My Droving Days: Life on the Long Paddock

When I bought this book, I had thought it was by the Australian travel author of the same name. It isn't, but it was still a great find.

Published in 2012, it is a book about the experiences of a drover in the 1950s, in New South Wales and Queensland. He and his wife wrote it in his eighties - as he told stories to his family, his wife taped them, then started to write them down.

The author was a city boy from Sydney who wanted more than a city life. He headed north to check things out and worked a few rural jobs before being given the opportunity as a drover. Cattle, then sheep, then back to cattle. I did a bit of cattle work on a station up north of Perth a long time ago, and there were a lot of similarities. I never had to deal with the cold, but I was only there over summer.

Anyway, this book is in short chapters with a short story being told in each. They are sort of in chronological order, but work ok as stand alone yarns. My minor criticism, is that a couple of them are out of order, and the author has to explain that “this” occurred before “the boss and Les had their falling out”, etc.

They are interesting people, who work in such isolation. They are self dependant, they learn to make do with what they have, they know animals, they binge drink like mad, and like a fight. There are always the inevitable clashes of personality. This occurs in the book, and was also my experience.

The people on the station where I worked had very few communication skills. They were hard to talk to, and could never hold a discussion. What I mean is - if they had a contrary opinion, you either shut up and accepted it, or you had a fight - no discussion. We would work all the hours it was light, and then the guys I worked with would drink 15 cans of beer each and crash out. In 40°C heat all day, dehydrated at the best of times, I could manage a couple of cans at most!

When it came to leave the station, after the muster had finished, it came to squaring up time for my wages. The deal was they paid us 8 hours a day, 6 days a week (we did about 12 hours a day, six and a half or seven days a week), less the beer we drank. I got my cheque from the bosses wife, and I noticed they hadn't made any deductions. Weighing it up, my conscience got the better of me, and I said - you didn't deduct the beer. She said - yeah, we looked at that, and you drunk so little it wasn't worth deducting. Ha, I tried my best.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book, as it brought back a lot of memories of that time for me.

Four Stars.