Noeline Franklin (High Country crusader and member of the Miles Franklin family) emailed that today we might also remember the horses that went to war.
About 160,000 horses from Australia went to WWI.
Australia’s mounted soldiers included stockmen from the High Country – mostly volunteers who took their own horses.
The story goes, that at war’s end, many of these men were asked to shoot their horses. The horses could not come home.
For Noeline, the brumbies that now roam the High Country are their descendants and represent “the free spirit of our people and the horses who never returned”.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
I agree with Noeline.
the brumbies should be protected.
Very few people know the story of the horses that were taken to WW1 and what happened to them.
I didn’t until a few years ago.
My childre now in their 30’s were 10 and 13 when we came to live in northern NSW. They went to pony club and had their own horses and I know how they loved them and how they felt when their horses died. I don’t know how those young soldiers survived. It was killing your best friend.
jennifer, some brumbies are fine, too many are a plague ,just like Simpson’s donkies in the Kimberleys, they help us destroy the natural environment .
The only thing that is destroying the natural environment where the Brumbies are concerned is the human management failing.
There are not, masses of Brumbies constituting a plague.
Without the Brumbies loses in the Snowy Mountains the high country would have suffrered a much worse fire fate that that which happened. Mega fauna are NATURAL for Australia and the Brumbies are the last such animals left to do the job of what our prehistoric mega fauna did, our high country grazing used to do.
When our pioneers arrived in the Mountains they remarked how the trees grew out of what appeared to be parkland grasses. These pioneers learnt that this environment before whitemnan came about by management of vast tracts of Australia by savvy Aborigines and hence these pioneers were smart enough to learn, enhance and capitalise on history, not try to re-invent it.
By these actions the Snowy Mountains maintained there integrity right up until those with no skill, no knowledge, but plenty of political smarts interferred and against all crys from the bush and those who in fact knew better, took over one of the wonders of the world. The Mega Fauna and fire managed the bush, the Aborigines and fire managed the bush, our pioneering fore fathers and fire managed the bush. All with slightly different techniques, but with the same common purpose.
The no skill, no knowledge party with envy in their eyes and greed in their hearts decide they must have this wonder. From that point of green mismanagemnet to today, the Mountains and other areas of Australian are being destroyed at a rate unsurpassed in Australian history since time began.
This childish, greedy, power hungry, elitist control has cost farmers generations of work, Australian cultural decline, wildlife their terrain and existence, predators uncontrolled reign, humans the chance to enjoy, rivers the water to flow, NATURALLY, Australia billions in revenue and jobs and now they want the Brumbies shot.
Wilderness Societies, Colong Foundations, Green Politicians and the like, are not working for Nature, not in it’s natural sense, but rather an agenda that no sane person with an understanding of the interaction of humans, animals and the environment all bring together collectively can come to grips with.
What we do know, is that the 2003 fires that destroyed our Mountains from Bass Strait to Queensland is a window into the effect those groups are achieving and by this we see they are SOOOO! WRONG.
For thirty years the powers to be were warned in no uncertain terms that what happened in 2003 was going to happen. Politicians and conservationists alike, but no one would listen. I have heard the excuse, “no one could have forseen that such a holocaust was possible.”
Well take this defence to court and I will show written letters to the very politicians and land managers alike that they were warned literally and exactly, right up until Nov 2002, that what happened was going to happen. I will show video footage while the fires burnt in 2003, but before Canberra was believed threatened of an old bushman, ex fire captain, telling the camera EXACTLY what was going to happen.
The Crime against our bush is not the farmers, is not the Brumbies, is not the timber men, The CRIME is those that know nothing having the power to control everything.
God Save the Brumbies.
i TOTALLY agree 110%. people who probly havent even seen the snowy mountains beleve that they have the right to be slaughtering the animals (brumbies) that inhabit it. the brumbies are part of our history and for hundreds of years the brumbies have lived there and the land has been perfectly unharmed by them. why make them move????
plz god
save the brumbies.
yeh its me again. i forgot to say…forget they are brumbies. think of them as HORSES! for THOUSANDS of years the horse has been a nobel alli to men. is it not HORSES who are the animal who stop the nation in november at the melbourne cup??? is it not the HORSES who have an olimpic event dedicated to them??? is it not the HORSES who proudly carried our australian flag at the sydney olypics in 2000?? and most important.. IS IT NOT THE HORSES WHO HAVE FOUGHT WARS FOR US??? CARRIED OUR SOLDERS IN BATTLE??? GIVEN THEIR LIVES TO PROTECT OUT COUNTRY???????? HORSES OWE US NOTHING. IF ANYTHING WE OWE THEM THE RIGHT TO LIVE IN HAPPIENESS AND PEACE IN THAT ONE TINY PART OF THE COUNTRY WITHOUT THE FEAR OF BEING SLAGHTERED BY THE MEN WHO THEY HAVE SERVED SINCE THE DAN OF TIME!!!!!