Bingara Mayo's Son - Page 2 of 4
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As with everything Australian, nobody is quite sure how they began, which is why Crufts Dog Show wouldn't have anything to do with them until just recently. It began with the working dogs brought out from England having difficulty with the Australian conditions. They simply were not tough enough to be able to handle cattle in the vast western plains which had been opened up over the Great Dividing Range.
Basically, in the old world, dogs had never been used to working cattle anyway, let alone the half-wild scrubbers that developed in this country. Then around the 1850's, a drover from Bathurst, named Timmins, decided that since the native dog was doing fairly well at the business without any training whatsoever (apart from the unfortunate idiosyncrasy that he tended to keep the animals for himself, rather than bring them back to their rightful owners), mucked around with a couple of his own dogs and a couple of wild dogs. His breed was known as Timmins Biters. The dogs were silent like the Dingo and would heel. But something went wrong and the breed did not develop any further after its initial success. Somewhat later on a breed known as Halls Heelers, started to be noticed in the working dog world. Once again they appeared to have a lot of Dingo, plus smooth haired Collie in them, but there are tales of other crosses. One early cross was said to have included the old Dalmatian, or fire dog, to give a guard strain. Another, the old English meat market dog, known as the Smithfield, has made some sort of a shadowy appearance. All this is still argued about by the breeders of blues, but some exactness starts to appear in the 1890's, when Robert Kaleski appeared on the scene and started breeding cattle dogs in earnest in Sydney. At that time it was generally claimed that a separate strain had been continuously bred at Musselbrook, in the Hunter Valley, for about 18 years.
No matter. What we then finished up with, was a heavily built, broad faced dog, with blue or red markings and a harsh, waterproof coat. By breeding, the dogs were silent, but they bit and they bit low. Then somebody introduced a blue highland collie strain onto the breed and so we went on. What one had, more or less, was a dog fruit salad. Since the Dingo has been put back into the strain to stop it from going soft, and there has been a lot of mucking around to make the paws more cat-like so they can work over rough, burr infested country.
The news of the arrival of Bingara Mayo's Son was not taken with any wild enthusiasm by the other half of our greenie, groupie commune. She had gone through a deprived childhood, one that had been completely pet free, so one had to answer innumerous questions about housing,( chain the bastard up), attitude to strangers, (chain the bastard up), fleas, (chain the bastard up), sex life, (chain the bastard up), and general obedience, (hit the bastard with a piece of four by two). But one question absolutely floored me. "Do you," she said, "do you think we should get him some boots? No, now come on Richard, I'm serious, I want to know these things."
"Booties for a blue heeler? " I replied, more than somewhat thunder struck. "Have you gone completely and utterly raving mad? They'll fall down in the local boozer. We'll be the bloody laughing stock of this town. The owners of the only limp wristed cattle dog in Australia. And what about the other dogs? Think of the shame of it. He'll either learn to walk on the prickles or lump the things as far as I'm concerned. Good God!!" The rest of the evening passed in restrained silence.
Anyway, the great day arrived at last. Brendan arrived with an extremely confused tale about being delayed on the road by bikies, of taking Buddy, son of Bingara Mayo, to a C.I.B. press conference, of introducing him to Ita Buttrose, of great journalistic fame, in some dammed lift, and of how both of them, (he and the dog, not Ita), were banned from Sydney's Evening Star Hotel for fighting - He,( Brendan ) doing the fighting up top, and good old Buddy doing the floor work.
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