clearly remember my first trip into the bush. How, used to the watery sunlight of England, I found the red dirt, brilliant sunlight and gum trees as alien a landscape as I’d seen in my young life.
As my bike eats up the miles, I pass the occasional dirt road and mail box indicating some kind of human presence. Emerald is buzzing with well-turned-out travellers (I’m guessing they must be the owners of all the white 4-wheel-drives towing caravans and campervans I’ve been sharing the road with) and an Italian-themed coffee shop seems a million miles away from the awesome emptiness that lurks on the edge of town.
About 200 kilometers from Longreach I cross the Great Dividing Range at 444 metres. I’m now in the Lake Aire Basin and if there was any water around, it would flow westward with me. I’m suddenly amongst a forest of smallish red ant hills that extend away from the road as far as I can see.
In a run-down pub in Jericho I forsake my usual coffee for a cold beer – it would probably have been instant anyway. I ask the portly owner how long it should take me to get to Darwin. “I could do it in three days,” he replies. “But on your bike, youz should piss it in a week. Youz going right round, are yuz?”
I nod as he hands me my beer in a stubby holder, “On ya mate!” he says, before serving the only other customer.
Road trains thunder past heading east, hauling cattle to ships, abattoirs or greener pastures as I carry on to Longreach, which emerges in the late afternoon. On the way I pass two emus on the road side of a stock fence behind some stunted trees. One swivels its head as I ride past, a brief vignette in my peripheral vision.
Friend of a friend Lisa kindly puts me up at the Pastoral College where she works and has arranged for me to chat with a couple of colourful locals. She’s a great lady and incredibly helpful. I’ve barely unloaded the bike before John arrives, looking like he’s just stepped out of a Western movie. After a firm handshake I hop into his ute and we’re off in a cloud of dust to his place of work.
Rural Trainer John Arnold
As we drive, we get to know each other. John still has his wide-brimmed hat on and with his boots, jeans and steely gaze, he looks every inch the cowboy. He’s a tall and rangy 62, but looks younger. He was born in the outback, in a little town on the Queensland/NSW border where his father managed sheep and cattle properties. It’s the only life he’s ever known, and his earliest memories are of being a tiny boy, following old stockmen around, riding a worn-out old stock horse.
“I came here when I was two, so I’ve been around Longreach pretty much most of my life; I guess that make me a local,” he says laconically.
John has been a stockman himself but says his preferred work over the years has been as a contract horse breaker, moving from property to property, breaking horses in for the stockmen to ride, a job he’s been doing since he was 21. “You must have known your stuff at such a young age,” I say.
“Oh yeah …” he replies, “I guess I had some good teachers. But back then the horsemanship was kinda rough and ready. There wasn’t much science in what we did compared to today. In the last 20 years there’s been so much knowledge imported into Australia, some from America, some from Europe.”
John reckons the standard of horsemanship has improved markedly over the years. “The old Australian stockman was a good man with a rough horse, but today the horses are purpose-bred for the job.” We pull up by a huge corral where a small herd stand around swishing their tails and snorting. These are John’s personal horses which he fed earlier. I ask an obvious question, “so you must love horses John?”
“Yeah … you’ve gotta love horses. If you can turn what you love into your living, you’re laughing aren’t you? But they’re all different personalities. Good and bad ones. The American quarter-horse was brought over in the 1950s and a lot of cross-breeding went on with them – plus we still have the typical Australian stock horse which is a thoroughbred horse. You’ve got to be open-minded. The only horse I’m looking for today George, is a better one than I rode yesterday.”
He suggests we drive over to the Pastoral College facilities where he spends most of his working day. “Normally there’d be 50 or 60 horses waiting in the paddocks out there, hanging around waiting for us to work with them,” says John as we wander around the steel fenced corrals and buildings that make up the facility that is owned and funded by the State Government and managed by the Queensland Agricultural Training Colleges Corporation.
“Basically,” explains John, “we have young people coming here who are looking to work on a property. We don’t teach them management, we teach them the basic things like stock handling, horse riding, branding, fencing and vehicle maintenance. The sort of skills needed to work on a property.”
It’s quiet at the moment because the students have just been sent to their work placements. Some are placed on properties with as many as 50,000 head of cattle, working with staff getting practical experience in the industry. Students can start here as young as 16, with six and 12-month courses available, with a qualification at the end that is recognised nationwide.
“About 15 or 20 years ago the Government made up a syllabus called the National Training Packages, which meant that if you did a subject in the Northern Territory, it’d be the same as what they taught you in Tasmania,” he says in the soft, measured tone that I imagine has calmed many a nervous student over the years. We enter the tack room which has that unmistakable smell of well-looked-after leather.
He slaps a beautiful saddle, one of many sitting in a row on brackets, “This is your typical Australian saddle that we’ve used here for the past two hundred years. It was derived from the old English hunting saddle but because our horses are a bit wilder and we do some crazy things with them, we’ve put these knee pads in and also made the back a bit higher than the hunting saddle. Over the past 50 years of so we’ve also added some American features so this is called a half-breed saddle, half American and half Australian.”
A typical saddle here is worth around $5,000 which surprises me as there must be so much leather around. “Well, believe it or not leather is ridiculously expensive. With the millions of cattle that are slaughtered in Australia,” John says, “there are only two tanneries left here. The leather for most of these saddles would probably have been imported from America.”
John has been training jillaroos and jackaroos here for 32 years, but he gives the impression that he’s still as passionate as when he started out.
“It must give you a lot of satisfaction when you send a young person out, knowing that you’ve done a good job,” I venture.
“Yeah … when you see them go out and do a good job, it does give you a lot of satisfaction,” he ponders for a second, “A lot of young people these days are content to be Joe-averages so when I hear back that a young person from here has been a success, it’s good. I wouldn’t want to take all the credit, of course, but it’s nice to know that you may have fostered that desire to learn and improve.”
Some
