The Silence of the Dingo

The first dog I remember bonding with was my Grandparent’s dog Rusty. Some of my earliest and fondest memories are of sitting happily outside in the dirt while he leaned against me—my arm thrust across his sun warmed body. He had a capacity for stillness that is unusual in most dogs, and we’d sit for long periods together in silent contemplation.

Rusty was a working farm dog, an outside dog whose bed on cold nights was a couple of old hessian sacks in the shed. He wasn’t the sort of dog who would play or chase a ball, and when my grandfather was out in the yard or working on the farm he never ventured far from his side. He also wasn’t the sort of dog who would be expected to have much time for children, but he bore my childish love with quiet equanimity.

According to family legend Rusty was at least one quarter dingo and the rest Australian red cattle dog, a combination that gave him the beautiful red-gold coat that led to his name.

Dingoes are Australia’s wild dogs and scientists say they arrived on the continent somewhere between 4,000 and 12,000 years ago, most likely from Borneo or Sulawesi. Like domestic dogs, they’re descended from wolves, but dingoes branched off much earlier than other dogs and like wolves, remain essentially untameable.

Or as my Grandfather put it, ‘Dingo blood makes them smart, but you have to keep the dingo strain low or they’ll take off back to the wild.’

Australian cattle dogs—or red and blue heelers as they’re also called, are themselves the result of deliberate breeding processes in the 1800s that began crossing dingoes with different breeds of domestic dog to produce a sturdy and fearless animal capable of managing sheep and cattle. (You may be familiar with them from the Australian cartoon 'Bluey'. Bluey and her dad Bandit, are blue heelers while Bluey’s mum Chilli, and sister Bingo, are red heelers.)

By my reckoning, the cattle dog factor plus the dingo quarter meant that if we’d been able to send Rusty’s saliva off to a doggie version of DNA testing they’d rate Rusty’s dingo heritage a fair bit higher than one quarter.

Rusty shared more than his colour with his wild cousins. He was a notoriously silent dog—not something that’s common amongst farm dogs who are usually expected to alert the household to any intruders. However, he still managed to fulfill his guard dog duties, speeding soundlessly up the driveway to confront any visitors by standing in front of them. I suspect the glint of his white teeth suddenly appearing next to your leg in the night would be enough to deter most marauders.

Some people believe that dingos don’t bark but actually they do.

It’s a shorter, harsher sound than a domestic dog and one rarely used except when seriously alarmed. Like wolves, they can communicate by howling—which they do mainly at night to connect with their pack. I don’t ever recall Rusty barking but I can remember occasionally hearing him howl on dark nights. If you’ve ever heard a dingo howling it’s a seriously eerie sound.

Many farmers don’t like dingos—lumping them with all wild dogs and blaming them for attacks on sheep and cattle. My grandfather always told us never to let Rusty stray onto the next door property because the neighbour would shoot him on sight. As far as I could tell Rusty never left the yard around the house except when working, or at the prompting of me and my cousins, so I suspect this was my grandfather’s crafty way of making sure his grandchildren didn’t wander off, rather than a legitimate concern for Rusty.

Rusty was connected in my mind in some nebulous way with Rin Tin Tin, an ancient television show I’d never seen but had heard about. I knew there was a boy and a famous dog in it, and for some reason confused the two—assuming Rin-Tin-Tin was the boy and Rusty the hero dog. I think this was because my Grandparent’s dog, the Rusty I was familiar with was a hero to me.

I was the youngest in my immediate family and one of the youngest in a big gang of noisy cousins. I loved being outside and running wild, but sometimes I felt overwhelmed by too much happening and too many people. It was then that I’d withdraw and seek out Rusty. Sitting quietly with Rusty, patting his dusty coat, or just with my arm curled around him calmed me and helped with the strange mix of feelings and emotions that I didn’t have a word for then, but now know as anxiety.

Rusty’s silent, constant presence allowed me to step away and recharge. His doggy/dingo love gave me a way of dealing with a world that I sometimes found too loud, too confronting and hard to process. Even now as an adult and many years later I just have to think of him and our quiet times together and I feel content.