Cattle class - The Australian

The cattle yards at Sunday Creek, near Daly Water in the NT. Source: Supplied

THE Droughtmaster cattle gathered in the yards at Sunday Creek station are bright-eyed, well-fed and calm: they chew their cud contentedly, their coats are smooth and sleek -- but what's that mark they all bear, that strange, striking emblem where the cattle brand should be: a wavy line beneath a solar symbol, elusive, almost alchemical in appearance, redolent of hidden meanings and mysterious, intriguing depths?

Sunday Creek, a compact Northern Territory pastoral enterprise, 80,000ha on the Sturt Plateau near Daly Waters, is a rational, well-ordered property, with neat paddocks dividing up its expanses of black and red soil plains, and a die-straight central avenue run between them for ease of access. It is the creation of Tom Stockwell, a cerebral cattleman, an intellectual on the land, at once an innovator and a trend-watcher, a distinctly front-foot kind of figure.

No surprise, then, that Stockwell should be at the vanguard of one of the more telling little shifts in the Northern cattle culture over recent years: a development that both reflects and results from the cascade of changes, social and economic, in Top End pastoralism: a shift that opens up a space for whimsy in the homestead or the stockyard -- the introduction of symbolic brands.

A brand, of course, is nothing other than a claim on flesh. It is an assertion of ownership over an animal, the ultimate moveable asset; and on the great runs of the tropical savannah, where vast mobs of cattle roam across unfenced tracts of land the size of European countries, clarity in branding is essential, for the mark on a beast is the pastoralist's proof it belongs to her or him. Thus a brand must be distinctive, it must conform to standards, and be registered, and above all else it must be difficult to overprint.

On the wild frontier in pioneering days, these were urgent concerns. There were several ways to purloin cattle and make your money off your neighbours on the sly. You could be a "poddy-dodger" and simply brand cleanskin calves and lead them off their home station on to neutral ground; you could be a "cattle duffer" -- a straight-out animal thief; or, more challengingly, but perhaps more satisfyingly, you could be a "cross-brander" and imprint your own mark over the original brand.

But as historian Darrell Lewis recounts in his sweeping new history of the Victoria River District, there were problems with this strategy: for when a cross-branded hide was wet, the first mark sometimes showed through, and this frequently resulted in charges of cattle duffing being laid.

Among the many lively characters Lewis portrays in his account perhaps the most vividly sketched is the cattle thief Jim Campbell, a hard-driving bushman, a king in the saddle, "defiant, cruel on occasion", but not without a streak of cunning intelligence.

The brand he devised for his station was a diamond, from which he took his nickname: it was the basis for "one of the most famous and versatile brands in Australian cattle duffing history" -- the Diamond 88, a "brand of genius" that allowed Campbell to overprint with ease the marks of no fewer than five of his neighbours.

Clarity of emblem was the watchword for the first brands in the North: why overcomplicate? A handful of old station symbol marks are still in use, and they preserve their impact and their charm: the most famous are the "wineglass" brand used at Newcastle Waters and the bull's head mark of Victoria River Downs.

But once governmental authority dawned in Darwin, and police attention could begin to shift from reprisal raids against Aboriginal groups to more normal law and order duties, a new system of cattle identification came into effect. This was the three letter brand register: every run or holding taken up across the Territory had to devise a unique brand made up of three capital letters, one of them an inverted "T" -- and this simple-seeming rule worked: it generated a large number of brand options and reduced the cross-brander's scope almost to nothing.

The northern cattle industry continued in its rough and ready ways for two generations, through boom and crash, drought and epidemic, until, in the late 1970s, the era of large-scale international exporting arrived, and Brahman cattle became the breed of choice.

At first, the live trade thrived. Indonesia was its key destination: but there was a problem. As Stockwell, who was a senior Territory public servant at the time, relates, officials in Jakarta explained to a delegation from Darwin that they found the large letter brands on the cattle objectionable. It was not so much that cows coming off the transport ships were festooned with meaningless snatches of alphabet: it was more that the letters were on the prime parts of the hide used for leather production: the ribs, shoulders or rump.

The minister responsible, Mike Reed, reacted with his customary dispatch. Orders went out. Henceforth, he declared, all new brands would be symbols, not letter combinations, and would be applied only on the cheek. But soon new animal welfare regulations put an end to the practice: it was felt to be too traumatic for the cows. Swiftly a fresh ministerial decree was formulated: the symbols would now be discreetly stamped on the old positions, but reduced in scale.

And so things stand still. Soon Stockwell acquired the Sunday Creek block, and conceived his special brand: a solar half-disc with sunrise rays set on a wavy current line. Other pastoralists in the region did likewise: a new paradigm developed. The symbol brand became an identifier, as much as a security device: and increasingly it has come to be seen almost as a herd trademark, a kind of mobile business stamp.

A glance at the NT Primary Industry Department's "distinctive brands register" reveals a plethora of emblems, and these explore a range of visual philosophies and iconic styles. There are associative brands: Hayfield station uses a stockman's hat and Gilnockie a schematic helicopter. There are "borrowed" brands: the pound sterling, the mathematical constant pi and the percentage sign, as well as hearts, clubs, tear-drops and diamonds in various forms.

One or two brands are visual puns that convey an implicit message: King River has a crown symbol, but the sign also invites the viewer to consider the family that runs the station, the Tapps, formerly masters of a cattle empire that spanned the North. Sometimes the brand is almost too appropriate: Henbury station south of Alice Springs, recently bought for a carbon trading pilot scheme with federal money, and destocked and carbonised by bushfires, has a rabbit symbol.

In a mild gesture of subversiveness, ignoring the Territory's new addiction to road safety, the government-run Kidman Springs research station still brands its cattle with a "no speed limit" sign.

But despite these little stabs at originality, the register tells, on the whole, a conformist tale. Symbols may be legitimate now, but the vast majority of brands use letters of the alphabet. Why? There are reasons, for branding imposes sharp design constraints.

For elucidation, we must travel to Jandowae, between Chinchilla and Kingaroy in Queensland, a small town that doubles as the world capital of high-end brand-making: here is the headquarters of the century-old concern Morrissey and Co., which is to cattle brands what Vuitton is to luggage, or Paspaley to pearls.

Sean Morrissey, the fifth member of his family in direct descent line to run the business, explains what can and can't be done. Morrissey steel brands are all hand-forged, from 304 grade stainless steel; they are open in the back to minimise blotching: they have a finesse about them; each one is a little masterpiece of the blacksmith's craft. The firm still holds its original brand book, dating from the 1800s, with all the old designs carefully set down. There are the favourites -- the boxed "A" from Alexandria on the NT's Barkly Tableland, the "wineglass" from Newcastle Waters. The records prove that station owners of the past were seeking simplicity in a brand, distinctiveness: letters were natural choices, combined, maybe, with wings, or scrolls.

Today a new generation of pastoralists bring Sean Morrissey their proud first sketches: their dreams. Some of the emblems being proposed have a simplicity that reflects design trends of the moment: a broken outline of Australia, a stylised kangaroo, the schematic turtle mark made recently for Lawn Hill station, now indigenous-owned.

But what works best is not always what is most imaginative. A smiley face beneath a hat, little patterns inside boxes: busy designs of this type are bad news for the brand-maker. "People sometimes register their brands, and then come to us," says Morrissey, with a certain tact. "And they ask if the design's going to work, and I might have to put my two bob's worth in. Remember: everything has to be contained in a brand size of 80 millimetres. If you put too much in your design it isn't going to work."

Perhaps inevitably, letters, the first symbols, still make the best marks: they are clear, clean, distinct. Morrissey has a penchant for letter brands, but ones with a fluid elegance: curved and running lines, and of these the epitome is his favourite from the past, the cursive-script "WR" made for Winthrop Rockefeller, pioneer of the Santa Gertrudis breed and former governor of Arkansas.

It is a graceful emblem -- and it transfers its mark with ease to cattle hide, which, after all, is what the branding iron is designed to do: for a brand captures something of the panache of a vast human enterprise, and stamps it on an animal.

On the Sturt Plateau, the centre of the symbolic brand movement, the day's drawing to a close, the light turns soft. Stockwell stands at the gate before his yards, and looks on for a second, with a faint, well-mastered air of satisfaction: at his herd, his young children on horseback, the mauve horizon, the station's ordered paddocks, stretching away. And how does he think the cattle feel about the Sunday Creek brand they all bear on their flanks? "I certainly hope," he says, after a little pause, "that they wear it with pride."