Stock route

An early stock route, the Snowy TSR, was pioneered during the drought of 1828, when the supply of water and fodder failed around Lake George (New South Wales), near Canberra.

These early drovers sometimes had to contend with crocodile-infested rivers, droughts, dust storms, floods, poisonous plants and hostile Aboriginals.

In times of extreme drought, when paddocks lack feed and/or water, stockowners have been forced to reduce their livestock numbers radically or take the remaining beasts to travel their six miles a day, along the stock routes, surviving on the roadside grass.

During 1997, 125 head of cattle died after eating Kalanchoe delagoensis (mother-of-millions) on a travelling stock reserve near Moree, New South Wales.

In 1870 Henry Arthur Readford, better known as Harry Redford, or Starlight, drove a thousand head of stolen cattle from Queensland, down the Barcoo and Cooper past Mount Hopeless, to Blanchewater where he sold them for $10,000.

Although he was caught and went on trial for his crime, he was found not guilty by a jury largely impressed with his audacious feat of blazing a new cattle stock route, making him one of the greatest drovers in Australian history.

The Murranji Track in the Northern Territory, also known as the Ghost Road of the Drovers, was pioneered by the famous overlander Nathaniel Buchanan in 1881, when he drove large mobs of cattle along it.

A series of wells, first dug between March 1908 and April 1910 by a party under the leadership of surveyor Alfred Canning, connect the stock route.

[11] In the early years of the stock route, several drovers were killed by Aboriginal people defending their land and water sources.

[14] Although their original transport purpose has been mostly superseded, stock routes also sustain non-pastoral industries, including bee keeping, forestry, fossicking, mineral exploration and quarrying.

The entire network is publicly owned, and therefore represents the best remaining opportunity for conservationists to protect large amounts of threatened biodiversity.

[17] As temperature and rainfall patterns begin to change, the stock routes represent a set of corridors that organisms can safely transverse to reach appropriate climatic conditions.

[18] A group of more than 450 scientists recently petitioned the Premiers of New South Wales and Queensland, asking them to intervene, to protect both the heritage and environmental values represented by the stock routes (the "Long Paddock Statement").

[20] In January 2009 Travelling Stock Routes came under the control of the new Livestock Health and Pest Authorities (LHPA) which replaced the Rural Lands Protection Board.

The new LHPA has stated "that TSRs to be ceded back to the Department of Lands where they place an unreasonable financial burden on authorities (latter part of 2009)".

A fee is paid to the council on a per head of livestock basis and the stock owner is permitted to use the selected strip to the exclusion of others.