6/20 Red Banks cattle & sheep farm

Tim Charge, owner of Redbank Farm and the Billabong Cottage, gave us a tour of his farm. We piled into his 4-door Toyota utility with one of his working dogs leashed to the flat bed on the back. He owns a number of acres and leases others. We saw a large number of his beautiful Angus cattle, bred and sold for beef. Beautiful tar-black bovines with their longer winter coats on, looking, at the risk of sounding juvenile, like stuffed animals you wanted to pet - they looked like a furry cow version of oversized teddy bears. Each time we drove near they were always curious about what we were doing and came over to inspect.

We saw rolling, grassed hills, neatly chop-stick straight fencing. One gate used retired wharf pilings as gate posts. Marine worm burrows were visible, probably the cause of their retirement, but the salt they contained from their former life and the chemicals used to preserve them originally, made them ideal for this purpose. The ant hills reminded you that there are a lot of insects that are very fond of eating wood. Tim explained there was another unintended consequence: the cattle also like the salt in the post and come over to like them. At this point they had just observed that and he withheld judgement as to whether that would ultimately be good or bad. I suppose in the best case scenario the posts could do duel purpose as gate support and ion supplements.
Passing through a paddock of heavily wooled merino ewes and strong lambs, disappointingly no longer in the recently-born, springing stage, we opened a gate into the neighboring paddock. Once through we saw a lonely lamb. Clearly he had climbed through or under the fence and gotten separated from his mother. Tim let us try to herd him back to the open gate, but when we climbed out of the car he bolted farther away. Jay and the kids walked toward the distant lamb, but Tim drove around with Beth and his working Kelpie, Scooter.

Tim parked the truck, released the dog and Scooter, following Tim's clear instructions, herded the lamb toward the gate - doing a better job than we did. This was a clear lesson to us foreigners of the value of dogs for working with sheep and cattle! The lamb made a panicked bolt for the fence, which it clearly knew was impenetrable, but its fear was uppermost. Then we got to see that working dogs do more than just run around: Tim saw the lamb crash into the fence and damage itself so he called to Scooter. She tackled the lamb and pinned it to the ground with her front paws. Surely the lamb was frightened, but pinned by the Kelpie, now it could not damage itself. Holding the lamb down - and having to prevent it escaping - Scooter did a very neat job until Tim walked over and picked up the lamb. It was more frightened than hurt, and he let Bentley and Kylie (and Amy who is not in the picture) pet the lamb. In a few minutes after it was calmer, he gently set the lamb down on the other side of the fence and it ran off to look for his mum.

After this Scooter too got a larger share of affection from Bentley, particularly, at which point Scooter was less keen to listen to Tim about jumping up on the truck. Scooter and Bentley both would have rather played and snuggled in the pasture together, but we had to go.

It was an astonishing pleasure to see how quickly working dogs perform their tasks and how acutely their masters, like Tim, can control and direct them; amazing!