Halls Heeler

The Halls Heeler was a dog bred by Thomas Simpson Hall to herd cattle on the Hall family's extensive properties in north-western New South Wales in the 19th century. On Dartbrook Station, in the Upper Hunter Valley, Hall selectively crossed the offspring of Northumberland Drover's Dogs (Border Collie lineage) that he had imported, with progeny of dingoes that he had tamed. By 1840 he had bred the type of dog that he needed to control cattle on the massive runs that his family owned, and until he died in 1870 few of these dogs were owned and used by anyone outside the Hall family and their workers. However the death of Thomas Hall and the break-up of the Hall estate coincided with the development of the dog show, and an interest in breeding dogs to specific criteria or standards. The Halls Heeler was further developed into two contemporary dog breeds the Australian Cattle Dog and the Australian Stumpy Tail Cattle Dog. The name is spelled both with the possessive apostrophe, as Hall's Heeler, and without.

George Hall and his family arrived in the New South Wales Colony in 1802. By 1825, George's son Thomas Simpson Hall and some of his older brothers had established two cattle stations in the Hunter Region, Gundebri near the present day Merriwa, and Dartbrook near Aberdeen. In the 1828 census Thomas Hall is described as 20 years old, and the manager of Dartbrook. Using this property as a home base, Hall began a northward expansion into the Liverpool Plains, New England and Queensland, setting up properties for the family and eventually controlling over a million acres of good grazing land.

On Dartbrook Thomas Hall set about breeding the cattle needed to stock these extensive holdings, and developed a herd of polled shorthorn cattle from stock imported from Durham in 1830. Getting the cattle to the Sydney markets presented a problem in that thousands of head of cattle had to be moved for thousands of kilometres along unfenced through sometimes rugged bush and mountain ranges. A note, in his own writing, records Thomas Hall's anger at losing 200 head in scrub. A droving dog was desperately needed but the colonial working dogs are understood to have been of Old English Sheepdog type (commonly referred to as Smithfields, descendants of these dogs still exist) useful only over short distances and for yard work with domesticated cattle. Thomas Hall addressed the problem by importing several of the dogs used by drovers in Northumberland, his parents’ home county. At this time dogs were generally described by their job, regardless of whether they constituted a ‘breed’ as it is currently understood, and in the manner of the time these blue mottled dogs were known as the Northumberland Blue Merle Drovers Dog.

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