Australia Drovers Riding Off Into Sunset

The Gunnedah-to-Breeza track is a lifeless stretch of sun-baked rock blasted by biting winds in northwest New South Wales, but when drought grips Australia this is where you’ll find Jack Wakeman and his cattle.

Each afternoon white, billowing clouds brew on the horizon and a smile will creep across Wakeman’s face.

By dusk lightning will dance across the sky, the heavens will open and in the morning this stony road will boast a lush green crop of stubble--ideal for hungry cattle.

“There’s some of the best mitchell grass and clover in Australia here--all you need is a bit of rain,” Wakeman says.

Wakeman, 58, knows the “long paddocks” or stock routes of the Australian outback like the back of his weathered hand.

Stock routes are public land available to any farmer for grazing at a daily rate per head of stock. They are nicknamed “the long paddocks” because they run parallel to roads, sometimes a third of a mile wide, alternating from one side of road to the other every few miles.

While other drovers curse this sunburned country, Wakeman can always be found grazing his cattle on the sweetest grass and coolest water.

“He’s forgotten more than I have ever learnt,” says drover Bluey Hall, 50, a tree-stump of a man who has been riding the long paddocks for the last five years.

At the turn of the century author Andrew Barton (Banjo) Paterson immortalized the drover’s life in his now classic Australian poem, “Clancy of the Overflow”:

As the stock are slowly stringing,

Clancy rides behind them singing

For the drover’s life has pleasures

that townsfolk never know . . .

And he sees the vision splendid

of the sunlit plains extended

And at night the wond’rous glory

of the everlasting stars

For the past 43 years Wakeman has kicked, pushed and cajoled cattle the length and breadth of the “sunlit plains” looking for the best feed the country has to offer.

But the Australian drover, a gnarled and tough breed, who once pioneered vast tracts of this continent in massive cattle drives, is fast becoming a chapter in the history books.

“It’s a dying trade because the young fellas are no longer born stockmen and educated the right way,” says Henry Bell, 70, a longtime employer of Wakeman.

“Wakeman’s a first-class stockman, a good horseman and he understands his stock. The young fellas on the land today don’t know what day of the week it is.”

Seated on the doorstep of a battered caravan he now calls home, Wakeman remembers the early days when home was a packhorse and tent and the main pleasure of life a hot brew of tea. He remembers the camaraderie of droving a herd of 1,300 cattle around northern Queensland for nine months.

“It’s tough up in the top end because the cattle are meaner. It takes you three weeks to break the buggers in. You can’t get to sleep at night because they wander off,” Wakeman says.

But Wakeman, who admits in true laconic bush fashion that stubborn cattle and horses have “busted a few bones” along the way, says droving is simply common sense--walk your cattle slowly and find them shade and water on a hot day.

Today there are only about half a dozen professional drovers left in Australia.

“There are drovers and drivers,” explains Hall. “A good drover treats his cattle as if they belong to him. A driver doesn’t give a stuff about the cattle as long as he gets somewhere and gets paid.”

As Australia’s best farmlands are squeezed by one of the worst droughts in memory, drovers like Wakeman and Hall are much sought after by farmers desperate to keep their stock alive until the rains come.