“It’s a wonderful place to work young horses,” the Cressy breaker says as we brush through wattle, step over fallen logs and look up to a wedge-tailed eagle nest in the canopy.

“If you take them out into an open paddock on their first ride, anything that appears will spook them, but in the bush there’s so much for them to look at that they don’t look at anything.”

Only the scuffling of a big wallaby in a patch of undergrowth startles the quarter horse mares we are on, but barely; they are certainly not spooked enough to shy.

On our ride up here through farm paddocks, the mares appeared especially interested in an outcrop of flowering bulbs.

“Ma’s daffodils,” Bill laughed.

Apart from brief periods away to work, the 65-year-old has spent his life at Taranaki, the soldier settlement block his parents moved onto in 1947 and on which he and wife Margie run cattle as well as their horses.

Like so many country kids, Bill learnt to ride on a Shetland pony. From Tommy, he graduated to bigger steeds, doing stock work and playing polocrosse for Tasmania. He came to horse-breaking after jackarooing in the New England region of North West NSW.

His employer Maurice Wright had written a book on the Jeffery Method of horse handling, having been a protégé of Kell Jeffery, and gave a copy to Bill as a parting gift when the 20-year-old headed home to Tasmania.

Short of a bob, Bill thought he would make some money on the side by applying what he had learnt from Wright, the book and his own observations. “I didn’t have a reputation as a breaker, so the only horses I could get were thoroughbreds that were going to the track, but that was fine,” Bill says over lunch in the farmhouse kitchen.

Meanwhile, back in the mid-1970s, Margie was also heading south. Born in Charters Towers, she was nursing in Townsville when she decided to travel to Tasmania.

“Just because you could,” she says with a giggle.

“I drove down in my little VW, didn’t know anyone. Saw an ad in the paper for a horse and went to look at it, loved it …”

Loved the breaker she took her little chestnut mare to, too.

“I couldn’t believe you could break in a horse and get such a good result by being so kind,” Margie says.

“Where I was in Queensland it was always the rough, tie-them-down way. I’d spent quite a bit of time with breakers up there, so I said I’d only agree if I could watch Bill at work.

“Apparently I was the only one allowed to watch.”

All these years later — the couple have been married 43 years and are now grandparents — their daily life more or less revolves around three chestnut mares, all quarter horses.

“Generally speaking, they have a lovely temperament,” Bill says of the breed.

Bill’s own temperament seems like a good fit for his line of work, too. Calm, thoughtful and methodical, he is not one to rush a horse into anything, including submission.

He tells the story of watching an old stockman saddle up long ago.

“He was obviously competent, but he’d got to the stage where he was moving slowly. Yet he was saddled and ready to go before the young blokes around him, who were tearing around and throwing saddles onto the horses while they were moving sideways.

“For me, it’s just a habit now to take my time. Some people handle horses fast.”

For Bill, breaking in a horse is essentially a process of advancing and retreating over many sessions: he calls this incremental familiarisation with new stimuli habituation.

“Advance to a stage where the horse is comfortable and retreat before the horse is uncomfortable,” he says.

“If I wanted to put a rug on a horse, I’d put it close to them and before they moved away I’d take the rug away,” Bill says.

“I’d wait a moment or two and take it closer and eventually the horse would think ‘this is not going to hurt’. Then I might just drape the rug over its withers, folded up, before taking it away.”

Similarly, Bill divides basic steps into micro-steps when taking a young horse through its paces and always ends a session on a positive, pressure-free note.

“When I get them to their first canter, even if it’s only one step, I just get off them,” he says. “The fact they’ve done it once, they learn from the relief of the pressure, not the pressure itself.”

Horses have incredible memories, he says. They are not top of the food chain and for thousands of years their memories, both individual and herd, enabled their survival as a species.

“If you can get a ‘try’ right at the end of a ride, they go out and soak on it overnight …”

Many of the book’s entries, which are written in sparse prose accompanied by photographs in black and white, address the method one way or another.

Bill spent years scribbling his insights into a stockman’s notebook before deciding to publish it as a book.

“I’d have a light bulb moment and think “s***, I hope I remember that when I get back to the stable … when the notebook was full and I started repeating myself, I thought it was time to write it up for the grandchildren.”

The idea of applying natural horsemanship principles to other tricky areas of life, such as parenting, is not new, as horse whisperer Monty Roberts’s best-selling books attest.

The wisdom gleaned by sensitive handling is enduring, though, and Bill’s book contains plenty of it.

He has little time for another common way of handling horses. Far more confronting, it involves advancing until the horse retreats, then keeping the pressure on until it stops retreating.

“This is a method used by many people, but I’m not good enough to deal with the stress that it creates,” he says.

He says his preferred method relies on a certain mindset, but it’s not a bloody-minded one.

“When we are nervous, we make horses nervous,” he says. “Not long ago, I had a horse that was more highly strung than most. The main thing was making sure I had my mind right. It’s making sure you are in the zone: in charge and confident.”

These days Bill works just with his own horses. He says that six years after being diagnosed with multiple myeloma he feels more grateful than ever for his life with horses and his deep engagement with them.

“Thinking through a problem then coming up with an answer yourself is very fulfilling,” he says. “When I was diagnosed, I remember it was nice to have that time with the horses every day where you didn’t think about it, you were that far removed from illness. You were thinking and it was stimulating and at times like that you become even more attuned.”

In 40-odd years of breaking, Bill says he has never sustained serious injuries.

“I’ve never been injured by a horse that I’ve broken in myself,” he says. “I don’t say that to be smug. It’s just because I am so careful and I’ve tried not to take on horses with deep-seated problems.”

As in his book, Bill speaks as a mature horseman who’s seen it all and lived to tell the tale.

“When you’re young you almost hope they’ll buck,” he says.  

Observations of Horse from Middle Tasmania, designed by Julie Hawkins, $19.99