Down the Dirt Roads

by Rachael Treasure

  Phil, no matter how hard the work, or how long the days, would always smile when he spoke. Sometimes he would look shyly down to the toes of his boots, yet I came to see his mannerisms weren’t ones of shyness, but incredible self-possession. He was calm from the inner to the outer and his stockmanship and horsemanship reflected that. Even when he was frustrated that a cow had crossed the river to the neighbour’s place or a sheep had broken through the fenceline to thieve some of the lucerne crop, Phil would still hold a smile in his eyes, gritting his teeth with challenge. His voice was soft and soothed horses and mesmerised dogs. What a contrast to that shouting manager I had known as a toddler!

  I loved the isolation of the farm by the river that sometimes had more than eight gates to open on the long winding road in, depending on where the stock were. The Nye family were often forgiving of my youthful naivety and, I’m sure, my misguided views of the world, but as a first job it was my dream come to life. It was here I saw such a stark contrast to the stockmanship I’d experienced as a child. Phil communicated all he needed to to his horses with a simple touch or step towards or away from them, with the lift of his hand and the click of his tongue. His dogs looked at him as if he were some kind of deity to bow before. Not in fear. But in adoration.

  I came to learn through Phil that farming men do let their working dogs come inside, they do cuddle them by the fireside and play with them and give them food treats. All the old-timers who had told me off as a kid for patting their working dogs could now go jump, as far as I was concerned. The proof was in the pudding in Phil’s dog Joe. By day that dog worked like a trouper for his boss and by night snored like a dozer on his patch of rug beside the fire.

  This steady-moving, methodical relaxed man went on to become one of the best in the world at teaching horses to trust humans, and was taken on as one of the first Pat Parelli instructors in Australia. Years after I’d left Ousedale my mum sent me clipped pictures of Phil riding his stallion at a gallop, saddleless and bridleless. I have since learned that every experience we live, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is a gift. I had seen the worst of stockmanship and I’d seen the best. I knew I wanted to travel the road Phil was on in terms of communicating with and handling animals.

  It was no wonder that years later, after agricultural college and then a degree in communications at the university in Bathurst, as a young journalist for the Stock and Land newspaper, I found myself at the steep, green-hilled, windswept home of Paul Macphail at Welshpool who didn’t just ‘train’ dogs, but educated them. Along with the dogs, Paul reshaped the minds of humans too. And I was one of his pupils with my first ever working dog, Dougall.

  Dougall came as a surprise gift from a former boyfriend in the mid-1990s after a lifetime of me longing for a dog, but my parents refusing. Al was a beautiful, tall boy from Orange with blue eyes and thick dark curly hair. Not only was Al an electrician – a sparky – with a tool belt around his lithe hips, he was a motorbike rider, whitewater rafter, water polo player and an all-round nice Aussie bloke. But if I thought the guy was gorgeous, Dougall was even better! (More faithful, to start with.) He had a parental mix of a wandering red kelpie father from up the Molong Road and black-and-white border collie mum. He arrived to me as a tiny tricolour puppy in an airline crate when Al came to see me in Tassie. As Al grabbed his baggage from the trailer towed in by airport staff, that young man gave me the surprise of a lifetime. I had no idea the dog would be mine as I peered into the giant dog crate and cooed at the minuscule sheepdog puppy with frightened brown eyes wedged at the back. Suddenly, Al wrapped his big hand around the handle and lifted the crate up.

  ‘He’s yours,’ he said, a smug ‘good boyfriend’ smile on his face.

  ‘Mine? Really!’ Tears welled in my eyes in shock, surprise and delight. Al had just revved over a family boundary that said I couldn’t have a dog. Unplanned, I at last had my own working dog!

  Dougall was as nutty as a Picnic bar and having come from a litter that consisted of just one – him – he was slightly left of centre but burst himself inside out to please me. Whilst Al didn’t stay by my side over time, Dougall did. He slotted into my world and became my constant companion. At the time I was still living with my parents, saving for an overseas trip, so my mum and I snuck him into the house and he was there for three months before my father even knew we had a dog.

  Dougall lifted my heart to a place of joy and made me braver than I was. For a time I had to leave Dougall as I adventured overseas. A good friend of mine whom I’d cheekily nicknamed ‘Filthy Fee’, a sheep-groom based at Conargo in New South Wales, babysat Dougall for a year, and there he got to enjoy billabongs, sheep work and a visit to the Conargo Hotel now and then. When I came home I was hired as an Australian Broadcasting Corporation rural radio reporter, and Dougall had to be hired too. Before the ABC let me loose in Sale, Victoria, I did a stint of training in Burnie, Tasmania. Here Dougall sometimes came on air to bark to listeners when giving my rural report. He often had to be shushed when he played too robustly with my colleague Elaine Harris’ seeing-eye dog, Dorrie. The golden lab and the sheep dog would rumble in the offices outside the broadcast booth while Elaine and I were on air, sometimes sending an office chair whizzing across the carpet, or Dorrie delivering up a giant ‘Woof!’ right when the weather was being read out. Dougall became a bit of a hit within the ABC, and was asked to Christmas drinks, travelling up in the glass lift for a rooftop soiree in Melbourne and talking with cricket commentator Tim Lane.

  Those ABC days in Sale were the time I met my future husband, who was then running droving trail rides on his family cattle-grazing runs in the snow-gum country above Dargo. Dougall gave him the tick of approval so he was accepted as a boyfriend. Not long into my work at the ABC I was offered a job with Rural Press as a Gippsland dairy reporter, writing mostly for Stock & Land. I was so in love with the written word that I left the radio and, together with Dougall, took the journo job.

  I was asked to cover a story on Paul Macphail’s ‘Working Dog Education’ program. Of course I had to take Dougall to the interview too. Here I saw clearly Dougall’s lack of breeding and sheep-work finesse, but he made up for it with unshakeable loyalty and obedience to me. This turned him into a very handy dog that on command would back, bark, gather runs, roll over, play dead and ride with me on a horse through the High Country, not to mention doing party tricks and dancing. He came home from rural shows with blue ribbons and prizes of bags of dog tucker for his dog high jumping efforts, his record almost 3 metres, scrabbling up a wall of boards to be with me on top of bales of hay on the back of a ute. As the time wore on, I became obsessed with getting better at stock handling and I returned often to Paul’s, practising my handling skills on Dougall and using Paul’s better-bred dogs with more style to learn further. Watching. Listening. Soaking it all in, always with the view to returning to Dad’s farm one day where I could be the best sheep farmer and dog handler I could be. Paul and I became friends, so after I moved back to Tasmania with my fiancé, I began to facilitate schools for Paul and help him out demonstrating pups at Agfest, a three-day festival run by the Rural Youth organisation every May in Tassie.

  At one of the schools during a lunch break, Paul asked me to step outside the shearing shed with old dog man Wes Singline, who was visiting the school.

  ‘Show Wes Dougall’s trick,’ Paul said to me with a grin, nodding down towards my dog. I glanced at Wes, nervous to be showing my eccentric canine to a man who was renowned for his dogmanship.

  ‘Dougall,’ I said, looking down to him, ‘go back. Go waaaay back!’

  With his funny ‘one ear up, one ear down’ look, Dougall bounded away in an anticlockwise cast around some sheep in a holding paddock. Just when he was on the fringes of the mob I shouted, ‘Dougall! Roll over!’ Dougall, at full pelt, flung himself into the air, in a perfect body-flipping commando roll. He found his feet, and kept casting. I called again, ‘Dougall! Roll over!’ He gave another spectacular thrilling tumble, then
regained his race to get to the other side of the mob of sheep, perfectly on balance to where I was standing. I raised my hand and without a word or a sound, he sat. Then I whistled and he set about mobbing the sheep and bringing them to us.

  On seeing the commando roll cast, Wes was shaking his head, wheezing laughter.

  ‘In all my years,’ he chuckled, ‘I’ve never seen a dog do that! Not in all my years.’

  I’ve never seen another dog like Dougall either. No two are ever the same. He saw me through, that dog. By my side on travels around Australia with my job as a journalist, he also came to work on a cattle station in outback Queensland, tailing cattle. He was an intense worker. Just before wet season, water points were few and far between on musters on the Rolleston property. Dougall worked so hard his back legs cramped so I had to carry him for a time on the front of the saddle until we reached a trough. In 2002, with my other dogs, Diamond and Gippy, Dougall walked down the aisle with my bridesmaids on my wedding day on a riverside paddock. He travelled with me, on towards becoming a wife, a novelist, and falling pregnant. But dear Dougall left me a few months after my daughter arrived inside me. It was as if he was making room in my life for her. I’m not sure if he died from overwork on a hot day, or if it was snake bite in the yards near the shearing shed that took him from me. I was inside at the time crafting my first novel, Jillaroo, and my fiancé had borrowed him because he didn’t have his own dog and there was sheep work to be done on my cousin’s place. I can still hear that last haunting cry at the vet’s before Dougall died. A mournful moan of ‘I don’t want to die. I don’t want to leave you.’ He was a do-anything, go-anywhere dog and the grief I felt in losing him was beyond description. I still miss his comical presence, even today, well over ten years later. After we drove home from the vet with his body wrapped in a sheet, my Auntie Susie sat me down and Uncle Col gave me a shot of whiskey, while my cousin dug a hole to bury the dear boy, who was still only seven years young when he died.

  It was Dougall who led me to Paul Macphail and it was Paul who led me not only into the colourful world of working dog breeders and dog schools and trials, but also into a journey of self-discovery and self-awareness. Out of the blue, Paul gave me a book called You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay. On its cover were rainbow colours and a photo of a lady’s smiling face dolled-up Yank style with short blonde hair. At the time, I wondered what on earth that book had to do with dog training, but as time wore on I saw it had everything to do with it.

  ‘I think you need this book,’ Paul said. I took it from him, a little perplexed. But after I read it, I knew Paul could see I was blocked in a lack of self-love and confidence. I couldn’t become a better handler if I was ‘unconscious’ to the inner workings of myself. I don’t think Paul will ever know what he began in gifting me that book. It turned me into a scholar of life and a seeker of what it is to be human. I began to search for more and more information on how humans function in the world. At the time, the contents of the book were a revelation to me. After I first read it, I began to post sticky notes on the mirror as reminders to myself about self-love and life’s riches. I began to see how I had given away my power to society’s false beliefs and put myself last behind others. I began to consume other similar books, and search the internet for even more information, then I would weave my new understanding throughout my novels and into my life.

  Through meditation and practised mindfulness I became witness to my own behaviour and how it was reflected back at me through dogs, horses, people, my health, my landscape and livestock. I began to want to change the beliefs I’d absorbed as a child and learn to love myself fully and trust the world and the process of life. There comes a point where you have to own the circumstances you find yourself in. It has nothing to do with other people, and everything to do with yourself. Dogs reflect this to us clearly on so many levels. We can never blame them for going the wrong way. We take them that way.

  I have Paul to thank for the path of enquiry. It’s not only made me a better dog woman, but also a better mum and, I hope, a better person. In the same way I raise my dogs, I never tell my kids they are naughty or bad. I correct their behaviour if it needs it, but I praise them constantly and deliberately. Never do I hit them or stifle them with diminishing words. Like with puppy training, I may use tones in my voice to reach the parts of their brains that need to learn social and safety boundaries. With guiding young animals it is about pressure and release, just as it is with children, and love, love, love. Like my pups, I want my kids to be curious and waggy-tailed about life. Not cowering, robot-like, too afraid to express themselves, ashamed of themselves or limited by labels.

  The most recent road trip we three took was again a ute journey crammed in between school terms. The kids and I stuffed the ute full of swags, bags, our two kelpies and the poodle. We were headed from Tasmania to Hamilton in western Victoria for a two-day working dog school with my long-term Casterton auction friends, the masterful dog trainer Ian O’Connell and his amazing, energetic wife, Kay.

  Why did I choose this kind of holiday for my kids instead of a trip to a Gold Coast theme park or a beachside resort? It’s because I want them to know you don’t have to follow everyone on the major highways of life. There are different paths to travel, and different ways to view the world. The choices will be up to them and their imaginations. And I also wanted to give my young country kids a foundation of awareness about dogs and livestock from one of the best handlers in Australia. Given that I was no longer on our farm with them to teach them such skills, Ian was a perfect mentor to show my children the kind way with animals.

  So there they were, my beautiful children, aged eleven and twelve, sitting in a shearing-shed classroom, in front of a whiteboard, with Ian standing before us all. To quickly sketch him in, Ian O’Connell was the founder of the Casterton Working Dog Auction over twenty years ago. He is a champion dog trialler, and yearly attracts payments for his young dogs of more than $12 000 each. Beyond those very human tags of accomplishment, he’s peaceful with people and animals, and imparts his knowledge with a deft, gentle touch. He’s also hilarious.

  In our morning session at ‘dog school’ Ian had two young kelpies, Sally and Boris, tied up to the steps flanking the raised board where the shearers normally work. There were no sheep in the shed today, only eight young male rural trainees from the Rural Industry Skill and Training Institute (RIST) and a few other young agricultural workers and one woman. The kelpie pups were lively and curious, but Ian had instilled in his two young prodigies an inner compass of confidence and calm. Their bright eyes were soaking up the situation they found themselves in, and then gazing back in adoration at their human hero. In front of Ian, sitting at desks beneath the corrugated-iron roof, were young future farmers, equally as keen as the pups to soak up information. Behind them, idle for a time, was the stack of computers containing their course content. For the next two days Ian would be making sure the computers were put away and the students encouraged to focus on the dog they had on the end of the lead and their own ways of being. How they walked, how they talked, what they were conveying to their dogs in their voice and body language. The inner to the outer.

  After our morning session we gathered to see Ian’s training principles in action in the yards. Here, the kids were witness to Ian’s deep wisdom, infinite compassion and brushstrokes of genius as he humbly demonstrated perfect synergy between man, dog and sheep upon land. All the components were pieced together in a beautiful dance of mindfulness and self-control. No hard cussing. No harsh treatment. No panic. With Ian and his pups it’s all praise, praise, praise, along with pats and pampering, even if it all goes pear-shaped and the pup gets it wrong and sheep scatter. It’s all positivity. You can feel it. I watched my children light up when they saw Ian in action with the nimble but sensitive Sally, and the bold-as-brass Boris. He tempered himself to suit the temper of his trainee.

  When it was my kids’ turn, they grabbed their dogs with glee. I could tel
l they had a sense of apprehension and nervousness, but like the pups, were keen to at least try. Our veteran dogs, Rousie and Connie, hadn’t had any stock work in years, not since leaving the farm. In the backyard of the rental they have the occasional task of putting the chooks to bed some nights, and they do it with great seriousness and skill. Rousie was only just starting out as a working dog when we had to leave the farm, so I’d barely had him around sheep. I had no idea what he would be like with my son working him. Connie had more miles under her collar, so I teamed her up with my daughter who, due to her cerebral palsy, can sometimes be unsteady on her pins.

  Dear old Connie, who is deaf and a bit blind, slightly batty with age and impersonates a labrador with the size of her girth, was still a champion the moment she set paw inside the round yard. She worked the sheep for my daughter like a dream, crouched down, slinky wolf-like and steady. I saw the serious face on my daughter as she lost all sense of what was going on around her. For her it was just her, her dog and the sheep that huddled at her legs. As the dog drifted around the sheep, I saw my girl catch the buzz . . . of working a dog and ovines quietly through the yards. Ian looked on, pleased. It was his breeding he was witnessing in Connie. Ian had given me Connie as a pup, well over a decade ago, as a thankyou gift from the community of Casterton for writing my novel The Stockmen. It was a story about both the Casterton Kelpie Festival and my fictionalised version of the history of the kelpie and Jack Gleeson, the Irish stockman credited with founding the breed. When I was on the farm, Connie and my border collie, Diamond, were my main girls in moving sheep. I couldn’t have done the mum thing and the stockwork without them, and each time Connie steadily did her job, I would send out a thank you to Ian for his amazing gift in her.