As if an answer to a prayer, within months my ‘Fuck-off Fund’ arrived out of the blue in the form of a modest book advance for a collection of already written short stories. My publisher at the time had no idea just how much she saved my sanity and my life. The money was enough to help put a deposit towards a two-bedroom uninsulated house – a real ‘fixer-upper’ – in a dying rural community. I had no idea how I would make regular mortgage repayments on it with a vocation like writing, but I knew the children needed a home and stability, so I dived in with blind faith. The house sat on a patch of flat ground on a steeply sloping 20 acres just 6 kilometres up the road from my family farm and just 1 kilometre from my children’s tiny country school. The school had only eighteen children and was only just surviving the threat of closure. I thought if I stayed nearby in the district, maybe my father or my brother would eventually ask us back home to the farm. My waiting slid from months to years.
I thought back to when I was a child, seeing the brutal clearing of the land and remembering how I could never understand the masculine economic rationale. In the same way, I couldn’t understand my father’s silence about me and the kids having to leave the farm to make way for my ex-husband. I also didn’t ‘get’ why my former husband would choose to remain in my childhood district and stay in business with his ex-wife’s family, nor did I see how my brother seemed okay with all of that. All I can know is that for those particular men, their intentions were right for them, in their world – a patriarchal world that holds all the power in our society. Nowadays I hold no blame for them. Only a deep gratitude for the lessons they delivered to me.
Since losing my place I have had recurring dreams of homelessness and never being able to find somewhere to lie down and rest. I now have some sliver of a sense of what it must’ve felt like for those Indigenous families ripped from their heart-places within the landscape. I grieve for my Aboriginal friends now more fully than I ever have. In the same way I grieve for long-remembered special trees I used to touch on my dawn jogs and for the gentle breath seen from newborn lambs on frosty mornings. Rocks, favourite strainer posts, sags that always looked like wallabies, on and on my love-memories flow for that place. But why keep trying to go down a road of memories that is now so forever blocked? I asked myself, where does that much crying and self-pity get you? My continuing flow of salty tears would eventually only bring salinity, and salinity gives you barren ground! It was time to move on.
With no money for livestock and fencing, I had to find another way on the 20 acres I had bought in a panic. Little did I know, by moving to that cold house on the hill, with the tired, overgrazed and ploughed paddocks, I was about to embark on the best and worst journey of my life . . . I would be starting all over again, hoping desperately that I could remain in my beloved agricultural industry somehow.
I once had a kelpie pup I named Taxi. I thought the name would be a great laugh. I imagined the farmer who bought him standing in the midst of a paddock calling out, ‘Taxi! Taxi!’
He was a sharp little pup with prick ears, a shiny black coat and those little tan blobs above the eyes that make kelpie faces so endearing. Taxi was one of several pups I would train annually to sell at a working-dog auction and festival in Casterton, a town dubbed ‘the birthplace of the kelpie’, situated halfway between Adelaide and Melbourne. I loved packing the dogs into the ute on that Queen’s Birthday long weekend in June and sailing over Bass Strait to drive to the event. Because Taxi was so utterly gorgeous, as were the other dogs I sold at auction, with my big heart I found it far too gut-wrenching putting all that love and time into a little power pack of canine sheep-shifting fur to sell to an anonymous buyer in a crowd of hundreds. The shouting auctioneer, the dog’s ears flattened to the noise, sidling near the handler’s legs with nervous glances, and the excruciating moment when the time came to hand over the lead . . . After my babies arrived (the ones without the fur) I was not made of enough steel to keep doing it. It felt to me like I was selling my own children to the highest bidder. I’ve left that style of selling to others, but a lot of great dogs go through that auction system in Casterton and on to wonderful owners. It’s a chance for farmers who don’t have the time or the know-how to put the foundations on a dog for working stock to buy some of the best-trained dogs in Australia.
Over the past twenty years, the Casterton auction has also lifted the value, status and meaning placed on working dogs, which is a great thing. Sadly, I’ve seen incredible cruelty in the rural industry too; dogs bashed semiconscious in sheep yards by angry men until the dogs’ spirits were crushed as much as their skulls. Or sheep dogs half-starved, riddled with worms, hauled on chains and zapped by electric collars so brutally that they would fling themselves on the ground yelping in a state of panic. The cruelty didn’t stop at dogs, however. I saw horses whipped, yanked, tugged and belted by furious women until the horse’s soul eventually seemed to fly from its body, the poor creatures continuing to walk the earth with eyes of the dead, their giant horse hearts still beating. I’ve seen men, besotted with football on the television, knowingly leave ewes with lambs stuck in them to die under blinding sun while flies laid maggot eggs into their flesh and crows clustered to peck at their eyes. Then there’s the billions of microbes in the soil that no one thinks about. Living things butchered each time a plough slices the turf and turns the creatures to the sun. Billions upon billions of living beings fried by sunshine or stubble burning, or wiped out by herbicide sprays or ground grazed bare. The very same animals grazing the land bare also suffering under management systems that leave them malnourished and shelterless. Agriculture can be a brutal, greedy, human-ego-filled place.
But thank goodness that culture is changing. As a species, I believe we are evolving into kinder creatures. Many farmers, livestock workers and dog handlers I know are looking to life’s guiding compass – the part within – and many are ready to ask themselves, ‘Am I honouring these animals that give me income? Am I honouring the land that I run them on that gives me a home?’
It’s at places like the Casterton Kelpie Muster you see the level of skill, intuition and evolution of the human spirit coming forth with gentler ways. Those men and women who have learned to switch off their egos and turn on their empathy with animals are often the ones who top the auction with the most confident and balanced dogs. Those people paying money in the thousands for dogs are also acknowledging the preciousness of the creature they are purchasing, and the skill needed in their training. I am glad we are evolving into softer beings when it comes to our four-legged companions. There is awareness now within the industry that you don’t have to be a yee-haaing cowboy around animals to get the job done.
Most meat consumers don’t want that either. One of the movies my kids and I watch over and over is Temple Grandin, starring Claire Danes. It’s a story based on the real-life woman Temple Grandin, who altered the American slaughterhouse process to a kinder way, using her insight into what animals see, hear, smell and feel, generated by her autism. It is brave people like Temple who are making changes to the agricultural industry for the betterment of all animals. We have our own quiet heroes here in Australia who are champions of kinder treatment of animals, like Bathurst-based Graeme Rees, who teaches the most mind-rigid men and women the art of low-stress stockhandling. Graeme became a mentor to me and, after spending time in the stockyards with him, my whole perspective changed on stock flow, and with it my life changed for the better.
Along the path I’ve travelled with working dogs and livestock handling I’ve met some of the best, most centred humans, and like the dogs I’ve encountered, they have all been my greatest teachers. Dogs have taught me to be a better human. They have taught me patience, to temper my temper and to love unconditionally, along with other acts of present-moment mindfulness: like stretching in the mornings, dozing in the sunshine and smiling frequently at the smallest of things. Dogs have opened up my world and given me a richness to living that is ineffable. I owe them big-time. The
y are my constant companions.
Before my children arrived, for a time I had eleven dogs. Most were roly-poly pups in litters, but others were at various ages and stages of training. Each one was a divine being wrapped up in fur. My desire to become a working-dog trainer began early. When I was little, on Sundays we would pull up in the Ford station wagon outside the manager’s farmhouse on my dad’s mate’s farm. The manager’s wife was always cooking a Sunday roast in her electric frypan, the smell drifting out from the house making me wonder at the dedication of that woman. I’d been going to that farm almost every weekend since I was a baby and it fed my hunger for all things agricultural. Until my dad had earned the money to buy the farm next door, we spent our time there, joining in on whatever was happening.
There was one specific event that cemented in me my fascination for a working dog’s natural willingness to round up almost anything that moved – including small children, like me! The manager was moving sheep near the shearing shed. I must’ve been very small because I remember my short little legs could barely keep up over the stony uneven paddock. I was so excited to see the yellow-brown dog with its crazed eyes and lolling tongue blur like a catapulted stone across the pale butter-coloured grass around the fringes of the mob. The sheep were full wool, their cloven hooves en masse eddying dust up around me, so that my vision became one of dreamlike mist.
I remember the elation within me and how it lit my little face into a beaming smile. I was incredulous to be this close to the action. To be set loose on a Sunday away from the confines of the house and into the world of dust, men, dogs and sheep, my hair blowing into stubborn knots that my nana would later brush out, tut-tutting over my ‘tomboy’ nature and asking me why my mother hadn’t tied it back. But I loved to be witness to the almost wordless world of the men. Such strange communicators! Standing side on. Pauses as wide as the paddocks that stretched before them. It was the place of roly wool sheep, ribby-sided dogs and lung-thumping rides in the ute over newly worked ploughed ground. It was the place of lizards on rocks, snakes in sags, taddies in the creek; of sheep, horses and mild-eyed cows. It was a place of bounty to me. I loved to help in the huge vegetable garden that Dad and his mate cultivated every Sunday, containing beans, broccoli, spuds, artichokes, peas, silverbeet, beetroot, carrots, cabbage, spinach and swede. In the evening on the way home we’d cut up a whole side of lamb, me packing chops into boxes with Dad as we stood in the breezy meat house, Dad hacksawing away down a sheep’s spine as it hung from a hook. Next to the shed sat the offal pit: a place of fascination, dread and lip-curling grossness for a kid. But I loved it all . . . even then, as young as four or five.
As I stood in that holding yard that day, I saw the sheep come towards me, their faces vanilla-ice-cream white, fresh from crutching shears. How was the dog doing that, I wondered? I don’t remember the dog’s name but I do remember the manager’s red face and his voice getting louder and louder, shouting the dog’s name over and over again. Then the dust got thicker and before me a wall of wool, as solid as grey stones, began toppling towards me. I could hear my dad calling urgently. He was shouting that I should run but it was too late. The mob hit me and swallowed me up. My soft baby cheeks met with rubble stone, my teeth and lips crashed on rocks, and the acrid stench of sheep shit enveloped me. Some of the sheep ducked and dived out of my way, so close I could see their fear in those pale-yellow eyes. Some didn’t have time to dodge me and I felt myself pummelled on the ground, winded by the fall and pained by the harsh press of those sharp panicked hooves. By the time the sheep storm had passed and dad had hoicked me up by my arm, I was bruised, crying, shaking. I smelt like the underbelly of a shearing shed. Still, it didn’t put me off sheep, or working dogs.
‘Why did the dog do that?’ I asked later.
‘It was a young dog. It went the wrong way,’ Dad explained. But I somehow knew it wasn’t the dog in the wrong. I could feel the chaotic energy: the terror of the sheep, the unhinged unrestrained force of the dog. The yelling of the farm manager. It didn’t feel right. That was the moment that set me on a path of discovery into stock psychology. I became fascinated by the synergy between man, beast and dog . . . one that would uncover the fact that dogs never ‘go the wrong way’. Only humans do.
My early memories of man’s management of dogs included driving through the farming area of Cambridge, near Hobart airport. Of course it’s all cloned giant big-buy stores now and the paddocks are smothered with consumerism, but I remember my surprise and delight at seeing rows and rows of sheep dogs tied to steel pegs. I thought it was some kind of dog show.
‘What are they doing?’ I had asked Dad, eyes glued to the array of leaping, barking dogs jerking on chains as we drove by.
‘Hydatids testing,’ my father said. I was well familiar with hydatids; a worm that forms cysts in the offal of animals, predominantly sheep, and when eaten, can infect dogs, dingoes and humans with worms. A government-funded school education program had been circulating the Tasmanian classrooms. Sitting at our old wooden desks that still had holes for ink bottles, in my green checked uniform, my eyes had grown wide in horror and fascination at the diagram they’d given us. Circular arrows connecting a sheep to a dog and also to a human who had a see-through stomach and head showing the worms within. It had a sinister feel to it.
‘Always wash your hands after playing with dogs,’ we were told sternly. When we brought the information home, Mum was able to tell her gruesome stories about her farming family members who had contracted hydatids, or the old-timers she knew who’d died from it.
‘If the surgeon slips and cuts the cyst, millions of worms burst out and infect your body even more,’ she had said dramatically. ‘Your uncle had it once, and his sister . . . you can even get it in your brain.’
It made my little stomach squirm, but still, it didn’t put me off dogs.
The hydatids testing went on for weeks, because I remember the next time we drove past, Dad had met the farmers from our Runnymede district there and I found myself on the testing strip, where I was not allowed to pat the dogs. Warning signs were in place. The dogs seemed to sense this was some kind of death camp. They were going nuts on the ends of their short chains that had been hammered into the ground in rows on steel pegs. Farmers, in dull, earth-coloured clothing like the soil itself stood about waiting for results. The vets in white coats had a Dr Who feel about them and seemed menacing to a young girl’s eyes, like they were being cruel.
‘What will happen to them?’ I asked, watching the dogs excitedly yapping and flinging their bodies against the chains. They were mostly sheep dogs, collies of some type, or the Tassie breed of Smithfield with shaggy coats and pale eyes. There were fewer kelpies in those days in Tasmania. Back then, the kelpie was viewed as more a ‘mainland style’ of working dog, more suited to hotter, larger properties. Mixed in with the sheep dogs were also farmhouse dogs, so little Jack Russells, Australian silkies or corgi bitzers joined the mix.
‘If they test positive, they’ll be put down,’ Dad said. ‘They want to eradicate the disease from Tasmania.’ He went on to explain the words ‘eradicate’ and ‘quarantine’. But I had stopped listening. Once realising ‘put down’ meant killed, I began to cry. I thought of the dogs I had known in the yards at Runnymede and wondered if they would pass the tests. I thought of the farmers who would grieve the loss of their working mates. Would the manager on the farm cry about his dog if it had hydatids? I don’t remember if people wormed dogs then, and I have no idea how many dogs were put down, but it’s made me as an adult become a stickler for disposing of sheep’s guts properly and worming my dogs.
It wasn’t long afterwards that, I discovered my name, Rachael, meant ewe in Hebrew. My brother had laughed at me for it, but I felt like a piece of life’s puzzle fell into place. Sheep and dogs. I grew up knowing I wanted to work with those animals and to write about them. So as soon as the school bell rang for the last time, I was off down a dirt road, journal in my bag along with worn
old farm boots with hobnails that pressed into the soles of my feet, bound for my first job as a jillaroo on a grazing property.
In my ugly maroon Toyota Corona I zoomed teenage-driver style along the winding dirt roads, dodging brush-tailed possums and Tassie devils towards Tasmania’s central highlands and the dolloped grassy high hills between the historic sandstone townships of Bothwell and Ouse, to a property called Ousedale. I soon discovered the locals liked to educate travellers that the Scottish word Ouse rhymes with ‘moos’. In the store I found postcards and tourist items stamped with the slogan ‘There’s more than moos in Ouse’. There sure was! At least for me there was. There was a whole new world on those tussocked hills that felt so much better than the ivy-clad walls of my former private school. As a would-be shepherdess with the name of ‘Ewe’, I couldn’t have found a better first job. Nor a better mentor in Phil Nye, my first boss. He was young but he was the best stockman, teacher and farmer an eighteen-year-old girl fresh out of school could hope for.
It had been my mum’s middle sister, Auntie Susie, who prompted the whole experience for me. The year before, she and Uncle Colin had taken me to visit my cousin and their eldest son, Ian, at Orange Agricultural College. I was hooked when I saw the campus, college farm and the syllabus, not to mention the crowds of fresh-faced young ag industry students who looked so free compared to how I was faring in my final year of school. To get into the course, applicants had to have at least a year of practical work under their belt. To help get me into the college, Susie had put in a few calls to her farming network and knew she had found kind and understanding bosses in her friend Louie Nye and her son Phil. I was offered 80 bucks a week, petrol thrown in and board and lodging. A bonus offer was I could take my pony Tristan with me as my very own stock pony. I was beyond excited. My life now heralded brighter days as I threw off the brown school tie and itchy woollen tights of girls’ school forever and donned a flannie shirt, boots and jeans.
Down the Dirt Roads Page 3