NOT JUST ANY
DOG MAN
Article by Angie White
A
s a young man, John White had vision in his eyes and a spirit of adventure that led him from the green and sometimes snow-capped mountains of Victoria to the red dirt and dust of western New South Wales. His father was a mining Engineer working in Penang, a Malaysian state located on the northwest coast of Peninsular Malaysia. He had taken his young wife with him on his journey to work in this pioneering role, as she raised three children in a foreign land far from the life they had known in a small town south of Melbourne. This alone taught John that passion and tenacity were winners in life, and he adopted this mantra as he headed off on his life adventure at the age of 18. Not to mention that his father was a bravery medal recipient during the Second World War. John had a fine example to follow as he waved off his parents at the train station. While Johns father had his eye on rocks and dirt, John was passionate about the land and animals, completing his final years of schooling at Dookie Agricultural College. Even his brother Don had a love of animals, spending years as the curator at the Werribee Zoo with a passion for all things wild. A passionate interest in birds saw him travel to several countries lecturing and contributing to research with his findings. But for John, it was to the land, and he found himself on a station eleven kilometres east of Nyngan, in the Centre of NSW, as a Jackeroo. The long days of dry winds and heat were a far cry from the more tepid temperatures of his home state. He settled in and his conscientious nature and ability to work harder than required soon saw him promoted to head overseer, an important role on the station.
It was here amid bustling station life that he discovered his love of working dogs, most particularly the Kelpie. He admired the work ethic and natural ability the dogs showed along with their gentle nature, which appealed to John, as he himself is a gentle man. Kind in nature, he was quiet but with a determined air that made him very affable to those he worked with. He was fascinated by the Kelpie, and soon began to breed his own, from good station dogs whose attributes he considered would produce a top dog that would make his stock work on the station easier. With large mobs to move around a vast area and on horseback to boot, these selected dogs soon showed they were worth their weight in gold. Gaining a reputation for being wiry and tough with unparalleled propensity for hard work, they soon started to be noticed by the other stockmen in the area. It was not long after, as all good stories go, that he met a quiet, shy, local girl Joy Murie. She was the daughter of a local property manager and the pair married in a quiet ceremony at Nyngan and went on to have three children. It was during this time that John and Joy decided to begin their own Working Kelpie Stud and “White’s Kelpie Stud” was born. It is to this day one of the longest running Kelpie Studs in Australia and once again is a clear indication of John’s passion and tenacity. With the mission in mind of producing dogs that were all round workers, John set about producing a team of Kelpies that could go from paddock to yard and yard to paddock without the need for a specialist dog for each job. In no time at all his dogs became well known for this and he had requests for dogs from all over Australia, and also the USA.
