DOG OWNER A

ABLOKE I know was walking his 13-year-old border collie, Banjo, in Mindham Park, Mysterton, at 6pm on November 13 when he had to step in to save it from being killed by two killer dogs.

I have a theory that vicious dogs mimic the behaviour of their owners. For this reason and this reason alone I won’t say the name of the bloke whose dog was attacked.

Instead I’ll just call him “G”.

Out of the blue two dogs attack Banjo. It’s full on. Banjo is being mauled. G tries to get them off and becomes splattered with blood in the process. He’s covered in it. The owner of the two dogs eventually gets them off and then abuses G who by now is trying to comfort his badly wounded dog. It’s like it’s G’s fault that his dog was attacked.

The owner of the two dogs slinks off into the gloom with his hounds, still hurling abuse at G. The dogs’ owner takes no responsibility. Offers no apology. There is no remorse on his part that his two poorly disciplined dogs tried to kill a much-loved family pet. Instead he claims victim status, throws abuse and vanishes.

Banjo is in a bad way and G is reeling with the suddenness of it all and the fact he is the one copping serious verbal flack. The upshot is Banjo had to have one leg amputated. Cost? $3000. The bloke with the savage dogs walks away.

Fair dinkum, some people should be charged for the oxygen they breathe. They certainly should never be allowed to own dogs, especially dogs from breeds with the “kill”

gene in their DNA.

WALTZ WITH ME

I HAD a few people make contact last week regarding my comments last week on our meek and mild Mary Had a Little Lamb national anthem, Advance Australia Fair. I compared it with the guts and glory anthems from France and the US. Not everyone agreed. Robert from Pimlico wants our anthem “left alone” and even suggested that hand-wringing progressives would label me a

“redneck”, a term that I thought went out with flared jeans and paisley body shirts. Apparently not. Another bloke, Peter from Townsville, wrote me a letter saying he wanted the anthem ditched, but for completely different reasons. He thinks some verses are cringe-worthy because of their cloying British Empire sentimentality (hear, hear, Pete). He thinks the Seekers’ I am Australian is a pretty good model for an anthem.

Yep, I’ll pay that. It’s a thousand times better than the bowl of blancmange we’ve been lumbered with. Ol’ mate Robert from Pimlico can sing Advance Australia Fair into his shaving brush in the privacy of his own shower, but if push comes to shove I’d vote for Waltzing Matilda.

There’s plenty of blood and guts behind Banjo Paterson’s famous ballad. How about it? Does anyone want to come a Waltzing Matilda?

TALES FROM THE BUSH

I WAS at Kevin and Viv Furber’s 60th wedding anniversary at the Tolga race club last Saturday night ( pictured right). The Georgetown legends, who now live at Tolga, among other adventures, ran Normanton’s Purple Pub for years, (that alone is enough to get you lead billing in the bush pub section in the Australian National Museum). Lots of bush characters were there including Les Mosch, the founding owner of Red Rock Station at Einasleigh.

As a teenager I had worked on

Carpentaria Downs near Einasleigh when Red Rock was one of its outstations. Dallas Hooper was the manager and Pudgee Curley was head stockman. Back then, before acquiring Red Rock, Les ran cattle on adjoining Canyon Station and the Einasleigh Common. We talked about Dallas and “Pudge”.

Les told me a story about how he was attending a muster on Carpentaria and had ridden out on horseback with Dallas at 4am. Little did they know they were about to stumble upon an unusual sight.

At daylight they rode up Copperfield River channel to a and chanced upon one of Dallas’s young ringers, a lad of about 15, naked, up to his neck in water. The ringers by this time should have been well away in another direction bringing cattle into the old, timber, Red Rock yards (which still stand today). What was this bloke doing standing in the channel with his clobber off? Dallas dismounted and jumped up and down, demanding to know why the young ringer was frolicking around in the water when he should have been 7km away helping the rest of the team bring in the cattle.

The young stockman, feeling the lash of Dallas’s words, yelled back that he was standing on his horse. This set off another expletive-laden tirade from Dallas. “What do you mean ‘standing on your effing horse’?” Dallas shouted. The boy ringer yelled that he’d hobbled his horse while he went to the toilet.

While he was going about his business under the paperbarks his horse took fright at something and bucked into the channel. Because it was hobbled it couldn’t swim and drowned in the deep water. Les said the young bloke was diving, trying to remove the saddle and bridle but was having trouble holding his breath long enough to get the job done. Undoing the long, narrow strip of redhide that secured the saddle to the girth would have been painstakingly difficult in the deep water stained

black by ti-tree leaves. He was probably trying to cut it with his pocket knife. The boy would have known he would be in for a serious “talking to” from Dallas for drowning a horse, but losing a fully-mounted Barcoo Poly saddle and a bridle would be beyond redemption. When the order came in for a replacement saddle, the company directors down in Brisbane would choke on their brandy, especially when they learned there was a perfectly good one still strapped to a dead horse in a deep hole in the Copperfield.

Les didn’t say what the comeuppance was but Dallas made sure the boy stayed there until he managed to retrieve the saddle and bridle.

Carpentaria was down one horse, but the company got its saddle and bridle back.

When large stations muster cattle into yards the neighbours would “attend” at the yards so that they could claim any of their own cattle that had strayed over to the larger station. Carpentaria was then owned by the pastoral company, Australian Stock Breeders.

Dallas reigned supreme over the then 1800 square kilometre station. He and Les “got on. Les said Dallas would often give him young cleanskin (unbranded) bulls and heifers when sorting out cattle at these musters.

Dallas and Pudgee, by the way, used to bulldog brumbies. I never saw them do it but it was the talk of the district. They would gallop up beside the wild horses and bulldog them the same as cowboys bulldog steers at a rodeo. A lot of them were broken in and used as stock horses in the Carpentaria mustering camp.

THE BIG STEAL

PUDGEE Curley, bless his soul, is now up in the big stock camp in the sky, but his brother Bob ( pictured above right), another old time Gulf Country stockman, was there and in fine fettle. Bob and Les Mosch both said that poddy dodging (stealing cattle) was commonplace, especially from the bigger stations back in those free and easier times. “Blokes would ride into the big places with pack horses, take what cattle they wanted and ride out,” they said. I hasten to add that neither Les or Bob ever took part in such activities but living in the bush and being more than capable bushmen themselves, they knew what went on. Poddy-dodging was particularly easy during the wet season when there was little or no activity on the stations due to wet conditions.

But, this way of life ended when the big stations started using light planes and helicopters in the late 1970s. Poddy dodgers were too easily spotted from the air. I remember a manager at Van Rook Station north of Normanton telling me once how he had flown over his boundary during the wet and had spotted grass laying over. The direction it was laying indicated it had been pushed over b by horses h ridden by men coming in from afar. And then further along he came across a 100m-wide expanse of grass laying over in the opposite direction. It had been pushed over by a large mob of Van Rook cattle the same men had taken back across the station’s boundary.

I was talking to Bob Curley about a couple of old-time Georgetown poddy dodgers. “They got caught because they were idiots,” Bob exclaimed. “How so?” I asked. “They threw their cigarette butts on the ground and carved their initials on trees with their pocketknives while they were moving the cattle,” he said with a grin that said “bloody idiots”.

Cane farmer Pete from Ingham was there on Saturday night. He told me about a local farmer who is notoriously tight with his money. “When you work for him it’s best to take your own pay,” he advised, straight-faced.

And the best quote of the night came from Kevin and Viv’s grandson Brodie, when he was making a speech. “Don’t be there when the whips are cracking, be there to crack the whip.” It is one of Kevin’s favourite sayings.