Stock route

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In Australia, the Travelling Stock Route or TSR is a road authorised for use as a drovers' road, that is, for owners to walk their stock such as sheep or cattle from one location to another. The TSRs are known collectively as "The Long Paddock".[1] The practice of moving stock in this way is called droving and the people who do it are drovers.

A stock route may be easily distinguished from an ordinary country road by the fact that the grassy verges on either side of the road are very much wider, and the property fences being set back much further from the roadside than is usual. The reason for this is so that the livestock may feed on the vegetation that grows on the verges as they travel. By law, the travelling stock must travel "six miles a day" (approx 10 kilometers per day). This is to avoid all the roadside grass from being cleared in a particular area by an individual herd. Bores, equipped with windmills and troughs, may also be located at regular intervals to provide water in regions where there are no other reliable water sources.

The travelling stock is kept moving by drovers or stockmen on foot or using Australian Stock Horses. Other working animals include dogs such as Border Collies and Kelpies, which have been bred for working sheep, and Australian Cattle Dogs (or Blue Heelers), which have been bred for working cattle. The stockman may also be accompanied by a packhorse (frequently a Clydesdale), carrying supplies and equipment, or a wagon with supplies might follow the stock. More recently, the travelling stock has been accompanied by four-wheel drive vehicles and mobile homes. In some cases the stockhorse has been replaced with the motorbike.

The purpose of "droving" livestock on such a journey might be to move the stock to different pastures. It was also the only way that most primary meat producers had of getting their product to the markets of the towns and cities. The meat was transported to the abbattoirs "on the hoof". The rigors of the journey, the availability of feed and water and the reliability of those "droving" the stock were all factors in the state of the livestock when it was butchered and the profits that ensued.

With the establishment of railways in country areas from the 1860s onwards, livestock usually reached the major destinations in cattle trucks. There were stock-holding pens and livestock ramps at nearly every rural railway station to facilitate this transportation, meaning that it was only necessary to drove stock to the nearest railway depot. From about 1980 the road transport of livestock by road trains became increasingly common and has virtually replaced the transport of stock either by foot or by rail.

But the days of the travelling stock route are not past. In times of extreme drought, when every blade of grass has been eaten from the country properties, farmers have been forced to reduce their livestock numbers radically and take the remaining beasts to travel their six miles a day, along the stock routes, surviving on the roadside grass.[2]

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