deliver the mob in two or three days time, or he may be a year or more travelling them but duringthe whole time he is thrown upon his own resources, with nobody to turn t for advice or guidance.

He is expected to choose the best route and to know where grazing and water can be obtained any where along the tracks he must account for every head in the mob at his destination and nobody is his friend for important though he is to the pastoralist he is the reverse of popular with the owners of the properties which he passes on the trip.

In theory, the grass, which grows by the roadside is there to be eaten by travelling stock, but in practice a landowner is apt to regard the roads around his property as long paddocks to which he alone holds the grazing rights. The law compels the drover to move his sheep at least five miles every day and to proceed to his destination by the nearest practicable route, but, no matter which route the drover chooses he is sure to strike trouble in the shape of irate landowners who demand to be informed why the drover could not take his sheep along some other road.

Long and heated arguoments of this type are often the daily lot of the drover and as a result he must be a good "sea lawyer" who is fully conversant with his rights. It is a waste time to attempt to bluff a droverin bad seasonshe is often forced to go beyond the law and adopt expedients similar to those of Banjo Patersons immortal Saltbush Bill when he and his sheep starving in sight of grass and at such times he becomes as the Ishaaelite of old, with every mans hand against him and his hand against every man.

Even so, he is a poor person to quarrel with, for there is a freemasonry among the craft which regards an injury to one as an injury to all. The man who comes down in a straightforward way to point out to the drover that his paddocks are bare of feed and that the bit of grass along the nearby roads is all he has for his own stock is likely to receive every possible consideration but the man who runs down to the road and attempts to bully and bounce the drover into moving his sheep elsewhere will most likely not only fail to do so but will find that he has done himself a bad turn. Word is passed around among the drovers when they meet every passing mob of sheep is taken along that road and soon what grass is left in it is not worth arguing about any longer.

The same applies to water. An astonishing number of waterholes and springs throughout the settled areas is fenced off in spite of the fact that on the survey plans they are marked with the broad arrow which iridicates a public water reserve. Here again, the drover has to act the "sea lawyer" with anyone who tries to stop him from watering his sheep there.

The drovers working day begins at dawn the whole year round. The boss prepares breakfast while his offsider sees to the horses after breakfast, the drover unchains his dogs, lets the sheep out and strings them along to feed on the roadside leaving the offsider to pack up and bring the van along later.

A good man always tries to travel his sheep in accordance with their natural habits they graze in the early morning, rest through the middle of the day, move on again during the afternoon, graze towards ovening and go on to the night camp with full bellies. Inside a yard made by stretching rope-edged strips of hessian on iron stakes with the dogs chained at intervals as an added precaution. The dogs receive their only feed for the day at dusk. After a yarn around the camp fire the two men make up their bunks side by side on the floor of the van and turn in.

A good drover knows that the dogs will awaken him if the sheep become restless or frightened during the night. So at a rate of between five and eight miles a day, the sheep are taken to the destination. Except in unusual circumstances, speed in transit is a minor consideration the main point is to give delivery of the sheep, with no avoidable losses, and to have them in mood condition.

In autumn when the young grass has sprouted and there is no longer any fear of feed and water shortages, a drover's is a pleasant life equally so in the springtime, when every patch of scrub is bright with wildflowers and the feed grows thick and Iush by the roadside.

But it is a different story during the mid summer heat wave, when all the feed is parched, water is scarce, and the gritty dust penetrates to every corner of the tucker box. Then the drover eyes the farmhouses as he passes by and wishes that he could sit down to a meal in a cool house, where there would be no necessity to keep one hand waving flies off the plate, and where the butter would be firm instead of a warm and gritty oil, and the bread soft instead of having dried to the hardness of a brick. Even more attractive is the thought of a real bath instead of a hasty sluice down behind the van or a clump of bushes.

Midwinter brings the nadir of a drover's hardships. As he struggles to light a fire of damp sticks, with his back to the freezing wind and the trees which shelter the camp bending before the rain squalls, he thinks enviously of the men who go home to sit by the fire when their warm beds beneath a roof. The man who has sheep on the track in mid winter may not know what dry clothes feel like for days on end.

At night he huddles in his blankets in a van little bigger than a dog kennel and yet it is a life which most drovers do not want to leave and are eager to return to. It carries heavy responsibilities and the pay is hard earned, yet there is not much really hard work attached to the job, and the drover is his own master.

The life gratifies the wanderlust which is part and parcel of so many human natures, and the drover spends most of his life in the land of lots of time. In a world where everything else is being endlessly speeded up, the drover's job remains one where hurry does not pay. Nothing can be said or written of the drover without mentioning his indispensable friends, servants and companions.

The drover's dogs are a class apart from sheepdogs, they perform the hardest part of the the work with an intelligence and devotion to duty and master which has to be seen to be believed. Old Monk, the famous dog owned by Fred Knight, of Naracoorte, was typical.

If sheep from the traveling mob broke through a fence and became boxed with those of a land owner, Monk would leap over the fence, cut out those sheep one at a time, drive them back to the fence and force them through again. For eight years he worked on the tracks and that is a.long time for a dog to stand up to the hard life of droving.

Then a passing motor car ran over himn and injured him so severely that his hindquarters were partially paralysed. He had to be cairied in the van after that. There was a severe heatwave at the time and the mob of 1900 crossbreds had been two days without a drink when they passed a dam which had dried to a basin of soft and treacherous mud, the sheep broke and rushed towards the smell of wet mud.

The drover did his best to check the mad rush of the thirst maddened sheep,but his exhausted sheepdogs could do nothing. With in another minute hundreds of sheep would have been bogged down in the mud. Then old Monk come to life. He had heard the sheep breaking, and knew what it meant, he leaped out of the van, howling with pain which his effort caused his injured back and made for the lead at a staggering run, where he turned the leaders away from the dam by barking and snapping under their noses. Then he collapsed.

When the sheep were safely out of reach of the dam, Knight went back for his old dog, and found him lying helpless on the ground. It was the last work that Monk ever did, he never recovered the full use of his hind legs, and spent the rest of his days as an honoured pensioner. But how that old dog used to strain at his chain, barking and fretting, when sale day came around, and he could hear the bustle at the nearby sheepyards!

There is never any need to tell "tall" stories of what sheepdogs have accomplished fact beats fiction every time.

H. A. Lindsay in the "Advertiser." .