Bingara Mayo's Son
Barking Buddies Note: This story has some "descriptive phrases". Barking Buddies rates it as: PGR. (parental guidence reccomended)
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There was once a time in our splendid past when the Queensland Blue Heeler, or
the Queensland Blue, as the animal is more commonly known, epitomised everything that stood for a proud nation. He was brutish, tough, viscous -tempered, would fight at the drop of a hat but stuck by his mates, hated fancy food and would screw anything that moved.
Even better, those pommie bastards wouldn't have a bar of him. The lah-de-dahs who ran Cruft's Dog Show declared he was not "a recognized breed ", but they didn't bloody dare come over here and say that, did they? My colonial oath they didn't. Because old blue here, would have their moleskins off quicker than they could change their accents. Times unfortunately change. Outside my window sits Bingara Mayo's Son, the descendant of a once feared and terrifying race. The magpies have just stolen his breakfast toast.
My family has had a long, if somewhat erratic, association with Queensland Blues, so when I sloped off to the country once again about a year back, I decided that only a proper dog would do. None of your silly, city terriers. It had to be a man's dog. A mate and a pub fighter, a back of the ute barker, one of those bastards that terrify all comers by slavering at the end of a chain. When I mentioned this to my companion at our five acre weed factory, she became very alarmed and wrote to her sister, who replied that such an animal sounded "quite horrible".
Satisfied that anything which upset Beverly's sister was a good omen, I stuck to my decision and contacted an old mate of mine who specialises in things that fall off the backs of trucks. Now, everybody has a mate like this, except that mine is odder than most. While others deal in crocodile skin bags, wrist watches and stuffed bears, plus the occasional chook, my mate does dogs.
When I rang him about the matter, he gave me that terrifying Australian reassurance in reply, "No worry, mate". I should have twigged then, because every time that cry is uttered in the land, it means, at the very least, that your house is going to burn down, or to use the old line, somebody is going to run away with your wife and send her back. But because he was a mate, I was lulled into a sense of false expectancy. The old Brendan wouldn't muck things up, would he? He wouldn't let me down. Not bloody much he wouldn't! Anyway, there was silence for about three months and I forgot about the matter, continuing to seek my simple, solitary pleasures in the public bar of the Molonge's Exchange Hotel, (which in this part of the world , passes for Thoreau's Walden Pond.).
Then good old Brendan rang. Not only did he have one blue, but he seemed to have about a thousand of them, of all shapes and sizes, sexes and ages. They were all line bred, and they were all for free. Pushing the thought from my mind that he had perhaps conducted a one man guerrilla raid on the N.S.W. Cattle Dog Society's Annual Show, and now had the slavering horde confined in his third floor "studio apartment", I said I would take one, one only, and I thought it only fair that it should be the first one, rather than the last one he had grabbed, so that is how Bingara Mayo's Son, officially known as Buddy, but more generally referred to as Dickhead, came into my life. But before one gets down to the horror of it all, a little history about the noble breed for the benefit of outsiders.
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