Sandra Closs: Hooked on the hill country life
Sandra Closs mustering at Ben Lomond Station near Queenstown. Photo: Supplied.
For three decades Ken and Sandra Closs have farmed at Te Hapu, on the remote, rocky coastline near Mangarakau. Here they raise livestock, train farm dogs and host 700 holidaymakers annually at their three farmstay cottages.
For Sandra in particular, living along the wild west coast fronting the Tasman Sea is a far cry from where she grew up in London, with a dance teacher mother and theatre actor-producer father. But if anything, this lean and active 67-year-old is become ever more passionate about hill-country life, and in particular her working dogs. She’s just back from a three-week stint at the 13,500-hectare Ben Lomond station near Queenstown, where she and her heading dog Zinny helped with the autumn muster.
Twenty-two years ago, John and Ginny Foster sold the neighbouring farm at Te Hapu and bought Ben Lomond. Ken has visited them frequently for nearly two decades, and in the last three years, Sandra has joined Ken on his autumn trips, seeing it as the perfect opportunity to extend her dogs.
It’s hard, demanding work on Ben Lomond’s steep tussock slopes and big rock outcrops, getting the big mobs of sheep off the tops and down to the warmer lowlands before they get trapped in winter snowfalls. Ben Lomond runs around 7,500 sheep, mostly Merino but also some Perendales, plus 130 cattle. The very long winters mean the growing season there is short. Terrain is too steep and rough for horses, so mustering is done on foot with dogs. For the autumn wether muster, covering about 6000 hectares, a local chopper pilot comes in with his Robinson to help, flying the musterers around and helping to push mobs together or down from the most difficult country.
“I will never forget my first helicopter muster,” says Sandra. “My dogs were terrified being pushed into the crates attached to the outside of the helicopter. After [the pilot] dropped us off and flew off there was dead silence! I looked around and thought, ‘now where are those sheep we’d just seen?’ It all looked so obvious from the air. I walked for about 20 minutes and was so relieved to come across the first mob and then find the others.”
After this year’s wether muster, 500 goats were shot from the helicopter in just under five hours, part of the necessary annual pest control.
One of Sandra’s allocated jobs last season was bringing 900 ewes down from Bowen Peak, much of it through deep snow. That day started with the tops all clagged in, but by 2pm the cloud cleared, providing a little window of opportunity. John called in a helicopter to find where the sheep were stranded, after which Sandra and her dogs (including her huntaway Meg, lost later last year to a rare blood disease) were flown up, coming down just on dark.
This year Sandra cleared the 1700-metre Bowen Peak all by herself with her one heading dog. They left at dawn in a 4WD truck, forded several rivers and creeks on the way, then walked five hours upwards, mustering 600 ewes up steep chutes on the Queenstown side to the ridge tops, then down the other side to the lower, warmer country for tupping.
Weather is erratic there, and they sometimes get cut off by flooded rivers or heavy snow. Two years ago, over 300 sheep at Ben Lomond were caught on the high summer country in early snow a metre deep but later found their own way out after a partial thaw.
“It was definitely warmer this year than last,” says Sandra. “There was only one day Moonlight River was impassable to vehicles after heavy rain and only the higher mountains were snowclad. This meant someone had to go to the top of each block, involving climbs of up to 1000m, eight hours or so of non-stop stints with long vital dog runs. My heading bitch got bluffed herself for 20 minutes once before she found a way down, it was so steep.
“It’s so great to have a break from the endless jobs at home. Ken and I come back to Te Hapu quite revitalised.”
Their friend Gail Soper makes their visits to Ben Lomond possible by being their regular farm and holiday-home-sitter, looking after puppies, horse, chooks, ducks, geese and the garden.
Sandra has trained animals all her life, starting with the family cat she taught to perform jumps as a child. Horses and eventing occupied all her middle years, but dogs more lately have become her forte. With its craggy limestone landscape, Te Hapu has been the perfect training ground for the succession of pups Sandra has reared. She intensively trained her top dog Zinny for two years—20 to 30 minutes a day, totally under control—and it paid off: last year Zinny won two cups at the Upper Takaka Dog Trials and this year scored the most points by a local maiden competitor to win the Nobivac prize.
“She’s small, almost fragile looking, but her temperament is extremely intense, highly effective and accurate. She’s the dog you’d send up to get the ‘sticky’ rams off the ledges. She can cover huge uphill distances very quickly too.”
Sandra teaches all her dogs eight basic voice and whistle commands—run, stop, walk up, steady, right, left, come to me, stay where you are. Variations are then applied to get the dog exactly where it’s needed and to dictate speed. Added into the mix are voice commands such as look, look back, come out of that, get up here, that’ll do, keep out. To make it more complicated, dogs working together have to have a different set of whistles, otherwise they will get confused.
Sandra came out to New Zealand at age 21, but not before she had worked on a mixed farm, studied at a farm institute for a year and been employed as a herdswoman for three years. She owned and fully trained her first dog, a labrador. On one trip to London she told it to “stay there” outside a Marks and Spencer Store in crowded Oxford Street, coming out an hour later to find it in exactly the same spot and receiving many strokes from passers-by.
In New Zealand Sandra found work as a shepherdess, and rousing in shearing sheds, before returning to England via Mexico, USA and Canada. In Devon she worked a year as a shepherdess, then undertook three years’ voluntary service in rural India, organising well-digging and road-building on a “food for work” aid project.
Back in New Zealand, she met Ken in a shearing gang. After a year travelling overland back to England, where they got work on a Northumberland farm, they returned in 1974 with only $50 between them, and scraped and saved to buy their first property in 1976 atop Bird’s Clearing. It sold four years later and they bought their 317-hectare “homestead block” at Te Hapu. Here they raised their three kids, Jess, Joe and Alexander, now all grown up and strewn around the world. Somehow, amongst it all, Sandra has found time to participate in dance, theatre and clowning workshops and grow all the family’s vegetables.
“It’s been a fantastic journey,” she says. “I feel more thankful all the time I can still live and actively work in this amazing environment at Te Hapu, doing everything I’ve always wanted to do.”
Gerard Hindmarsh
