BEEF WEEK 2026 East Gippsland Newspapers 2 Thursday, January 29, 2026 Droving legends of East Gippsland: Life, From page 1 Both started as young blokes, Pilso as a kid on a pony in the early 70s, joining the mob under Leon Ford for a few days as it went past his home at Doctors Flat, and Tim later on, at age 16, with Laurie Hiscock as boss drover. In a car these days, Benambra to Bairnsdale takes about two hours. But with a mob of cattle, the 150-kilometre trip took about 11 days, picking up cattle along the way from the Omeo saleyards and the Ensay saleyards. It was a fair undertaking, particularly with the advent of faster cars and trucks in later years, and the lack of understanding of their drivers. The weather played a big part in the trips, with hot days and cattle laying down, big storms and hailstones savage enough to mark a man on a horse. The droving was done to educate the weaned cattle and to identify each new owner’s cattle, the system was simple. The Benambra cattle were marked with blue paint, each new owner claiming the rump, shoulder or loin, for their particular painted mark, the Omeo cattle were marked with red paint and the Ensay cattle with yellow. PILSO’S MEMORIES Pilso grew up at Doctors Flat, where the mob would pass right through, and was just 14 when he did the full trip from Benambra to Bairnsdale and has many great yarns to tell. “It was an epic journey for a young fella,” Pilso said. “I had a little brumby mare, and I used to go with them when I was 10 or 12 and do a couple of days. “I wasn’t flash enough to have a swag, I’d crawl in under the truck, I had a tarp and a couple of blankets, and I put my jacket on my upside-down saddle for a pillow.” He did a few droving trips with Leon Ford and then Laurie Hiscock. “I remember Mr Taylor, he was pretty well known in the district. “Especially for his counting ability, no one ever disputed him.” He said they kept their horse feed and camp gear in the truck, and their diet was boiled spuds, pumpkin and onion, plus meat, every night. “If tomatoes were in season someone would drop them off to us and I remember fondly, Topsy Newcomen bringing tins of homemade butter to us,”Pilso said. He tells the story of a ‘mongrel whip-shy dog’one trip. “We were at Double Bridges and a bloke brought a young horse for Laurie to ride. “We had the cattle in a wire paddock in the bush there. “One of my jobs was to ride up the ridgeline cracking my whip, to scare the roos away so they didn’t spook the cattle through the night. “That dog wouldn’t work, the whip shy thing, it’d just slink along behind us all day. “Anyway, we had the veggies in a pot on the campfire and some beautiful lamb chops someone had delivered, and we all went to watch Laurie ride, but the horse went like a bloody pony clubber, did nothing. “In the meantime, that mongrel dog turned up and ate every one of those chops so we had to have bloody potato, pumpkin and onion on its own again.” He said when the mob left Benambra, they’d let them run a bit of steam off and when they picked up another 400 or so at Omeo they would circle the mob so the fresh weaners let off steam. “Old Bert Lee would be in the lead for that section, he’d never turn his head, just look out the corner of his eye, see the calves moving up and send his dogs to turn the lead back. Tim and I sat in what we called the‘death seat’to turn those weaners back.” Pilso didn’t have any working dogs but got to know‘every nook and cranny’of the road, where they would have trouble with cattle leaving the road and how to pull them up. “There’s always an art to stopping a big mob,”he said. “You have to slow them down and let them settle, you can’t just stop, it’s a bit of a process. He remembers Reids camp not far down from Swifts Creek, with a big mob that wouldn’t fit in the yards and using a holding paddock where they had to light fires in a line. The calves would rush through the night until they reached the fires that and a bit of hollering held them up. It was an all-night job for the older blokes. “The calves would rush because the Ensay ones were fresh and they’d rush to the fires and stop,”he said. Another trip at the Ensay yards, they had their horses tethered with a nosebag feed and somehow, someone opened the gates and the Ensay weaners poured out of the yards. “Leon Ford jumped on his black horse with a halter to get them, he was a good operator Leon, a great horseman and a gentleman of the road.” The gate opening may have been due to the camp being so close to the Ensay Pub, a ‘bit of a trap being so close’according to Pilso, with‘King Browns’(bottles of beer) being consumed. With a laugh he remembers Plugger McMahon, who was “good when you were in trouble with the mob, but more than likely he was the reason you were in trouble!”. He says the camp spots have changed over the years and so has the river. “The river is just a gutter now, it used to be wider, flatter, slower. “You could water a thousand weaners at Tambo Crossing, now it’s all scrub, even Double Bridges, we used to feed them there now it’s all covered in bush, you couldn’t poke a flea in there now.” Sometimes the calves would get footsore, with the worst cases roped and put in a horse float to be taken to Bairnsdale. “I remember Ian McMahon with a rope one time in front of some young ladies, somehow he managed to get the rope around himself!” Closer to Bairnsdale the school buses would go through the mob, and in an effort to‘impress the sheilas on the bus’, Pilso was out the front feeling like a real cowboy, until his “bloody old horse took me under a low limb and nearly knocked me off”. Some of the years the Newcomen brothers would put the Ensay calves on the road before they joined the main mob. Pilso also remembers Johnny Cook, Evan Newcomen, Hoss Pendergast, KJ and Johnny Ross on the road. “Hoss came with us one year as many did over the years,”he said. “Some for a few days some just for the one trip. “There are still some older fellas around who did the droving trips in the early days,”he said. Tim Woodgate and Ken Howlett, 1979, at the Livingstone River. (From Tim Woodgate’s collection) Boss drover Laurie Hiscock. (Photo: Anne Hiscock) * Tim Woodgate * Peter “Pilso” Richards Anne and Laurie Hiscock 30 years ago. Alan Taylor. (Supplied by Anne Hiscock) Fiona & John Glover: 0416 216 951 | 4770 South Gippsland Highway, Lang Lang. Victoria | www.wattlewoodangus.com.au ANNUAL BULL SALE: THURSDAY 5TH MARCH 2026 AT 4PM WATTLEWOOD ANGUS 9Herd Book Registered 9Semen Tested 9Parent Verified 9Genotyped 9P.I. 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