A master of his dogs
• Lance Clifford on his Pipers River property with his award winning dogs.
By Tony Scott
March 10, 2021
Dog breeder and trainer Lance Clifford has been involved with sheep dog trialling for more than 50 years.
The 77-year-old now resident of Pipers River has a stack of trophies, ribbons and memories but he’s not so sure about the latest accolade from the State Association.
“They’ve made me a patron. Trouble is a few haven’t lasted very long before they’ve died after they’ve become patron.”
Despite having dogs since aged 12 and working kelpies since 1969 Lance spent almost half his working life not in the wide open spaces of a farm but office bound with the postal service.
He grew up at St Helens where his father worked in the sawmill, at least through the summer.
“They couldn’t get the logs out in winter time, so Dad used to go hunting out towards Ansons Bay.
“He’d go out into the marshes for a week or so at a time and come home with a load of kangaroo, wallaby and possum skins.”
“In those days we used to have three or four house cows, that I usually used to milk (by hand).
“We didn’t have much of a paddock to keep them in, so we’d turn them loose on the town for the day and then have to find them on the way home from school.”
His first taste of real farm work came in school holidays helping a dairy farmer Joe LeFevre at Pyengana.
Transport from St Helens was courtesy of Joe’s son David.
“We’d leave about four o’clock in the morning in his big old Ford Plymouth. We’d have breakfast after the milking, but he wasn’t the slowest driver around some of those corners and after the trip up and milking those cows I usually didn’t feel much like breakfast.”
That and odd jobbing on the Treloggen family farm nearer St Helens might have given young Lance a taste for farming life, but it wasn’t long after that that the post office job came up, starting as a postie on a push bike, but graduating with the passing of exams to a position on the relieving staff.
He went all over the State filling in for postal clerks on leave, except that is for the North West and West.
“The West Coast was somewhere you didn’t really want to go and if you did something wrong you got sent there.
He was in Cygnet during the 1967 bushfires, worked at Launceston, Evandale, Cressy, Longford, Beaconsfield and Scottsdale as well as St Helens, where eventually a longer stint as Post Master came up.
Through most of his postal career he had a bush block he’d bought from the Crown for 10 shillings and acre.
“I spent whatever spare money I had clearing up bits of it and running a few cattle and some sheep that I could work with the dogs.”
The 200-acre block on the Tasman Highway opposite the “Shop in the Bush” was put back to trees by a subsequent owner and is now being cleared again.
Lance’s real involvement with working sheep dogs in competition came in 1969 when he bought his first kelpie.
They became his passion ever since. He teamed up with another North-Easter, Weldborough’s Wes Singline, to enter trials around the State.
“We’d sometimes leave home at three in morning. I’d pick him up or the other way around to go to down to Huonville or Wynyard -- three hours or more just to get there.”
He’s had his success in the trial ring, but some memories go well beyond the straight competition.
There was even a touch of Hollywood when he trained a dog to appear in the feature film Manganinnie in 1980.
“We were competing at the Hobart Show when they asked if we could come in for an audition.
“So we went in and they asked us if he would attack someone. I said you hop out on the lawn there and I’ll show you. They said ‘no we’re not paid for that’, so I got the job with no test.”
Filming went over six weeks at different sites around the State.
“I don’t think they could fault him in how he performed.
“They called him Pace the wonder dog, because they never had to do a retake in any of the scenes he was in.
“At the start they didn’t understand I could push him up into where the action was, so I was continually pushing him into where the focus was.
“When they realised what I was doing, they asked ‘Can you make him a bit less prominent?’
“I think he was a better actor than the one in the Red Dog movie.”
Another brush with international celebrity came with a change in direction in 1989.
“We took a couple of dogs and a pup to Canada as part of a delegation to the World Sheep and Wool Congress.
“They had some McShane sheep yards on display and we had to show how they were used.”
During the same trip to Edmonton Lance and his dogs were the half time entertainment in a grid iron game.
“We just gave a demonstration of penning some sheep, but it was different experience.
“I couldn’t follow the game. They tend to get the ball and every two minutes they change their backs to their fronts and when they throw the ball in they all seem to charge one another and bowl each other over.”
It was after he returned home that Lance decided he’d had enough of the desk job.
“I just told ‘em I wasn’t coming back.”
So started a 34-year career as a farmer.
Running beef cattle and some sheep at Pyengana, Lance had more time and a good excuse to train his dogs.
Along the way he became the father of the yard dog branch of competition.
“Some of the old farmers around St Helens reckoned their dogs were better, but wouldn’t put them into trials, so I wrote some rules and away we went.”
“The first one we held was won by an 18-year old girl Peta Roberts and the publicity about it just had it take off.
“It’s a lot quicker than trials and you don’t have to have quite as much control over your dog.”
But Lance does like that trusting relationship between master and dog on the trials field.
“I’ve slowed up a bit now, shying away from the travel.
“I used to go to the mainland fairly regularly, but don’t do that anymore.”
In fact he rations himself to competing in about half the 16 to 18 trials in Tasmania a year.
But, his patron’s badge notwithstanding, he’s not about to call it quits all together.
“I don’t think you give up while you can get about … it’s good to catch up with your mates and people you share an interest with to have bit of a yack.”