Tasmania's Journal of Discovery

The Stockman

The Stockmen
By Rachael Treasure
Published by Viking
ISBN 0 670 04293 5

Here’s a fun book, a good airport novel and a rollicking read. The fact that the Women’s Weekly has chosen it for its book club will alert you to the fact that the story is more Mills and Boon than Maxim magazine, but blokes who relate (a) to the country and (b) to training working dogs will soon be absorbed in it.

Dogs, with their many and varied characters, are as important as the people in the pages.

Rachael Treasure is a Hobart girl who worked as a jillaroo before studying at Orange Agricultural College and Charles Sturt University, in New South Wales. Her first book, which was quite a hit, is titled Jillaroo.

She lives on a sheep farm in Tasmania with husband John and daughter Rosie, several dogs (mostly from their Castleburn kelpie and border collie stud) and horses, and is deeply involved with working dog trials as a sport.

As she says on her web site, about her introduction to working dog education:

“It was a course that changed my life and made me realise the power of communicating effectively with animals. Positive training methods and looking after your dogs are the only ways to get the best out of a working dog. It was my association with Kelpies which led me to the idea for my second novel, The Stockmen.”

The story of how an Irishman bred the dogs we now know as Kelpies is based on fact. The romance between the heroine (described in one review as “refreshing") and her own Irishman, described in the book as “gorgeous”, is Rachael Treasure’s own romantic fiction.

There are some interesting twists in the plot, and a couple of dramatic incidents which came from life-threatening experience.

If you’ve ever been to a country show day, you’ll know the author is a country girl herself. Her well-founded knowledge of life in a country town and on a sheep property makes the book all the more enjoyable.

And it makes a good link with Tim Dub’s real-life story on sheep dog trials in Tasmania here. PH