Journey to Queensland

New Zealand Listener, Volume 30, Issue 778, 18 June 1954, Page 16

Journey to Queensland

by

SUNDOWNER

JUNE 1

E were not ten minutes on our journey when I saw Ransom. He was watching me as a horse watches you when you approach from behind, not turning round to look at you, but facing away as if he neither saw you nor cared. Only horses can't grin. Ransom

was grinning broadly, and eloquently, telling me without saying a word

that it was a huge joke to see me there and to be caught there himself. Ransom is one of my test cases when I think about the value of education. When I first saw him 20 years ago he was asleep in his mother’s arms. When I saw him last three months ago he was on his way to North Canterbury to break in a dozen young horses; and he seemed genuinely amused when I suggested that there were safer ways of earning a living. Now here he was with a mate of 23 on his way to Queensland to break in horses on. out-back stations. There was good money in it, he said, and no special risk if you were neither brutal nor reckless. A horse was dangerous only when he was afraid of you. Knock him about and he will always be dangerous. There were no special rules for overcoming this fear. The great thing was

not to add to it. If you made him more nervous you were going the wrong way. If his confidence seemed to be growing you could be sure that your method was right. "What about your own confidence?" I asked. "‘Isn’t the secret of success knowing that you can ride him whatever he does when you mount?" "TI don’t think so. It is certainly important to be able to stay in the saddle once you are there. But if you have handled him properly that will not be difficult. It is two years since a horse tried to buck me off, and he had been made half mad before I got him." "Outlaws are not: outlaws to begin with?" "Not often. It can happen, I suppose. But the outlaws you see in the ring are made into outlaws deliberately. If a man comes along. who can ride them to a standstill, he is not allowed to do it. If he did, there would soon be no money in them." Well there must be a lot of horses in the world that no boy of 20 has ridden, but I accept Ransom’s story so far as it goes. What interests me most however is the distance he has travelled in six or seven years. If he had gone to High

School and University he would now perhaps have been a Bachelor of Arts. But it is unlikely that he would have been able to tame an outlaw; I don’t think he would have been able to shear a sheep in four minutes or shoe a horse in half an hour; he would not have trained and run dogs in trials; and I am sure he would not be in Queensland making more money in- a week in a

stock yard than I have usually been able to make in two weeks in a "profession."

N a journey of a thousand miles north from Sydney I saw 20 sheep. They were three or four hundred yards away and could have been Romneys. They were certainly not Merinos. But as I

JUNE 3

write this note the auctioneers are.selling 66,567 bales of greasy Merino in Brisbane which will probably bring

growers seven million pounds. No one _ could travel from Invercargill to

Kaitaia without seeing 20,000 sheep if he slept half the time, but the sheep begin in Australia where the coastal belt ends, It surprised me all the same to see. cattle grazing over all that sheepless country, and horses at nearly every homestead. The cattle were not always fat or well grown, and the horses were usually the nondescript animals to be seen on small New Zealand farms 30 years ago-draughts, often hollow-backed and pot-bellied, half-draughts, and indifferently bred hacks. Often, too, there were pigs, red, white, mottled, or black, and where they were running free they seemed to be finding enough to eat. I will say nothing about the piggeries’ except that they reminded me painfully of eye-sores nearer home, In one of them, however, a saddle-back sow just about the time we were rushing past was giving birth to a family of 25-not a world’s record, the newspapers say today, but equal to the record and established in spite of cyclones and floods. Cattle, too, have been making news over here. A bullock which jumped out of the Brisbane show ring three years ago and injured a spectator bas this week cost the show authorities £3000. A bull which charged a 16-ton tram in Melbourne yesterday put a horn through the control mechanism, and without injury to itself stopped the tram dead and considerably increased the blood pressure of most of the passengers. = we : *

JUNE 7

WAS pleased when I reached Brisbane to hear over the air that the Government of the Philippines had decided to import 1000 cattle a month from Queensland and New South Wales. But I was smiling on the wrong side of my face. The cattle are not to be used to improve Filipino cattle in milking sheds and

grass lands, Dut to aispiace them on Filipino tables. Thev are to go out alive

so that they will still be fresh meat when they arrive a fortnight later, But their destination is "the works," The story is in fact a little worse than that. Instead of buying fat .cattle the importers are asking for second-grade only, which means that these animals will be rounded up in the bush’ and begin their journey to the sea without any internal reserves and- With: a. poor chance of building up 6n the way. They will be wild cattle, nervous and excitable, and not at all likely to settle down on board ship to hand-feeding and drink- ] ing. They will also, I gather, have to be certified as "pleuro-free" before they leave Australia, and will probably therefore be driven through crushes and subjected one by one to blood tests. By that time many of them will be half mad with fright, and by the time they reach Manila most of them will be half dead with hunger, weariness, thirst, and the violence of their uprooting. I am not quite old enough to remember the cattle ships of last century, But I am old enough to remember what happened to thoroughly domesticated horses on the transports of the Boer War. In any case the Atlantic cattle ships are a tale that has been told too often to be questioned in 1954. (To be continued)