Colossal droving tale leaps to life

Then imagine doing it in 1883.

These days drovers have mobile phones and instant weather reports, TV antennas on the roof of their truck and a generator out the side, and motorbikes to help them out.

As well as that, they have established routes and watering facilities all the way.

Just over 130 years ago a grazier from the Wimmera region, Thomas Guthrie engaged drover Wallace Caldwell to help stock his newly acquired property on the Barkley Tablelands, and so began an epic journey which is only now being told in full.

A map of the route taken by the drover making the longest sheep drive known in Australia, in 1882-4, and the usual track taken to get sheep to market down the Birdsville Track to Adelaide.

At the Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame last month, Thomas’s great-grandson, Tom Guthrie staged the Queensland launch of his 600-page book which details the longest sheep drive in Australia’s history, 3500km from start to finish.

“To me, it’s the best read about pioneering Australia since Kings in Grass Castles and it tells a similar story,” he said.

Kings in Grass Castles documents the epic droving journeys of the Durack family in the 19th century, firstly from Goulburn to Quilpie and then overland to the Kimberley region of West Australia.

By a strange quirk of fate, the Durack cattle and the Guthrie sheep collided with each other on the Diamantina.

“Writing The Longest Drive has been the most fantastic journey,” Tom said. “I got frustrated that I had to keep doing my day job.”

While his family had a good collection of letters and diaries from their early days in Australia, there was nothing recorded about the droving adventure.

The first they knew about it was from reading the drover’s memories of the trip in an Australian Stockman’s Hall of Fame newsletter in 1991.

He had originally written it in 1932, 50 years after the fact, and sent it to Paul Hasluck, later to become Australia’s Governor-General but at that time on the staff of the West Australian newspaper.

It was rejected for publication but stashed away in Hasluck’s drawers for 60 years, when it was found and sent to the Hall of Fame for safekeeping.

“Without this letter I didn’t have a book,” Tom said.

In it, boss drover Wallace Caldwell recounts an amazing tale of endurance.

He set out from Rich Avon in Victoria’s Wimmera in September 1882 with 10,000 ewes and 850 rams, in two separate mobs.

Each night two sets of temporary yards had to be erected.

Four times the huge mob had to cross the Murray and the Darling, using a punt that carried 160 at a time.

By the time the mob reached Wilcannia, around Christmas time, they had walked into a dreadful drought.

“The drover talks about going to the back of the mob and putting the weakest sheep in a dray then driving to the front and dropping them off, then going to the back again and repeating that all day,” Tom said.

“Other drovers they passed said, why not abandon them, they looked so forlorn.”

Eventually they stopped for two months but not before 7000 of the original mob had died.

It was at this time that the separate mobs merged and rams being rams, lambs started appearing in Queensland the following April.

Once in Queensland the route traced a path from Cunnamulla to Eulo, Adavale, Jundah and Old Cork station, then down the Diamantina to Boulia and north to the eventual destination at Avon Downs, on the Queensland-Northern Territory border.

The woolshed at Avon Downs west of Camooweal, which ran sheep for 35 years. Photo: Tom Guthrie.

Stories such as these – building up sheep numbers to 70,000 head, the journeys down the Birdsville Track to markets at Adelaide, the shearing shed made out of Murri pine, one of the few timbers white ants don’t eat – abound in the book that deserves to become a new bestseller.

It took nine years to write – severe bushfires in 2006 burnt out Tom’s farm, including 3000 sheep and his vineyard, putting a stop to writing for three years.

The looming 150 year anniversary of single family ownership at Rich Avon this year was a good incentive to put in a big effort to complete the book.

Launching it, the ASHOF Queensland branch president Rosemary Champion said The Longest Drive was a story of amazing courage and foresight that early pioneers and drovers were known for.

It also details family links with the Waltzing Matilda story, and the properties of Isis Downs and Portland Downs in the Isisford district.