Great scot.(Book Review)

A Cow's Life: The Surprising History of Cattle and How the Black Angus Came to be Home on the Range, by M.R. Montgomery; Allen & Unwin, 2005, $35.

A SHAMED, I must admit that one reason for wanting to review this book was a not-quite-dead romance with the Wild West, kindled in boyhood in Hoyts suburban matinees and comics like Red Ryder. But there were also more serious reasons.

One often overlooked point the author makes is the importance of cattle in mankind's march towards modern civilisation. Domestication of the formerly wild species, the prehistoric aurochs, about 10,000 years ago was a major step towards man also beginning to farm and to settle in one spot, in preference to the nomadic hunter-gatherer life.

From an Australian point of view, the absence here of any potentially domesticable beast like the aurochs was a crucial reason, along with the absence of naturally growing but domesticable grain like wheat, for the Aborigines remaining so long at the lightly developed hunter-gatherer stage of social evolution.

The wild aurochs that roamed the old Eurasian continent was midway in size between a modern bull and an elephant, too big, strong and fierce to tame. Montgomery speculates that the hunter-gatherers brought it in from the wild by capturing the dwarfs thrown up randomly for time to time by most species. These, plus some help from evolution after the end of the ice age softened climates, became the nucleus of the domestic cattle herds that started appearing from Western Europe to Egypt and China--though there were also at first large areas without them--about 10,000 years ago.

Hornless polled cattle may also have become more numerous through a similar selection process--their priority for selection for a Viking voyage to the British Isles is obvious.

ALTHOUGH MONTGOMERY is a connoisseur of the western ranch, his ranchers have more in common with their Australian counterparts than with the matinee screen cowboys of old. He usually calls them stockmen, which was the pioneer era term used in Australia to differentiate cattle station workers from the sheep men. Like their counterparts here, following a very brief pioneering stage, they spend most of their time fencing, feeding, husbanding scarce water and grass supplies and watching the market. They are more likely to ride the range by tractor or pick-up truck than by horse.