Horsing around at Wonga

After spending most of the past 25 years breaking horses and ringing on Gulf cattle properties, Bernie is pretty well placed to make the comparison.

"The horses know what they're doing but the riders often don't," Bernie grinned.

"But there are exceptions. Like the young British Paralympian who turned up here late last year. She'd rung up the day before to book in and told me she had a disability.

"I nearly keeled over when she arrived in a wheelchair, but she insisted on riding. We put her up on old Nugget and away she went, good as gold."

Bernie's been at Wonga Beach - just up the road from trendy Port Douglas - for four years now.

It's a far cry from the day back in the mid-1970s when he and a mate hopped into an old EK Holden utility at Wagga and set out to join up with Bernie's older brothers Leo and Lawrence at Warren Vale, south of Normanton.

"Leo was managing Warren Vale at the time and one of our first jobs when we got there was to walk a mob of cattle there from Mellish Park.

"Took 10 weeks all up and we ran out of food towards the end, but Lawrence didn't care. He wasn't a great fang man, but my stomach got so small I was flat out handling a corned beef sandwich at the end of the trip."

Bernie lobbed at Alroy Downs in 1976.

David Hughes was head stockman there at the time and it was to prove the start of a long friendship.

"David taught me a lot about running stock camps and horse skills," Bernie recalled.

"They had some beautiful horses at Alroy.

"On the droving trips, I was the horse tailer, with 60 or 70 horses to look after for the 14 men."

If Bernie was impressed by the horses at Alroy, he was in for a rude shock when he landed at Drumduff to work for AACo.

"Some of the toeiest horses I've struck in my life - Arab-cross types. It was stuff straight out of the old school," he said.

"I lived out of a pack horse for the first six months and saw nobody. All there was on the place was a Toyota and a chainsaw.

"David Hughes was running the show there as well, and looking back, that's when I really got serious about horse breaking."

Bernie put his acquired knowledge to good use in 1978 when he went contract horse breaking at Inverleigh, Magowra and Warren Vale, alternating between the properties.

"I'd be breaking five at a time and always had a dozen or 20 on hand to keep me going," he said.

Bernie took a break from the north in 1979 and tried his hand at driving oil rig supply trucks in the Simpson Desert before returning south to share-farm with his older brother John at Jerilderie.

"It was wheat and barley, sheep and cattle, but I kept my eye in breaking in the odd horse here and there."

Queensland's superior climate and lifestyle lured Bernie back north five years later, and he found work breaking horses and contract mustering in the Springsure district before scoring the job as head stockman up at Koolatah in 1985.

"My old mate David Hughes was the manager there at the time. Koolatah was full of wild cattle then and we turned off 500 bulls that first season alone. They were all thrown and coached out with the quieter cattle," Bernie said.

"But I came to grief one day when I tried to sidestep a bull behind a tree. He was too smart for me and gored me in the thigh. Lost a hell of a lot of claret and finished up getting flown out to Cairns."

Carpentaria Downs was Bernie's next port of call. It was still a King Ranch property in those days - 1987.

"They were a good mob to work for and they really understood the cattle game," he said.

"They had some of the best stock horses I've ever ridden as well. The blighters could buck, but if you could ride them you were right."

Bernie embarked on a stint as a stock and property salesman with Primac at Winton in the late 1980s, but returned to Carpentaria at the start of 1990.

"Bob Lowe was managing it for Gun Rural and then Stanbroke took it over," he said.

"I had three years there with Bob and Rita and that was when I really started getting more and more into horse psychology.

"I'd read a book on the subject by Ray Hunt from the US and took the opportunity of going to one of his clinics in Emerald. I found this an enormous help in advancing my horse-breaking skills.

"The only trouble was my cattle-handling skills let me down one day at Carpentaria.

"I got hit from behind by a cow in a hurry to rejoin her mates.

"It pushed my spine forward about two centimetres and it was four months before I could work again."

Bernie recuperated at Springsure and then worked for three years in the district at Mount Helmet. During this time, he attended some Ken May and ASH schools to keep up with the latest advances in horsemanship.

"Then I was reading the paper one day down there and saw this Wonga Beach set-up advertised for sale.

"The idea of working for myself for a change really appealed and here I am.

"We took 2500-odd people on trail rides last year, most of them from overseas.

"It's a bit hard to beat the scenery when you're riding along Wonga Beach - there are dolphins and flying fish jumping out of the water.

"It's not quite the same as chasing cows around on Drumduff," he grinned.

Bernie employs up to four people and 20 horses during the peak tourist season and trains and sells a few horses as a sideline.

He said he hoped to travel around a bit more in the off-season to run some horsemanship and colt-starting clinics.

"I get the odd problem horse dropped off here from time to time for me to work on," he said.

"But they're choir boys compared to what I struck at Drumduff and a dozen other places back in the 1970s."