As posted in The Australian.
Muster Dogs is simply delightful TV as well as being thoughtful, engaged and cast with a bunch of wonderful characters from the land, their laid-back humour coloured with a hard, sceptical and sombre undertone. They are the five farming families, on properties ranging from the red earth of the Top End to the green pastures of regional Victoria, who take on the challenge of training new kelpie pups and testing their worth on the properties they run.
Then there are the five central protagonists, a mob of five mischievous kelpie puppies from the same litter who we follow on a documentary journey to become muster dogs. Their eventual job will be to move livestock from place to place. These families have to transform the young dogs from greenhorns into efficient working members of their mustering pack in 12 months, a task that usually takes at least three years.
And while framed as a kind of reality show, it’s really about the way the renaissance of muster dogs in herding and farming in rural Australia is having a huge economic and environmental impact on the land. And how this ancient herding art form reveals so beguilingly the underlying emotional, economic, and environmental benefits of using dogs rather than machines to muster.
Unlike most reality TV though in this cleverly produced, four part series, there is no humiliation or shame at its core – only love and delight.
The game that provides the narrative structure under the observant eye of expert trainer and former shearer, Neil McDonald, is that these puppies and their new owners need to hit training milestones, before meeting again in 12 months’ time for the ultimate working dog challenge. Who will be crowned Champion Muster Dog? And will any of our excited puppy participants graduate into the adult muster dog pack?
The show is from Ambience Entertainment, a production company that for almost three decades has created compelling programming across the board for both local and international audiences, ranging from kids’ shows like Drop Dead Weird to movies like Shawn Seet’s retelling of Colin Thiele’s classic Australian tale, Storm Boy. The series producer and director is Monica O’Brien, an experienced showrunner across many genres, adroitly wrangling her field directors, Michael Boughen (also producer), Sally Browning and David Wallace. The original concept is from Boughen, developed by him, O’Brien and the ABC.
Director of photography is Brad Smith in charge of a large bunch of camera operators. The show is drolly narrated by Lisa Millar with a nice mix of the colloquial and the pedagogic.
The first episode establishes our central characters, and the lovely puppies, and we begin the journey of discovery to test the pups’ ability to harness their natural instincts under the guidance of the five, very different, grazier trainers across five states. They are Frank Finger in Queensland, Aticia Grey in Western Australia, Rob Tuncks in Victoria, CJ (Catherine) Scotney in the Northern Territory, and nomadic cowgirl Joni Hall, who works across the Top End.
They are a diverse lot but are united by a desire to excel in this experiment and give these pups the best start to life. And the soon named Annie, Gossip, Lucifer, Spice and Chet embark on the challenge to achieve an assessment of their skills at four months old. It is no easy task, warns McDonald. It’s a bit like an arranged marriage, he says. “What you are after is probably a bit different to what you get – but they’re all going to be good.” And they should be – we’re told each pedigree muster dog is worth anything between 20 and 30 thousand quid.
McDonald is evangelical in his desire to promote effective dog and stock handling training to improve animal welfare, safety for graziers and overall enjoyment of working on the land.
“A working dog,” he tells us, “is motivated by an age-old hunting instinct where they want to go out to the other side of a mob of livestock and bring them back to the boss wolf so he can kill and eat them; the natural instinct of livestock is to get away.” He’s a lovely character, a bushman straight out of a Steele Rudd story.
As the creators say in a note, the results of this study into the resurgence in the age-old traditions of stock handling and land management was a little surprising. “We came face-to-face with the impact we as humans have had on the land and our disruption to the natural interrelation of animals. With the introduction of mechanical mustering, we crossed a boundary that changed the relationship between livestock, the land, and humans that maybe should not have been crossed.”
Muster Dogs, Sunday, ABC and iview, 7.40pm.
