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| ISBN-13: | 9781743434086 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Allen & Unwin Pty., Limited |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 4 MB |
About the Author
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Great Australian Horse Stories
By Anne Crawford
Allen & Unwin
Copyright © 2013 Anne CrawfordAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74343-408-6
CHAPTER 1
BOGONG JACK
Craig Orchard remembers the first time he saw Bogong Jack in the Victorian high plains with the clarity of air after rain. The black-and-white stallion, bigger and flashier than most, was standing with a mob of brumbies in a clearing, a grassy plain rimmed by woodland. The horse turned to look at him with his half-white face and snorted. The brumby runner from Benambra way had caught plenty of wild horses before but this one looked pretty special.
Craig reckons he first crossed paths with the stallion in the early 90s, before the bush was burnt in the 2003 fires and before he married Tahnee. Craig was taking cattle to the Bogong High Plains for an old cattleman called Charlie McNamara, who had a lease up there then. It was the middle of summer and the horses were taut with condition and full of energy.
But Bogong Jack, as he became known, wasn't having a bar of the horse and rider that appeared on his patch. The stallion flicked his tail in the air, wheeled around towards his mares and galloped off with the rest of the herd into the scrub. Craig took off, chasing him, but he got away. The high plains are hard country to pursue horses: steep, rocky, full of rabbit and wombat holes, logs and little mongrel creeks with banks that subside under hoof. But he'd catch the stallion next time, he swore to himself. He never forgot a horse once he'd seen it. He'd be back for him.
Craig had been fascinated by the wild horses ever since he was a boy, sitting round the campfires listening to the 'old fellas' talk about brumby running. He helped a cattleman from Bindi called Mick Murphy drive his herefords — 200 of them — up to the high plains every year and there were usually brumbies on the way and stories about them at night; tales of men trying to yard a mob, the spectacular ways they got caught, the cunning brumby that always escaped. Stories that stretched with the telling like shadows in a setting sun.
The brumbies were kept in a holding paddock until there were enough of them to make it worth bringing them down to be trucked to Omeo. Most of them were sold to be broken in and ridden by the children of cattlemen or farmers, though Charlie McNamara used to take a few down to the Omeo Rodeo. Didn't get their nickname of 'bucks' for nothing.
Craig got his first catching rope at the age of eleven — not a fancy plaited cowhide like the older men and rodeo riders used, but one he made on the farm from baling twine twisted into rope with a winder. As he made it he thought to himself, 'I'm going to catch one of these brumbies.'
But it wasn't that easy. The first time he went after a brumby the horse outran him and Craig had to pull back, not wanting to go too far after it and get lost. Took him a couple of years before he learnt his way round the bush enough to rope one, but after that he got a bit faster and went further each time. His confidence grew, and from about the age of fifteen he was catching big numbers.
He started brumby running at seventeen with Jock Sievers, a rugged bushman who worked as a logger with Craig's father and wanted someone to catch horses with him. In time, Jock's daughters Tahnee and Aleshia came along with them. There's a fair few girls that do brumby running and plenty of them are as good as the blokes, Craig says. Tahnee was handy on a horse and became a fine whip-cracker. A good looker, too, with that smile and her long dark hair.
Craig would go out with the Sievers and others through from Limestone Creek out of Benambra to Quambat at the head of the Murray River to Nunniong back towards Swifts Creek, the Bogongs beside Mount Hotham and Spring Creek. Wherever there were brumbies, they'd go.
There's not much he doesn't know about brumby catching now. By the time he was 44 years old in 2013, he'd notched up more than 900 catches. It's a real good sport, he says, it's you against them. Once it gets in your blood you can't stop.
Craig has a licence to take brumbies out of the state forests as a subcontractor for Parks Victoria, or 'Parks' as it's called. He became part of what started as the Australian Brumby Management Association about twenty years ago, an organisation that made sure that people licensed to catch brumbies treated them humanely. The contractors remove a set number of horses every year from the national park as part of a program to keep numbers down. Craig tries to catch the younger ones — from eight months to two years old — because they're easier to find homes for. The older horses aren't good for much: hard to train and hard to fence in. He and the other contractors aren't allowed to release horses they catch back in the bush so if they catch a horse that turns out to be old, its fate is usually sealed. Unless someone wants it — and most people don't want an old brumby — it will be sent to the saleyards or knackery. He'd rather not catch the old stallions or mares but says he knows that if the number of brumbies in the parks isn't controlled, it could be worse for the horses. 'I'd hate to see them all get shot out,' he says.
In general, the brumbies see you then take off flat-out one way and you take off after them exactly where they go and just keep going and going until one 'knocks up' or you get faster than them and head them off. If you can't catch one in the first 200 or 300 metres, galloping up alongside them and looping a rope around their neck, you might have to keep chasing them for 3 or 4 kilometres. Craig once rode after a brumby for more than 13 kilometres. It was near Nunniong on the logging roads and he retraced the chase in the ute, checking how far he'd gone on the speedometer.
He got that one but there is always the one that gets away; the wily brumby that isn't going to be outwitted by a man on a thoroughbred. Like the baldy-faced mare at Spring Creek at the back of Cobungra Station, the state's biggest cattle station. An old story went that years ago the McCrae family, who had a bush hut there, released a Clydesdale stallion that was no longer of use to them. Cattlemen and farmers did this from time to time to improve the look of the brumbies, sometimes inbred and ugly as sin. The occasional trotter would go bush, or a coloured stallion, just to make the breeding better. The McCrae's Clydie mixed in with the local brumby mares and bred up some good-looking horses: brumbies with four white feet, chestnuts and blacks with big white faces.
At the time he saw the baldy-faced mare, Craig was competing in a few mountain races and had a fast horse, a big old thoroughbred that had been a racehorse when it was young and was now surefooted in the bush. Craig and his mates found a mob of brumbies in an area where the bush opened out to a meadow. Craig was winding up the thoroughbred, approaching the moving mob, thinking he was doing a 'real good job' of keeping up with them. He noticed the big mare with a lot of Clydesdale in her and thought she'd make a good broodmare. He galloped past a big foal and a yearling heading towards her, thinking he'd slip in and get her 'easy', sure that she couldn't outrun him on the thoroughbred. He drew in beside the mare and, moving quickly, got the rope ready to drop round her neck. The mare looked at him sideways, pulled away, stretched her neck and left him for dead.
Craig laughs and shakes his head thinking about it. 'I thought, I'm on a racehorse in an open gallop and she pulled away. It was like chasing a Melbourne Cup horse! By geez she could go. I admire them sort of horses.' He dropped the rope on the yearling and took him home instead. The mare's probably still out there or died of old age, Craig says. And good on her.
Then there are the rogue horses, the horses that take you on rather than galloping away from you.
There were a couple of pretty bad stallions up the back of Nunniong; horses that would see you and come at you flat-out to protect their mares. One day Craig was with an old cattleman from Swifts Creek and a good mate, Dean, riding on the Mia Mia logging road. The men had just started a mob off when Craig galloped into the herd, heading for a mare he wanted to catch. He looked round at what he thought was Dean approaching, and saw a set of teeth coming at him instead. A big black stallion, ears flattened, necked strained, lips back baring his teeth and lunging at him. Craig gathered the catching rope coiled on his horse's neck and smacked the stallion over the head with it as he passed to ward it off. The stallion dropped in behind him and Craig moved closer to the mare.
He'd chased her for a kilometre down the road when he heard a horse coming up behind him. 'Get off me horse,' he yelled at what he thought was Dean getting too close to the thoroughbred's rump. 'Get off me horse!'
Craig was leaning down about to loop the rope round the head of the mare when the black stallion's head appeared again from around the side, coming in to grab him by the thigh. Ripped him clean off his horse at a gallop, rolled him down the logging road, splitting his knee on the rocks and gravel. The stallion peeled away and off. Thought he'd won.
Dean flew past pursuing the mob and had been going for about a kilometre when the black stallion caught up and got hold of him, biting him hard on the shoulder. The two men met up and swapped accounts. Craig went back to have his leg stitched.
Quite a few people got bluffed by that horse. Big black thing, horror of a horse that didn't like riders, Craig recalls. Doesn't think he ever got caught.
There was another stallion that gave them hell, a small bay horse that ran with a huge mob of mares, yearlings and foals near what the locals know as 'Big Bend' on the Livingstone River. You were in for a fight as soon as you saw that horse, you knew you'd get a doing. The stallion would come at horse and rider, grab onto the horse by the neck and hang on fit to rip it. 'Geez, don't get me leg!' Craig would swear under his breath. He and Dean would split up one riding above the stallion on the slope, the other below the wily little horse. But the stallion would zigzag between the riders, evading them, then latch onto the nearest horse and try to tear its neck.
After ten or fifteen runs, Craig cracked it. 'I said to me mate this day, "I've had a gutful of this horse, I'm going to just gallop in at him flat-out and ram him. See how you go trying to get round him."' He headed his horse towards the mob. The stallion turned and in true form started to barrel down on them. Craig galloped as hard as he could into the horse and cleaned him up, knocking him to the ground. He looked down. His horse was standing right on top of the brumby — he had him! The stallion rolled his eyes and thrashed his head and legs around. 'I'm going to rope this bugger,' Craig said as he dipped the loop round the stallion's twisting, turning head. But he kept missing as the stallion kicked out and struggled below him. Kept swiping the rope round his neck like a madman. The stallion managed to crawl out, struggle to his feet and took off back to his mares. Craig watched his departing rump and shook his head. A real bad-natured horse, really hated people, too, he recalls. 'I reckon he would've taken to you if you were standing with a fishing line along the river, that fella.'
Dean caught the stallion the next time the pair went out after him and Craig came back with another horse out of the mob. But it was a real shame to take that stallion out of the bush, he says, with admiration.
Bogong Jack continued to elude Craig for months in the high plains. Craig came across the black-and-white brumby maybe a dozen times, sending his cattle dogs into the bush hoping to flush him out of the scrub, chasing him whenever he could. Summer turned into spring, turned into winter, and still the stallion kept his distance. Then, one day when Craig was riding through the snow in 'open tops' country — the big clearings in the high plains — he saw him again. The snow was a metre deep. Like a beautiful smooth white carpet. This time the wild horse couldn't slip away — he was leaving footprints everywhere.
Craig kept following the stallion and his tracks. But the thoroughbred had the advantage: his legs were longer and he moved through the snow more easily. They kept on the brumby's trail until they wore him out. For the last few hours Craig trotted, cantered and galloped after the stallion until he got him to what he thought was the right spot, then ran him down, galloping up behind and roping him. The brumby kicked the hell out of his horse. They get cranky protecting their mares and foals, Craig says, and will call out to them for a while afterwards. It was a big day — Craig roped a samba deer, too. He rode home carrying the deer's head on his horse and leading Bogong Jack on a halter.
It was around the time he caught the stallion in the early 2000s that he was talking to Jock Sievers and Tahnee about a dream Tahnee had. She wanted to create a brumby park, private land where brumbies could roam, safe from poachers and starvation, and where anyone who wanted to could see them in their natural state. They knew that people were fascinated by Australia's wild horse — the heritage and history that went with them, the spirit that inspired Banjo Paterson to write about them in poems like The Man from Snowy River and Elynne Mitchell to celebrate them in her Silver Brumby books. But people rarely got a chance to see them. Jock had 500 acres of mostly bush that would do the job. They could run a number of brumbies in the park, which the public could be taken in to see, and keep training and rehoming them.
Craig had been helping Jock and Tahnee with the horses but was busy with farming so left the park plans to them. He and Tahnee were also due to get married in late 2003. The bushfires went through the area early that year, though, and the ceremony was delayed. The 2003 bushfires killed a lot more brumbies than the management program ever removed: hundreds of them. Craig was paid by a wildlife group to humanely destroy animals after the fires, riding through the charred area from Benambra to Mount Kosciusko. He found horses with no hair left on them but which were still alive, tails burnt off, hooves gone off their feet but still hobbling around. It wasn't just horses, either; there were deer, wallabies, wombats, kangaroos and all kinds of wildlife. He shot a handful of horses. There would've been a lot more he didn't find.
When Craig and Tahnee did get married, it was a pretty flash wedding. Held in February 2004 at Tahnee's grandfather's property in marquees near the banks of Limestone Creek. As the large crowd waited, Craig and three men rode in on horses one way, and Jock rode in from the other way with Tahnee in a big white wedding dress, riding sidesaddle, 'all made up'. The bridesmaids arrived in the back of a ute.
It was also around this time that a film producer who Craig had met years before reappeared. The producer had talked to him about a documentary series he wanted to make about brumbies, following a mob for a year. The crew spoke to Craig and the Sievers, heard them talk about their dreams for the brumby park, and the wedding, and changed their minds; they wanted to make the series about them. 'So we had to get married again,' Craig says, laughing. No guests this time and not as big but the re-enactment was pretty close. The three-part series called Wild Valley took the best part of a year to film. Craig and Tahnee and other riders were filmed, sometimes close-up from a helicopter, chasing brumbies, and building the cabin they were to live in for a while.
Now they live out of Benambra on a cattle farm with a couple of kids, Dallas and Bonnie. The brumbies Craig catches come home with him to be broken in and trained, and are sold or given away. They make great kids' ponies. They're easier to break in than a 'bred' horse such as a thoroughbred and are more docile. Once you show a brumby something, it sticks. Take that little black one that Aleshia broke in when she was twelve. They gave Parrot to a family in Sydney, where he's winning at shows. The family sent a photo of Parrot a while back, ribbons running the whole way up his neck.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Great Australian Horse Stories by Anne Crawford. Copyright © 2013 Anne Crawford. Excerpted by permission of Allen & Unwin.
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Table of Contents
Contents
PART I BLD Wild horses,1 Bogong Jack,
2 A pony called Parrot,
3 The man with the horse in his car,
4 Saving the west's wild horses,
5 Rumpy and the last run,
PART II Droving days and outback ways,
6 Rocket, an outback legend,
7 The business of droving,
8 Night horses revealed,
9 The breaker, the brute and the queen,
10 Mustering on,
PART III Time of their lives,
11 The man who soared high,
12 A boyhood of horses,
13 The accidental drover,
PART IV Riding the highway of life,
14 Journey of a lifetime,
15 They call him Tex,
16 Trotting back from the brink,
PART V High achievers,
17 Harry's dream,
18 Made in Australia: The world's tallest horse,
19 The horse that made the man,
PART VI Horses that help,
20 Sally's healing horses,
21 To the rescue,
22 A different approach,
PART VII Tales of the unexpected,
23 The horse on the road,
24 Surprise moments for an equine vet,
25 Beware the free horse,
PART VIII Hanging on to our heritage,
26 The real Geebung Polo Club,
27 Holding on to the heavy horses,
28 Thrill and spills of harness,
29 Trooper: A horse given a fighting chance,
PART IX Beating the odds,
30 Brave Anne meets her match,
31 Clancy,
PART X There's always one,
32 Beth and Gypsy,
33 A horse called Spook,
34 Zelie Bullen and Bullet,
35 The Pact,
Glossary,
References,
Acknowledgements,