dingoes as pets in the Western Desert in the sixties

I've just watched a fascinating documentary - Contact - about a group of nomadic women and children who lived in the Western Desert in Australia in the 1960s and had never seen white people.

When this section of desert was chosen as the possible landing point of rockets in 1964, government officers contacted the nomads to convince them to move away from the area.

The film is mostly narrated by Yuwali, a 62-year-old gifted storyteller. She was 17 when the officials arrived in trucks she thought were rocks come alive. It's amazing to see the film that was shot at the time, but what struck me as a dog-owner was Yuwali's sadness when she viewed footage of her pet dingo, which she was forced to leave behind in the desert when she was taken with her family to live elsewhere.

It was sad to see the dingo following the truck as long as it could and then fading into the desert. At the time Yuwali begged to be allowed to take her pet with her, but this was refused.

We tend to think of dingoes as wild animals, but a transcript of The Science Show reports the work of Laurie Corbett, who has studied the history of the dingo and related it to the dogs of Asia. He believes the dingo came to Australia as a domesticated dog and points to its role as a companion animal for Aboriginal people in the past.

Dr. Eve Fesl, indigenous academic, suggests that in some areas there was a deliberate campaign to kill domesticated dingoes so as to deprive indigenous people of their valuable help in hunting, and thus force the people to abandon their nomadic life and agree to live in government camps.

The transcript of the show makes very interesting reading for anyone interested in the history of the dog.

classic poems about dogs

Tonight a good friend gave me a small book of old poems and pictures about dogs. It's called 'A Classic Illustrated Treasury; Dogs'. The illustrations and poems date from the 1890s to the 1950s.

I think my favorite would have to be the one by Rudyard Kipling

When the Man waked up he said,
"What is the Wild Dog doing here?"
And the Woman said,
"His name is not Wild Dog any more,
but the First Friend,
because he will be our friend
for always and always and always."

I thought that was a pretty good summary of a hundred thousand years of history - or fifteen thousand, depending on which archaeological study you believe.

And...I just noticed it is Rudyard Kipling's birthday today!