The greatest Roman of them all is the sheep dog.  He has done more work than all the men put together.  He is a tireless worker and never lets his master down.  A station worker may decide to walk  off a property and leave you to it, but the sheep dog will never do that.  The best sheep dog in my day was the kelpie – and the kelpie was the champion of the sheep dog trials from 1900 to 1920.  He was bred as a purely Australian  - developed  breed of dog by the King brothers at Hanging Rock Station, between Albury and Wagga.  They were bred in the first  place from a Scotch collie ( not the border collie, but the smooth haired collie ).  The King  brothers were joined by a man named  McCleod, and the dogs became known as King and McCleod kelpies.  They also were at Wilga Downs station near Cobar.  Somewhere along the line a strain of the Dingo got into the kelpie, and that gave them the ability to crawl along on their stomachs.  I recall at one time a mob of sheep being driven from Wilga Downs to Corona, through Langawirra – and there were only four men with the 10,000 sheep.  But the men had twenty kelpies dogs. The sheep were spread out in small mobs over a distance of about fifteen or twenty miles, with dogs allotted to each group, and would not allow sheep to stray from one mob to another.  The kelpie is a great worker, gets no pay, and sometimes has a very hard life.  Today, he may be seen sitting up in a buckboard, or on a motor bike, so he is still in use. The cattle stations were a different matter.  There, the cattle dog was used, mostly the Queensland blue heeler, and they were very effective.  An ordinary dog would get his head kicked off, but the blue heeler dives down low, and the cattle kick high and miss him.  Station owners did not want the cattle to run, because it affected the weight, so they changed the type of cattle.  In the first place they had shorthorns, which were heavy and would lose weight as they travelled, even in good feed, so they introduced the Hereford, which was not so heavy, and could walk faster without losing weight.  The droving rate for cattle was twelve or fourteen miles a day.  The rate for sheep was eight to ten miles a day, except in cases when they had to be kept moving in order to reach water; but to keep their condition, sheep should be allowed to wander along at their own pace. By the late W.F. Riddiford, O.B.E.     Walter Frederick  Riddiford was born at the Mount Browne goldfields, Western New South Wales, in 1895.  After several years of employment on sheep stations, he entered the Broken Hill mining industry.  He was elected as President of the Workers’  Industrial Union of Australia in 1933,  -  Broken Hill Branch  -   and became an alderman of the Broken Hill Municipal Council in 1934.  He was elected Mayor of Broken Hill in 1948 and occupied the position until his retirement in 1963 - having served 28 years as an alderman, during which time he was Mayor for 14 years.  Mr. Riddiford was awarded the O.B.E. in 1957 for his services to the community.