Halls Heeler

Early Cattle Dog with possible Halls Heeler ancestry.

George Hall and his family arrived in the New South Wales Colony in 1802. By 1825, the Halls had established two cattle stations in the Upper Hunter Valley, (Gundebri and Dartbrook) and had begun a northward expansion into the Liverpool Plains, New England (Australia) and Queensland. Getting cattle to the Sydney and other markets presented a difficulties in that cattle had to be moved along unfenced stock routes through sometimes rugged bush and mountain ranges. The mobs of cattle were small (the population centres were small,[4]) and the distances comparatively short compared with the long distance droving feats of the Duracks, and others, in the late nineteenth century.[5]

Until the invention of ice-making and refrigeration in the 1850s (by a Scottish immigrant to Australian, James Harrison)[6] butchers, and their customers, had no choice but to buy their meat in small quantities and the cattle growers, including the Halls, had no choice but to maintain a constant, but small, supply of cattle to their markets.

A droving dog was needed, but the Halls were prepared for this challenge. Thomas Simpson Hall, one of George’s sons, had settled on Dartbrook station in the Upper Hunter Valley in the 1820s. He had taken with him dogs, as well as cattle, and had honed the cattle-handling potential in his dogs. These dogs were the first of the Halls Heelers. The Hall family became dependent on them.

Note. A.B “Bert” Howard was persuaded that the Halls had imported working dogs from England, regardless of the lack of evidence. Howard invented an imported dog, the “Northumberland Blue Merle Drovers Dog”[7] but the “Northumberland Blue Merle Drovers Dog” had no existence in fact.

Although development of the Halls Heelers probably began on Dartbrook in the 1820s, in later years Halls Heelers would have been bred on other Hall properties, particularly those remote from Dartbrook. And drovers, outside the Hall family, would have been keen to get such valuable dogs. Among them were members of the Timmins family, drovers whose Halls Heelers became known as Timmins Biters.[8]

In 1976 a monument to Thomas Hall's achievement was erected on Dartbrook Road at the Blue Heeler Bridge in Dartbrook, New South Wales. The plaque inscription says: "This plaque presented by The Australian Cattle Society of NSW commemorates Thomas S. Hall of Dartbrook who in 1840 in this area carried out his breeding experiments with the native dog the dingo and a pair of smooth coated blue merle collies. These dogs known as Halls Heelers became the foundation of today's breed the Australian Cattle Dog."[9]

This plaque unfortunately perpetuates the myth of the “Northumberland Blue Merle Drovers Dog” and the mistaken assumption that the Halls Heeler was developed from a cross between the Northumberland Blue Merle Drovers Dog and the dingo.

By the 1890s dogs of Halls Heeler ancestry had attracted the attention of a group of men in Sydney with a recreational interest in the new practice of showing dogs competitively. None were stockmen working cattle on a daily basis, and initially they were interested in a variety of working dogs. Of these breeders, the Bagust family was the most influential.[10]

Robert Kaleski, of Moorebank, a young associate of Harry Bagust, wrote "in [18]93 when I got rid of my cross-bred cattle dogs and took up the blues, breeders of the latter had started breeding ... to fix the type. I drew up a standard for them on those lines".[11] This breed standard was published by the New South Wales Department of Agriculture in 1903.[12]

Kaleski's standard was adopted by breed clubs in Queensland and New South Wales but re-issued as their own, with local changes. Queensland breeders accepted short-tailed as well as long-tailed Cattle Dogs as varieties within a single breed and both varieties were exhibited, usually in separate classes.