Alan Taylor, Leon Ford, Laurie Hiscock.
Boss drovers and master horsemen, stockmen and dogmen of yesteryear, legends of their time.
Their names are etched in the history books for the feats they each managed to achieve, droving hundreds of freshly weaned cattle 150 kilometres from the Mountain Calf Sales to Bairnsdale, arriving with stock quiet and broken in.
There’s a kind of reverence when the younger drovers speak about those boss drovers, and while many locals will have their own memories, this story focuses on the memories of two such drovers, Peter ‘Pilso’ Richards of Swifts Creek, and Tim Woodgate of Buchan, as well as the diary entries of Laurie Hiscock.
Pilso and Timmy were part of the last generation of drovers who helped take the cattle from start to finish, all the way from the Benambra saleyards through to the Bairnsdale saleyards, where the new owners would collect their stock.
Both started as young blokes, Pilso as a kid on a pony in the early 70s, joining the mob under Leon Ford for a few days as it went past his home at Doctors Flat, and Tim later on, at age 16, with Laurie Hiscock as boss drover.
In a car these days, Benambra to Bairnsdale takes about two hours.
But with a mob of cattle, the 150-kilometre trip took about 11 days, picking up cattle along the way from the Omeo saleyards and the Ensay saleyards.
It was a fair undertaking, particularly with the advent of faster cars and trucks in later years, and the lack of understanding of their drivers.
The weather played a big part in the trips, with hot days and cattle laying down, big storms and hailstones savage enough to mark a man on a horse.
The droving was done to educate the weaned cattle and to identify each new owner’s cattle, the system was simple.
The Benambra cattle were marked with blue paint, each new owner claiming the rump, shoulder or loin, for their particular painted mark, the Omeo cattle were marked with red paint and the Ensay cattle with yellow.
PILSO’S MEMORIES
Pilso grew up at Doctors Flat, where the mob would pass right through, and was just 14 when he did the full trip from Benambra to Bairnsdale and has many great yarns to tell.
“It was an epic journey for a young fella,” Pilso said.
“I had a little brumby mare, and I used to go with them when I was 10 or 12 and do a couple of days.
“I wasn’t flash enough to have a swag, I’d crawl in under the truck, I had a tarp and a couple of blankets, and I put my jacket on my upside-down saddle for a pillow.”
He did a few droving trips with Leon Ford and then Laurie Hiscock.
“I remember Mr Taylor, he was pretty well known in the district.
“Especially for his counting ability, no one ever disputed him.”
He said they kept their horse feed and camp gear in the truck, and their diet was boiled spuds, pumpkin and onion, plus meat, every night.
“If tomatoes were in season someone would drop them off to us and I remember fondly, Topsy Newcomen bringing tins of homemade butter to us,” Pilso said.
He tells the story of a ‘mongrel whip-shy dog’ one trip.
“We were at Double Bridges and a bloke brought a young horse for Laurie to ride.
“We had the cattle in a wire paddock in the bush there.
“One of my jobs was to ride up the ridgeline cracking my whip, to scare the roos away so they didn’t spook the cattle through the night.
“That dog wouldn’t work, the whip shy thing, it’d just slink along behind us all day.
“Anyway, we had the veggies in a pot on the campfire and some beautiful lamb chops someone had delivered, and we all went to watch Laurie ride, but the horse went like a bloody pony clubber, did nothing.
“In the meantime, that mongrel dog turned up and ate every one of those chops so we had to have bloody potato, pumpkin and onion on its own again.”
He said when the mob left Benambra, they’d let them run a bit of steam off and when they picked up another 400 or so at Omeo they would circle the mob so the fresh weaners let off steam.
“Old Bert Lee would be in the lead for that section, he’d never turn his head, just look out the corner of his eye, see the calves moving up and send his dogs to turn the lead back. Tim and I sat in what we called the ‘death seat’ to turn those weaners back.”
Pilso didn’t have any working dogs but got to know ‘every nook and cranny’ of the road, where they would have trouble with cattle leaving the road and how to pull them up.
“There’s always an art to stopping a big mob,” he said.
“You have to slow them down and let them settle, you can’t just stop, it’s a bit of a process.
He remembers Reids camp not far down from Swifts Creek, with a big mob that wouldn’t fit in the yards and using a holding paddock where they had to light fires in a line. The calves would rush through the night until they reached the fires that and a bit of hollering held them up. It was an all-night job for the older blokes.
“The calves would rush because the Ensay ones were fresh and they’d rush to the fires and stop,” he said.
Another trip at the Ensay yards, they had their horses tethered with a nosebag feed and somehow, someone opened the gates and the Ensay weaners poured out of the yards.
“Leon Ford jumped on his black horse with a halter to get them, he was a good operator Leon, a great horseman and a gentleman of the road.”
The gate opening may have been due to the camp being so close to the Ensay Pub, a ‘bit of a trap being so close’ according to Pilso, with ‘King Browns’ (bottles of beer) being consumed.
With a laugh he remembers Plugger McMahon, who was “good when you were in trouble with the mob, but more than likely he was the reason you were in trouble!”.
He says the camp spots have changed over the years and so has the river.
“The river is just a gutter now, it used to be wider, flatter, slower.
“You could water a thousand weaners at Tambo Crossing, now it’s all scrub, even Double Bridges, we used to feed them there now it’s all covered in bush, you couldn’t poke a flea in there now.”
Sometimes the calves would get footsore, with the worst cases roped and put in a horse float to be taken to Bairnsdale.
“I remember Ian McMahon with a rope one time in front of some young ladies, somehow he managed to get the rope around himself!”
Closer to Bairnsdale the school buses would go through the mob, and in an effort to ‘impress the sheilas on the bus’, Pilso was out the front feeling like a real cowboy, until his “bloody old horse took me under a low limb and nearly knocked me off”.
Some of the years the Newcomen brothers would put the Ensay calves on the road before they joined the main mob.
Pilso also remembers Johnny Cook, Evan Newcomen, Hoss Pendergast, KJ and Johnny Ross on the road.
“Hoss came with us one year as many did over the years,” he said.
“Some for a few days some just for the one trip.
“There are still some older fellas around who did the droving trips in the early days,” he said.
THE JOURNEY
The first day was from the Benambra saleyards around to Estates’ yards, with blokes and hessian super bags or flapping oilskins helping to turn them round the corner.
On to Omeo the second day where they would wait for the Omeo weaners to be painted up, and again blokes would stand with hessian bags to help turn the cattle towards Swifts Creek.
Next camp was Huggins yards at the bottom of The Gap, then onto Reid’s Woolshed near Swifts Creek, where Tim remembers Joe Fitz turning up with baskets full of veggies on a tractor.
The mob would then take the old road from Doctors Flat to Ensay and follow the Tambo River along to arrive at the Ensay saleyards, rather close to the Ensay pub for the drovers.
The next camp, Pilso said, was four miles down the road at Reedy Flat, which was always a nervy camp with the fresh Ensay weaners in the mob. Often the cattle would bolt during the night. Some drovers blamed a certain bike-riding local for stirring the cattle up at night.
On through the bush to Sommerville’s paddock at Tambo Crossing, or Bill Flynn’s yards, then to a wire yard in the clear country at Double Bridges.
The following night’s camp was at Evans’ paddock at Ramrod Creek near Bruthen, then onto Leo Hamilton’s paddock at the Sand Hill.
The final camp was called ‘Yellow Waterholes’ or Macnamara’s Waterhole out the back of Lucknow and on the very last day the mob would cross the river over the bridge into Bairnsdale.
The drovers would turn them to the left past the old Imperial Hotel and the Butter Factory, taking the back road to the Bairnsdale Saleyards where their new owners would take over.
LAURIE HISCOCK’S DIARY
According to Laurie Hiscock’s work diary, his first trip as boss drover in 1979, 408 cattle left Benambra in the mob, the owners charged $2.40 a head; 364 head joined the mob from Omeo, at $2.30/head and 144 from Ensay joined the mob at a charge of $2.10/head.
Also at Ensay, 128 head were taken out for the Treasures, with the total to Bairnsdale 788 head.
The drovers on the trip ‘all or part of time’ were: Leon Ford, Dennis Neal, Ken Howlett, Tim Woodgate, John Jennings, Bert Lee, Peter Richards and Rick Morgan.
Laurie, born in 1943, was 36 on his first boss drover trip. Sadly he passed away in September, 2016.
Laurie and his wife Anne were married in 1966 and bought their farm at Ensay in 1974.
His dairy shows in 1980 the charge per beast from Benambra rising to $3.30/head and the total to Bairnsdale at 689 head. Nine head were taken out for T Farmer at Ensay, and the ‘men’ on the trip were John Jennings, Peter Richards, Tim Woodgate and Dallas Jennings, and part time were Dennis Neal, Bert Lee and P Commins.
Simon Turner and B Mitchell were added to the list of drovers in 1981 when the mob size reached a mighty 1299 head.
In 1982 the mob dropped back to 461 head, with ‘nil’ cattle joining the mob from Ensay, and Laurie’s sons Michael and Jim Hiscock, plus John McMahon listed as drovers.
The diary entries continue each year until 1984, with the 1983 entry stating: ‘Too dry, drought conditions the worst on record. Tambo River dry down to below Swifts Creek, in holes only to Ensay. Farmers had pumps on most water holes.’
The final 1984 trip lists the price at $4.10/head from Benambra, with a total 477 driven to Bairnsdale and the drovers including John Jennings, Tim Woodgate, John McMahon, Greg Counihan, Dick Leatham, and part time, D Neal, S Neal and B Lee.
Laurie’s wife Anne said Laurie loved the droving trips.
“He had always been friends with Leon Ford and it was something he always wanted to do,” Anne said.
Laurie went two or three times with Mr Ford before he took on the boss drover role, even spending a month on the road with him, droving cattle all the way to Glenmaggie.
“It was an achievement for him,” she said.
“They never lost a beast. They dropped one at Tambo Crossing once but it turned up a couple of months later and Laurie sorted it.
“They could always account for every beast.”
She also mentioned the camp at Reedy Creek, or Harmans, where the cattle would rush.
Laurie found himself with another young bloke running in front of the rushing cattle dragging a stick on the bitumen to make noise to stop them running.
The young fella told Laurie he couldn’t keep on running.
“You’ve got to run or you’ll die,” Laurie told him.
Anne said when Alan Taylor was boss drover, there was no truck to cart the gear, instead he used packhorses.
“If it was a wet night they stayed in their oilkins all night, rather than get their blankets wet,” she said.
TIM’S MEMORIES
Tim’s job was always to take the first cut of about 80 to 100 head, and John Jennings would be in the lead, with John ‘Froggy’ McMahon taking the second cut.
“You’d end up with nearly the same calves in front and behind you every day,” Tim said.
Tim’s first droving trip was with Laurie Hiscock in 1979, when Leon Ford travelled with them for a few days, handing over the boss drover title to Laurie.
He also remembers Alan Taylor, who would use a tea-towell to draft stock, he wouldn’t hit them with a cane.
“He was a bit of a hero to me,” Tim said.
“A legend. He would go droving from Omeo to Bairnsdale using just the one cracker on his whip.
“I managed to do that twice.”
He said everyone had three or four dogs each on the trips.
“You had to swap them over, they didn’t last long because they’d get footsore,” he said.
He remembers other drovers over the years being Greg Counihan, Dallas Jennings, Rita McMahon, Hayden Hamilton, Mick French and Billy Jim Mitchell.
“Pilso was really good, he’d done the trip so many times.
“It’s important to write down the history,” Tim said.
“When we’re all gone no one will remember.”
A few standout memories include at Haunted Stream the cattle would sometimes bump one off the edge and someone would have to go down and follow it along the river until it could come out and join the mob again.
He said sometimes it was so hot the cattle would walk in the shade of the log trucks as they went slowly through the mob, and one time a petrol tank truck ran into the lead of the mob and rolled a few calves underneath, killing them.
At Dirty Hollow near O’Donnell’s yards near Bruthen it was hot and a massive thunderstorm came through, leaving poor Ken Howlett with welt marks from the hail.
Both Timmy and Pilso were grateful to be a part of the Drovers Reunion, held at the Counihan’s Wy Yung property in 2005.
The reunion drew together generations of drovers, stockmen and bushmen.
It was an extremely successful event and timely, as many of those in the photo have since passed on, much like the tradition of droving stock down country from Benambra.
The next time you pass a cattle truck coming down the Great Alpine Road in March from the Mountain Calf Sales, spare a thought for the drovers who made the trek, the cattle that mobbed together, the dogs and the horses, who all played a role in the history of cattle sales and droving in the district.
The Bairnsdale Advertiser thanks the interviewees for kindly allowing use of the photos from their collections, and to Anne Hiscock for sharing Laurie’s work diary. Some of the images are said to have been taken by the well-known Stock and Land photographer, Frank Johnson.
