The typical Australian bullock—long-horned, sullen-eyed, stupid, and
vindictive—is bred away out in Queensland, on remote stations in the
Never Never land, where men live on damper and beef, and occasionally eat
a whole bottle of hot pickles at a sitting, simply to satisfy their
craving for vegetable food. Here, under the blazing tropic sun, among
flies and dust and loneliness, they struggle with the bullock from year's
end to year's end. It is not to be supposed that they take up this kind of
thing for fun. The man who worked cattle for sport would wheel bricks for
amusement.
At periodical intervals a boom in cattle-country arises in the cities, and
syndicates are formed to take up country and stock it. It looks so
beautifully simple—on paper.
You get your country, thousands of miles of it, for next to nothing. You
buy your breeding herd for a ridiculously small sum, on long-dated bills.
Your staff consists of a manager, who toils for a share of the profits, a
couple of half-civilized white stockmen at low wages, and a handful of
blacks, who work harder for a little opium ash than they would for much
money. Plant costs nothing, improvements nothing—no woolshed is
needed, there are no shearers to pay, and no carriage to market, for the
bullock walks himself down to his doom. Granted that prices are low, still
it is obvious that there must be huge profits in the business. So the
cattle start away out to “the country”, where they are supposed to
increase and multiply, and enrich their owners. Alas! for such hopes.
There is a curse on cattle.
No one has ever been able to explain exactly how the deficit arises. Put
the figures before the oldest and most experienced cattleman, and he will
fail to show why they don't work out right. And yet they never do. It is
not the fault of the cattle themselves. Sheep would rather die than live—and
when one comes to think of the life they lead, one can easily understand
their preference for death; but cattle, if given half a chance, will do
their best to prolong their existence.
If they are running on low-lying country and are driven off when a flood
comes, they will probably walk back into the flood-water and get drowned
as soon as their owner turns his back. But, as a rule, cattle are not
suicidal. They sort themselves into mobs, they pick out the best bits of
country, they find their way to the water, they breed habitually; but it
always ends in the same way. The hand of Fate is against them.
If a drought comes, they eat off the grass near the water and have to
travel far out for a feed. Then they fall away and get weak, and when they
come down to drink they get bogged in the muddy waterholes and die there.
Or Providence sends the pleuro, and big strong beasts slink away by
themselves, and stand under trees glaring savagely till death comes. Or
else the tick attacks them, and soon a fine, strong beast becomes a
miserable, shrunken, tottering wreck. Once cattle get really low in
condition they are done for. Sheep can be shifted when their pasture
fails, but you can't shift cattle. They die quicker on the roads than on
the run. The only thing is to watch and pray for rain. It always comes—after
the cattle are dead.
As for describing the animals themselves, it would take volumes. Sheep are
all alike, but cattle are all different. The drovers on the road get to
know the habits and tendencies of each particular bullock—the
one-eyed bullock that pokes out to the side of the mob, the inquisitive
bullock that is always walking over towards the drover as if he were going
to speak to him, the agitator bullock who is always trying to get up a
stampede and prodding the others with his horns.
In poor Boake's “Where the Dead Men Lie” he says:
Cattle on a camp see ghosts, sure enough—else, why is it that, when
hundreds are in camp at night—some standing, some lying asleep, all
facing different ways—in an instant, at some invisible cause of
alarm, the whole mob are on their feet and all racing in the same
direction, away from some unseen terror?
It doesn't do to sneak round cattle at night; it is better to whistle and
sing than to surprise them by a noiseless appearance. Anyone sneaking
about frightens them, and then they will charge right over the top of
somebody on the opposite side, and away into the darkness, becoming more
and more frightened as they go, smashing against trees and stumps,
breaking legs and ribs, and playing the dickens with themselves generally.
Cattle “on the road” are unaccountable animals; one cannot say for certain
what they will do. In this respect they differ from sheep, whose movements
can be predicted with absolute certainty.
All the cussedness of the bovine race is centred in the cow. In Australia
the most opprobious epithet one can apply to a man or other object is
“cow”. In the whole range of a bullock-driver's vocabulary there is no
word that expresses his blistering scorn so well as “cow”. To an
exaggerated feminine perversity the cow adds a fiendish ingenuity in
making trouble.
A quiet milking-cow will “plant” her calf with such skill that ten
stockmen cannot find him in a one-mile paddock. While the search goes on
she grazes unconcernedly, as if she never had a calf in her life. If by
chance he be discovered, then one notices a curious thing. The very
youngest calf, the merest staggering-Bob two days old, will not move till
the old lady gives him orders to do so. One may pull him about without
getting a move out of him. If sufficiently persecuted he will at last sing
out for help, and then his mother will arrive full-gallop, charge men and
horses indiscriminately, and clear out with him to the thickest timber in
the most rugged part of the creek-bed, defying man to get her to the yard.
While in his mother's company he seconds her efforts with great judgment.
But, if he be separated from her, he will follow a horse and rider up to
the yard thinking he is following his mother, though she bellow
instructions to him from the rear. Then the guileless agriculturist,
having penned him up, sets a dog on him, and his cries soon fetch the old
cow full-run to his assistance. Once in the yard she is roped, hauled into
the bail, propped up to prevent her throwing herself down, and milked by
sheer brute-force. After a while she steadies down and will walk into the
bail, knowing her turn and behaving like a respectable female.
Cows and calves have no idea of sound or distance. If a cow is on the
opposite side of the fence, and wishes to communicate with her calf, she
will put her head through the fence, place her mouth against his ear as if
she were going to whisper, and then utter a roar that can be heard two
miles off. It would stun a human being; but the calf thinks it over for a
moment, and then answers with a prolonged yell in the old cow's ear. So
the dialogue goes on for hours without either party dropping dead.
There is an element of danger in dealing with cattle that makes men smart
and self-reliant and independent. Men who deal with sheep get gloomy and
morbid, and are for ever going on strike. Nobody ever heard of a
stockman's strike. The true stockrider thinks himself just as good a man
as his boss, and inasmuch as “the boss” never makes any money, while the
stockman gets his wages, the stockman may be considered as having the
better position of the two.
Sheepmen like to think that they know all about cattle, and could work
them if they chose. A Queensland drover once took a big mob from the Gulf
right down through New South Wales, selling various lots as he went. He
had to deliver some to a small sheep-man, near Braidwood, who was buying a
few hundred cattle as a spec. By the time they arrived, the cattle had
been on the road eight months, and were quiet as milkers. But the
sheep-man and his satellites came out, riding stable-fed horses and
brandishing twenty-foot whips, all determined to sell their lives dearly.
They galloped round the astonished cattle and spurred their horses and
cracked their whips, till they roused the weary mob. Then they started to
cut out the beasts they wanted. The horses rushed and pulled, and the
whips maddened the cattle, and all was turmoil and confusion.
The Queensland drovers looked on amazed, sitting their patient leg-weary
horses they had ridden almost continuously for eight months. At last,
seeing the hash the sheep-men were making of it, the drovers set to work,
and in a little while, without a shout, or crack of a whip, had cut out
the required number. These the head drover delivered to the buyer, simply
remarking, “Many's the time you never cut-out cattle.”
As I write, there rises a vision of a cattle-camp on an open plain, the
blue sky overhead, the long grass rustling below, the great mob of
parti-coloured cattle eddying restlessly about, thrusting at each other
with their horns; and in among the sullen half-savage animals go the
light, wiry stock-riders, horse and man working together, watchful, quick,
and resolute.
A white steer is wanted that is right in the throng. Way!—make way!
and horse and rider edge into the restless sea of cattle, the man with his
eye fixed on the selected animal, the horse, glancing eagerly about him,
trying to discover which is the wanted one. The press divides and the
white steer scuttles along the edge of the mob trying to force his way in
again. Suddenly he and two or three others are momentarily eddied out to
the outskirts of the mob, and in that second the stockman dashes his horse
between them and the main body. The lumbering beasts rush hither and
thither in a vain attempt to return to their comrades. Those not wanted
are allowed to return, but the white steer finds, to his dismay, that
wherever he turns that horse and man and dreaded whip are confronting him.
He doubles and dodges and makes feints to charge, but the horse
anticipates every movement and wheels quicker than the bullock. At last
the white steer sees the outlying mob he is required to join, and trots
off to them quite happy, while horse and rider return to cut out another.
It is a pretty exhibition of skill and intelligence, doubly pleasant to
watch because of the undoubted interest that the horses take in it. Big,
stupid creatures that they are, cursed with highly-strung nerves, and
blessed with little sense, they are pathetically anxious to do such work
as they can understand. So they go into the cutting-out camp with a zest,
and toil all day edging lumbering bullocks out of the mob, but as soon as
a bad rider gets on them and begins to haul their mouths about, their
nerves overcome them, and they get awkward and frightened. A horse that is
a crack camp-horse in one man's hands may be a hopeless brute in the hands
of another.
