Old-timer George on his last cattle drive

Old-time drover George Booth ( pictured) has departed this mortal coil and taken up residence in that cattle camp in the sky. As George himself would have said: “He’s snapped his hobbles.” He was 89.

Born in 1931 George was helping his father, John, with his droving plant in inland Queensland at a tender age and was droving on his own in his late teens for the likes of Vesteys and the Peel River Pastoral Company. George’s brother, Frank, who started droving with George as an 11-year-old, remembers the time they had to cross the flooded Playford River at Elroy Station in the Northern Territory. In order to get their wagon across, they drove it onto a large army tarpaulin and then pulled and tied it over the top, effectively wrapping the contraption in canvas. “And then the horses pulled it across the river like a boat,” Frank recalled.

He spoke as well of George’s habit – one he learned from his father – of leaving a carbide lantern burning in the camp at night. The idea being that if the cattle rushed, the men, when riding back to camp in the dark from trying to block and control the stampeding cattle, would be guided in by the light.

George lived in Cardwell after retiring from droving. He was a keen fisherman and leather worker, and enjoyed nothing more than yarning about bush life. These old-timers who took mobs of cattle hundreds and thousands of kilometres across Australia’s trackless wastes are fast disappearing.