Muster Pups and Outback Ringer brilliant Australian television

Muster Dogs is simply delightful TV as well as being thoughtful, engaged and cast with a bunch of wonderful characters from the land.

Joni Hall, 40, with puppy Chet in ABC’s Muster Dogs

Muster Dogs is simply delightful TV as well as being thoughtful, engaged and cast with a bunch of wonderful characters from the land, their laid-back humour coloured with a hard, sceptical and sombre undertone. They are the five farming families, on properties ranging from the red earth of the Top End to the green pastures of regional Victoria, who take on the challenge of training new kelpie pups and testing their worth on the properties they run.

Then there are the five central protagonists, a mob of five mischievous kelpie puppies from the same litter who we follow on a documentary journey to become muster dogs. Their eventual job will be to move livestock from place to place. These families have to transform the young dogs from greenhorns into efficient working members of their mustering pack in 12 months, a task that usually takes at least three years.

And while framed as a kind of reality show, it’s really about the way the renaissance of muster dogs in herding and farming in rural Australia is having a huge economic and environmental impact on the land. And how this ancient herding art form reveals so beguilingly the underlying emotional, economic, and environmental benefits of using dogs rather than machines to muster.

Unlike most reality TV though in this cleverly produced, four part series, there is no humiliation or shame at its core – only love and delight.

The game that provides the narrative structure under the observant eye of expert trainer and former shearer, Neil McDonald, is that these puppies and their new owners need to hit training milestones, before meeting again in 12 months’ time for the ultimate working dog challenge. Who will be crowned Champion Muster Dog? And will any of our excited puppy participants graduate into the adult muster dog pack?

The show is from Ambience Entertainment, a production company that for almost three decades has created compelling programming across the board for both local and international audiences, ranging from kids’ shows like Drop Dead Weird to movies like Shawn Seet’s retelling of Colin Thiele’s classic Australian tale, Storm Boy. The series producer and director is Monica O’Brien, an experienced showrunner across many genres, adroitly wrangling her field directors, Michael Boughen (also producer), Sally Browning and David Wallace. The original concept is from Boughen, developed by him, O’Brien and the ABC.

Director of photography is Brad Smith in charge of a large bunch of camera operators. The show is drolly narrated by Lisa Millar with a nice mix of the colloquial and the pedagogic.

The first episode establishes our central characters, and the lovely puppies, and we begin the journey of discovery to test the pups’ ability to harness their natural instincts under the guidance of the five, very different, grazier trainers across five states. They are Frank Finger in Queensland, Aticia Grey in Western Australia, Rob Tuncks in Victoria, CJ (Catherine) Scotney in the Northern Territory, and nomadic cowgirl Joni Hall, who works across the Top End.

They are a diverse lot but are united by a desire to excel in this experiment and give these pups the best start to life. And the soon named Annie, Gossip, Lucifer, Spice and Chet embark on the challenge to achieve an assessment of their skills at four months old. It is no easy task, warns McDonald. It’s a bit like an arranged marriage, he says. “What you are after is probably a bit different to what you get – but they’re all going to be good.” And they should be – we’re told each pedigree muster dog is worth anything between 20 and 30 thousand quid.

McDonald is evangelical in his desire to promote effective dog and stock handling training to improve animal welfare, safety for graziers and overall enjoyment of working on the land.

Joni Hall and Derby in Muster Dogs.

“A working dog,” he tells us, “is motivated by an age-old hunting instinct where they want to go out to the other side of a mob of livestock and bring them back to the boss wolf so he can kill and eat them; the natural instinct of livestock is to get away.” He’s a lovely character, a bushman straight out of a Steele Rudd story.

As the creators say in a note, the results of this study into the resurgence in the age-old traditions of stock handling and land management was a little surprising. “We came face-to-face with the impact we as humans have had on the land and our disruption to the natural interrelation of animals. With the introduction of mechanical mustering, we crossed a boundary that changed the relationship between livestock, the land, and humans that maybe should not have been crossed.”

Outback Ringers returns in just over a week after its hugely successful first season has been seen all around the world. The half-hour series is from innovative boutique company Ronde Productions, based on an original idea by Thomas Lawrence, who created the 10-part series with Ben Davies, also responsible for Ten’s long-running Bondi Rescue, now broadcast in more than 100 countries. The producer is Ronde’s Liam Taylor and this time the director is Lawrence, who has vast experience as a wilderness cinematographer in shows like Outback Wrangler, Hunting the Jungle, and Territory Cops.

The show is a startling example of the way modern reality TV uses exotic locations, beer mat budgets and agile, courageous crews to find drama where, until recently, few had thought to look.

But this wasn’t easy, according to Lawrence. “These people didn’t care whether we filmed them – and so they don’t pick up their satellite phones to call you back for weeks at a time,” he says. “They were completely uncontactable. Given that we had a schedule, this was terrifying. Ultimately, we had no option but to send crews over 1000 kilometres from Darwin deep into the Outback – to places with no towns, no buildings, no roads, hoping that the bull-catchers would be where we thought they might be.”

When his crews did catch up, they again followed several families risking their reputations, fortunes and lives catching feral bulls and buffalo deep in Australia’s Northern Territory outback. They’re huge primordial-seeming animals with wide sharp horns hunted by low hanging helicopters, hurtling heavily armoured, cut down LandCruisers, quad bikes, and futuristic vehicles straight out of some dystopian science fiction fantasy.

With the United States paying a premium for lean grinding meat, wild-caught bulls like these are in high demand, good ones worth around a thousand bucks each.

To capture the action in such rugged terrain – and the filmmaking is extraordinary to watch – all film crews carried major GoPro kits with mounts, including special CASA approved chopper mounts. “The crews had serious 4WDs, with generators, fridges, sat phones, CB radios, camping equipment, and heaps of spare tyres,” Lawrence says. “We got better at preserving the gear very quickly, thanks to the talent teaching us how important that is – since there’s no one to fix your broken gear, except yourself.

Several of the standout characters from series one return including third generation Indigenous ringer Clarry Shadforth, with a new look team and equipment. With permission from the traditional owners they’re working Horse Island and need to catch 300 head a day to make a profit. But the cattle herds seem to have skipped town.

Also returning are Liz and Willie Cook – the intrepid husband and wife team, who are expanding their empire with ever-increasing debt financing. They have paid off their liability of $300k since the first series but their operation has grown and with it their reliance on the banks.

They’ve taken on a new recruit in Nathan “Sherl” Sherlock, a former professional bull rider, who comes a cropper early on in the first episode. “Shit goes wrong real quick,” he says philosophically.

The master bull catcher Kurt Hammer, as laconic and taciturn as they come, is also back, having negotiated an unprecedented mustering deal with the Northern Land Council and traditional owners of East Arnhem Land.

At the end of the last season the teams of ringer were beaten, battered and bruised, a couple savagely injured as bulls attacked their jeeps. Prices were down and a failed wet season left the feral cattle undernourished and undersized.

But this season the Outback is a different place, a big wet season and higher prices have turned it into a goldmine for the ringers. The catch is that the cattle are now spread out across the entire Territory as greater surface water has them luxuriating in far flung valleys. It’s dangerous but doesn’t deter the irrepressible Liz. “Off to catch some buffaloes,” she sings as she heads off in her battered Toyota.

The show is a visceral cinematic exploitation of the bush in a spirit of wonder really, the kind of spirit that once glorified the land as a basis of a national tradition. It casts a potent spell, the creed of mateship alive in the hardships of the physical environment of this exhausting series, a place as D.H Lawrence suggested “a weird grey-blue paradise, where man has to begin all over again”.

Muster Dogs, Sunday, ABC and iview, 7.40pm.

Outback Ringer coming to ABC, Tuesday, February 1, 8pm.