AMONG northern cattle producers, the story is well known of Monty Atkinson and how he took a liking to the progeny of two Zebu bull calves from India that Melbourne Zoo had purchased and that ignited breeding that has led to today's Drougtmaster breed.
Monty crossed the Zebus - and red half-bred Brahman bulls he later acquired - with Shorthorn and Devon cows at Glen Ruth, west of Cairns. Later, on his property near Ingham, Mungalla, he ran one of the Droughtmaster breed's foundation herds.
He and other trailblazers such as Bob Rea and John Stewart-Moore set about to develop a breed which had the attributes required to withstand the severe environment of the tropics but in the right proportions to retain the benefits offered by the British breeds.
In 1962 Monty became the first president of the Droughtmaster Stud Breeders Society. As the Society celebrated its 60th anniversary at the Royal Queensland Show in Brisbane this month, several of the family of the pioneers shared stories passed down about those early days.
Monty's grandson Rob Atkinson talked about how in the mid 1800s, when the Atkinsons arrived in northern Queensland, the only breeds of cattle were of British origin and they were really not suited to the country, which was mostly open woodlands, phosphate-deficient and poorly watered.
The tick plague arrived from the Northern Territory in 1896 and things got really tough. Ticks and buffalo fly had arrived about 20 years earlier, on a shipment of water buffalo from Asia to Darwin.
"Because of the ticks, fortunes were made and lost in a few days as cattle stations changed hands for a song," Mr Atkinson said.
Bob Atkinson, Monty's father - along with most of the other pastoralists in the northern Queensland - lost nearly all his breeders to tick fever.
"The year before the ticks arrived, they branded 400 calves, the next year only four. They were the calves on the house cows, and each morning, when the cows were milked, immature ticks were pulled off them," Mr Atkinson said.
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Of mangoes, not cattle
Among the stories at the Droughtmaster Society's 60th dinner of how cattle were made work in the north, a simple yarn about Monty's love of fruit proved very entertaining.
Mont and his first wife, Ruth Collins, honeymooned in Singapore in 1930, eating mangoes they were most impressed with - so they kept the seeds.
"As they sailed back to Australia, Mont put the three mango seeds on the window sill of their cabin to dry. He told the cabin boy he'd give him five pounds if he said nothing about them," Mr Atkinson said.
"Everything went well until the captain sprung a surprise cabin inspection. Mont and Ruth were up on deck, unaware. The cabin boy, in panic, raced ahead of the captain, put the seeds in a calico bag with a string cord attached and threw them out the porthole."
He didn't receive his five pounds.
About 35 years later, Monty's neighbour at Mungalla, Herbie Bosworth, who happened to also be a keen exotic fruit grower, spoke about a mango tree at Cedar Bay that no one knew the type of.
Monty made the trip to what was in those days a hippy commune.
He was told by a resident: "I've been here for 40 years and every morning I walk along the beach picking up all sorts of interesting stuff. One morning about 35 years ago, I found a calico bag with three mango seeds inside. I planted them and two of those seeds grew into these trees."
It seems the Cedar Bay Mango is another for the Droughtmaster Society to lay claim to, albeit one that might be best kept quiet given the focus on biosecurity at the moment.
Monty Atkinson died in 1986.