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There was never too many [wild horses] there at Oriners, we only had a handful. I don‟t
know what it is. Like even on the back of Drumduff, that sort of comes in close to Oriners
and the horses aren‟t there, but you go back further to the east, like on Dixie and into that
big sandridge country there is just thousands of them. I don‟t know whether it is just too wet
for them or what.
Colin Hughes
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I never seen many wild horses [at Oriners] but that old Nugget he said when he was over
there, all those horses that far are running bush, they not brumbies, they were his working
horses. But I never seen brumbies there, maybe 1 or 2 that grew up. But I did not see
many. They were just his working horses.
Philip Port
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Marcus Barber: What about wild horses?
Robert Burns: Yeah, they been up there.
Fred Coleman: Wild brumbies.
Robert Burns: Ran away from them gold miners and made their place up here.
Michael Ross: There were some horses up here, long time ago
Robert Burns: Yeah but no good horses, Horse too small you know. Brumbies.
Talking about the soil at Oriners, Viv Sinnamon recalled one possible explanation for the
consistently low numbers of horses observed at Oriners:
Nugget‟s local knowledge of how boggy it was with the horses was an example of that. We
were talking about bringing horses over [to Oriners] from Kowanyama and he said: “For
god‟s sake don‟t bring horses over here unless they‟ve got a coach that knows the country.
We‟ll have to put my horses with your horses, so that during the wet season they don‟t all
die. As soon as they put a foot on soft ground, a horse that‟s not forest wise, they‟ll go to a
place that‟s all hard and they‟ll sit there and die. But if they‟ve got a horse amongst them
who knows „if we go from here across this here, we can get onto there and then we‟re right‟
[then it‟s ok]. [Otherwise] they‟ll just eat out the grass and then just die.” They are the sort
of indicators of how boggy it can get. There‟s talk of breaking the legs of the pack horses,
trying to pull them out of bogs.
Viv Sinnamon
Based on consistent observations, horses have been present for a long time, but in relatively
low numbers. The terrain at Oriners appears not to favour them, and in the wet seasons the
animals either avoid the boggy soils of the area entirely or can become trapped by them and
starve. Therefore any significant changes in wild horse populations, either a decline to zero
or a substantial increase, should be investigated as this would not have a strong precedent in
the living memory of those who know the area.
2.4.4 Cane toads
The cane toads differ from the three previous species identified above because their arrival
can be fairly clearly identified in time as approximately the mid-1960s, and people have clear
recollections about their impacts:
Marcus Barber: What about the cane toads? Can you remember the area without toads?
Working Knowledge at Oriners Station, Cape York
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