Walwa on the Murray. A forgettable pub but an unforgettable role in our history.

Down the western side of the Walwa pub there’s a narrow sealed road heading north to the river and a gorgeous rest spot. I head down then to check the ‘Old Man’.

It doesn't disappoint. (Does it ever?) Across the Murray’s waters the trees bounce the early afternoon light back onto the waters as an eddy nearby gurgles and some ducks murmur about the dangers I represent.

Then it’s back to the town, and into the lane behind the pub before parking Super Ten beside the sign warning to go no further.

Inside there’s no other customer in the large front bar, just a woman sitting behind the counter. She looks up at me briefly, manages a quarter of smile, then it’s back to her digital tablet.

I shed at a distant wall-side table and head over. She looks up without getting up and after I tell her I have a booking for the night, finds the motivation to rouse herself, tell me it’ll be forty dollars, takes my credit card, hands me the key, tells me where the room is and then is about to sit back down when I have the audacity to ask for a beer.

Now, she can get back to playing Candy Crush or whatever it is that’s on her device!

I take the pot (we’re in Victoria remember!) back to my table. It’s becoming a bit clearer why the bloke I’m wanting to talk with suggested we catch up back at his place rather than the local.

This place is tired. Run by people who are obviously over it -people wanting to be rid of it. Beside me on the wall is an A4 sheet announcing the pub’s for sale.

I finish the drink, grab my stuff and head to my room. Dump the heavy gear and unload the bike of superfluous equipment and then jump on and head west.

Walwa has a very special place in this country’s history because it was here, well hereabouts, that Australia’s sole contribution to the great cattle breeds was born.

In 1898 two brothers, Peter and John Sutherland bought Thologolong Station

just up from where Walwa now is and worked sheep and black polled Angus. In 1902-3 a drought decimated their stock and they were forced to buy in cattle and the new beasts included an almost white roan cow.

Somehow this cow was penned with Angus bulls and a ‘mulberry’ calf resulted. Peter Sutherland wanted to dispose of it but his wife, Ina insisted it stay with them. Over the next 12 years the cow had a dozen more of these grey ‘mulberries’ .

. 

Peter Sutherland died in 1929 and a woman by the name of Helen Player bought 8 of the mulberries which she systematically cross-bred and improved the strain.

Helen Player married Keith, the son of Peter and Ina Sutherland. Keith wasn't a great fan of the greys either but Helen persevered, attracted by the breed’s quiet nature, its coat and its marbled meat.

They registered the name, ‘Murray Greys’ and, aided by other breeders like neighbour Mervyn Gadd, the breed began to take off. In 1967 three carcasses were shipped to the Smithfield Show in England, the most prestigious beef show on the planet.

They finished first, second and third in the Commonwealth Carcase competition and their future looked assured.

In 2008 the Murray Grey, which had originated by accident at Walwa beside Australia’s greatest river, was the largest represented breed at the 2008 Calgary Stampede Carcase Competition and that same year at Montana a Murray Grey carcase hit, well, I guess the bullseye when for the first time in history the judges gave it perfect ten for marbling and added a 9 for tenderness.

I leave the depressing pub behind and point the bike into the afternoon sun. My GPS has the co-ords for a roadside monument and in a few minutes

I’m pulling up at roadside plinth with an aussie flag hanging limp behind.

There’s a plaque on the rock announcing this as “The Birthplace of the Murray Grey” and detailing a bit of the genesis of the breed. At the bottom is a quote:

“This breed by accident was nature’s which in turn is God’s gift to our land Australia. These are our own cattle, our heritage, Australia’s heritage in the beef cattle world and none can say agin this”

This is taken from the diary of Helen Sutherland and after taking it all it, I turn the bike around and head across the road to talk with the author’s son and grandson of

Peter and Ina, the current custodian of the birthplace of the Murray Grey. His name is also Peter Sutherland.

Peter and his partner, Gina, have seen me coming up the path and they both come out to welcome me.  I can smell fresh baking aromas tempting me inside but Peter’s had a good morning that he’s wanting to share and something he’s itching to show me before we go in.

“Back in 1954 when I was 13, we had this fox that was taking all our chickens and dad tried to poison him and trap him but no luck.  So one night I hid in the old toilet we had out the back and waited in the dark.  Eventually I heard the chickens squawk  and I jumped out with the old Harrington Richardson shotgun.

And I got him!  From about 60 yards running across the bridge!”

Well they’ve been having another vulpine visitor of late and early this morning Peter once again lay in ambush.

He leads me out of the garden, round beside the shed, bends and picks up a not yet stiff dead fox.

“Here I am 64 years later and I can still hit one of these buggers from 50 yards! I got as much out of that as breeding a ribbon winner,” he laughs, and I used the same trusty Harrington to do it!”  He dumps the carcase and we head inside where the perpetrators of the baking scents are front and centre on the table: a tray of big country sultana scones.

“

Peter’s a wiry little bloke with a focussing stare. He sits back with his brew and as he talks his hands, sinewy and worn from a life of work, cut through the air, pointing and accentuating.

It wasn't always certain that Peter Sutherland would follow his father and grandfather into cattle. When he was 17 he did a wool-classing course and topped it.

“My teacher, he arranged for me to go to Sydney and get a job in the wool industry but I just felt that the future was in cattle and not sheep. The Murray Grey was about at the time and my brother and I were both very interested in them so I never went. I did a lot of wool classing in NSW and locally here up until was 25.”

But then he threw his lot in with the Murray Greys and has stayed with them ever since and now as looks for a quieter life, they have begun to slowly divest their stock. Finding buyers is not proving difficult.

“I had a bloke come from Bendigo wanting a bull and he drove up

here and asked me how much I wanted and I said 5 thou for your pick of the paddock so he drove out to have a look and picked one and paid and took it.

Next week he was back with a neighbour and a trailer and I didn’t quite know what the neighbour wanted but they asked me, is it still 5 thou for the pick of the paddock and I said yes, so they gave be 10 thou and took two.”

The heyday of the Murray Grey may have passed and Peter has no doubt where blame lies.

“There’s been no other breed in the world that’s declined like the Murray Grey and I put that down to administration, badly marketed, very badly marketed for 25 years.

They had every opportunity to really push them but they had a bad marketing programme and they took advice from the new breeders who thought they knew it all and didn't listen to the older breeders and when things didn't go so well they did nothing and let the industry fall apart.”

They moved the headquarters of the Murray Grey Association from Albury to Armidale.

Gina offers me a second scone and chips in: “They moved it from the Murray to Barnaby country. Barnaby!! The same Barnaby who didn't even know that a bit of latex or a pill would’ve saved his problems.”  

Barnaby Joyce once, disgracefully and disloyally, claimed that the paternity of his new partner’s child was, ‘a grey area’.  The disdain and disgust that Peter and Gina

have for both the move and the man are far more black and white.

And these feelings are part of their larger suspicion and contempt for much of city-based visionless bureaucracy. Peter says he’ll tell me a story and he’ll try to make it short.

“Back in the 70s they had a hell of drought around Longreach and Roma. It was in a shocking mess and there was a Murray Grey breeder called Ray Buntine and he was the first to develop the semi trailers to take the cattle to the meat works. He was a marvellous man and he came down here in the 60’s and took a semi full of Murray Greys all females and two bulls. About 5 years later he was in the middle of the worst drought ever and he rang me and said this problem is immense, ‘I have two small dozers pushing down the mulga to feed the stock. The calves are good but we just have to do something’.

So I rang around a found a truck that was taking a load of rams up to near Longreach and I went up there with him but even before we got there the truck driver said, ‘this is hopeless, look at the land and look at the cattle here, we wont be able to even get em on the truck’.

About 50 miles out and we hit a small town and I rang Ray and he said, ‘I’ll meet you at the 7 mile peg, you can leave the truck there and I’ll take you in

and show you the cattle.’

The truck driver was a bit anxious and wanted to turn back but I kept him with me and Ray’s son was pushing timber to the cattle and I said, ‘yeah the calves really do look okay’.

So I walked around the steers and we agreed on a deal for me to take all the steers about 48 or 50 of them and we could fit ‘ em on the semi and I said, ‘how are we going to yard em, it’s 25 mile to the yards?’

And he said, ‘I can make a yard?’

But I told him, ‘the truck driver won't wait that long, he’ll shoot me if I keep him waiting 48 hours!’

So he said to his young bloke, ‘I’m taking these blokes to the homestead for some dinner, they must be starving and you make a yard.’

So all the son did was push the timber that was already down, the branches and the trunks that the cattle wouldn’t touch and made a yard.

When we got back we drove the truck through an opening in this circle of pushed logs and all the cattle just followed the truck in there and then Ray’s son pushed some more trunks to close it behind them.

So I said, ‘how’re we going to load them onto the truck?’

He said Murray Greys are quite friendly and he guaranteed we could loan em.

He went and got some old panels and we cut the steers out from the heiffers

And he told the driver to back the truck up and he’d push some dirt up to make a funnel up and we loaded every beast, never left a steer behind.

We took them to a place north of Hay for agistment and it’d rained there and they had the best feed you’ve ever seen, clover this high.

And I stayed away from them for about 4 or 5 months and I rang the bloke

‘Take em to Sydney for the fat stock show,’ the bloke said,’ we’ve a lot of cattle here but yours are the best doing cattle on the place.’

So we sent them by road to Junee and then by train to Sydney for the show and when they arrived they were just magnificent.

Well we won 50 ribbons with them and they won the champion pens of nine the hoop and the hook  which is very hard to do.

But then both Peter and Gina jostle to assure me winning the ribbons wasn't the point of that story.

“Now if Peter Bentine saved his cattle that way now, those idiots in power up in Brisbane would’ve him charged for pushing the mulga to feed his starving stock.

They have these housing developments up there where it’s okay to knock over every single tree because that makes it easier to build their houses cheaper and make more profits but if a grazier wants to save dying cattle, somehow he’s a criminal.”

But there’s a more serious result of this sort of government policy.

Gina takes over:

“We got really affected by the 2002/3 drought and we struggled to get water out of the river and there just wasn't enough in it for everyone. Animals were dying everywhere and every day.

We know of 7 suicides just in the Murray Grey community, you know farmers would go out to shoot cattle trapped in the mud of dried up dams and they’d just be overcome by the helplessness of it all and take their own lives instead.”

The three of us go quiet. They both sip their tea and I swig some coffee and collect scone crumbs.

Then Gina continues:

“The river was so dry that Peter rode old Shah across it from one side to the other and back without getting his stirrups wet.”

“Old Shah?”  I ask and Peter’s face lights up, removed now from the gross stupidity and terrible costs of wrong decisions made many miles away.

“It was 1988 and I heard this bloke was going to put down one of his racehorses who’d done a fetlock and I said, no I’ll take him so they gave him to me and asked me what I was going to do with him.

I said he’s the best looking horse I’ve ever seen, like a proper Brumby and  I said I was going to put him where the national park was Mt Lawson State Park in those days. 

I said I’ll just turn him out there for 12 months, plenty of feed, plenty of water and plenty of space to run around, no other horses.

So I left him out for 12 months and we had an old war veteran who lived up there on the block and he used to hit the grog pretty badly.  And we had a duck shooters’ hut up there where we always kept a bridle and saddle to take a horse to muster with.  So this one evening when it was dark this old bloke went into the park and caught the horse and saddled him up and rode him down here half tanked and fell off him over there under that tree. I had to cut the saddle off the horse because the old digger was trapped under him and I put the horse into the yard. Next morning I had a look at him and said this horse is no longer lame, the rider was in a bad way but the horse was okay.

Next day I got on him and I used him for 25 years.

See the secret is that he had 1/8^th Clydesdale in him. Like the “whalers” that stocked the Remount Units of the first World War. They were very tough animals.

He was 39 when he died, old Shah. Was a very sad day.”

We get up and head out the back of the house and Peter points up the slope.

“Shah died at the top of that hill and we buried him there. We’ve applied to have it registered as a cemetery so I can be buried right next to him when I go.”

In the paddock off to the side a Murray Grey cow eyes us and heads over when she sees Peter heading the feed bucket. Her coat glistens in the lowering sun.

Gina remains with me and for the countless time almost swoons:

“See how her coat is like someone’s

thrown a silken sheet over her? Just so beautiful.”

On that, there can be no argument.

I say my thanks and take my leave. On the way back down the path I pass the old shed where the very first generations of Murray Greys were housed, a quick pause to photograph the signs at the front gate and I’m heading east back to the Walwa Pub.

Across from the television which seems never to be turned off or turned down, Candy Crush must be getting to an exciting stage, so I head straight to my basic but comfortable room.

In the morning, as I’m having a brew and pie in

front of a raging fire at the wonderful Walwa General Store and Agency just up and across the main street from the pub, a bloke starts asking what I’m doing it town.

I tell him I’m headed for Jingellic and he makes himself comfortable in a seat beside.

“Two things you’ve gotta do, mate.” He gives me the name of a fella I ‘must’ see in Jingellic, “and you’ve gotta head up to Lankeys Creek and see the ruins of the old shanty up there.”

Blokes like this know their stuff so I tell him I will, gear up and point Super Ten west.