The far north of Western Australia is known as the Kimberley and is one of the world’s last great wilderness areas. This vast, rugged and unforgiving landscape of dry deserts and pristine coastline covers an area of almost half a million square kilometres, with only one sealed road, and is more sparsely populated than almost anywhere else on Earth.
In the 1950s Pallottine priests took Arabian purebred stallions and mares to breed with Stockhorses at La Grange Mission, now Bidyadanga, near Frazier Downs south of Broome; Kalumburu in the far north; and Balgo near Lake Gregory in the east. From these horses a unique breed of Brumby has survived and is flourishing in the red desert sands and towering termite mounds around Lake Gregory (Paruku Indigenous Protected Area).
I first came across these Arabian Brumbies when I was near Teronius Gorge. We had become lost and camped under a tree using the pile of horse droppings as fuel for our campfire and woke up one morning to find a magnificent chestnut stallion with a black mare and their colts. They galloped off across rocky ground without a falter and I was hooked!
Weeks later a policeman from Balgo told me how he had saved some foals from kids who had tied them up in barbed wire. This led to me driving the ten-hour trek to Lake Gregory with Dr Sheila Greenwell and Arron Hinks, both Waler breeders who were on the lookout for more Waler types, where we discovered Arabian Brumbies living on grasslands amid the thousands of migrating birds around the lake.
We met with the boys of the nearby Mulan Aboriginal community and set up a ‘horse team’—a groups of boys in their late teens and early twenties who were interested in learning more about the horses and how to train them—with the aim of obtaining funding to help trap and re-home some of the horses to manage their numbers and also to educate people about the Brumby population that called this area home.
Another group of Arabian Brumbies was sent to us from Theda Station in the state’s far north. These were descended from the Pallottine mission days at Kalumburu and had been living in the wild river gorges. We now keep a group of these horses near Broome, all palominos, pintos and chestnuts with the typical flared tails and arched necks of the Arabians.
After hearing of these desert Arabian Brumbies surviving well in such harsh conditions, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum from the United Arab Emirates sent his veterinarian, Alan Post, to visit me in Broome. Alan then made the trip out to the lake and darted and trapped thirteen of the horses, which were then transported across the Australian continent to New South Wales. There they were given the ‘all clear’ to take to the skies and were flown in the Sheikh’s plane to Dubai, to be used for endurance riding and to enhance the bloodlines of his endurance stock. The Lake Gregory horses in Dubai are doing well and are living in luxury! Two favourites have been named Paruku, after the Indigenous Protected Area bordering the Great Sandy Desert, and Luca.
This was great publicity for the Lake Gregory Brumbies, a clear endorsement that their bloodlines were to be valued and that they should not be culled as the leaseholders, the Aboriginal Lands Trust and the Pastoral Lands Board, had planned.
Thanks to the foresight and planning of the missionaries, the Kimberley Brumbies today are spectacular horses and our work continues to save this precious heritage.