Description given on Youtube:
A Brumby is a free-roaming feral horse in Australia. Although found in many areas around the country, the best-known Brumbies are found in the Australian Alps region in south-eastern Australia. Today, most of them are found in the Northern Territory, with the second largest population in Queensland. A group of Brumbies is known as a “mob” or “band”.
Brumbies are the descendants of escaped or lost horses, dating back in some cases to those belonging to the early European settlers, including the “Capers” from South Africa, Timor Ponies from Indonesia, British pony and draught horse breeds, and a significant number of Thoroughbreds and Arabians.
Today they live in many places, including some National Parks. Occasionally they are mustered and domesticated for use as campdrafters, working stock horses on farms or stations, but also as trail horses, show horses, Pony Club mounts and pleasure horses. They are the subject of some controversy – regarded as a pest and threat to native ecosystems by environmentalists and the government, but also valued by others as part of Australia’s heritage, with supporters working to prevent inhumane treatment or extermination, and rehoming Brumbies who have been captured.
The term Brumby refers to a feral horse in Australia.[5] Its first recorded use in print is in the Australasian magazine from Melbourne in 1880, which said that Brumbies were the bush name in Queensland for ‘wild’ horses. In 1885, the Once a Month magazine suggested that rumbies was a New South Wales term, and the poet Banjo Paterson stated in the introduction for his poem Brumby’s Run published in the Bulletin in 1894 that Brumby was the word for free-roaming horses. Its derivation is obscure,[6] and may have come about from one or more of the following possibilities:
1.Horses left behind by Sergeant James Brumby from his property at Mulgrave Place in New South Wales, when he left for Tasmania in 1804.[7]
2.An Aboriginal word baroomby meaning “wild” in the language of the Pitjara Indigenous Australians on the Warrego and Nogoa Rivers in southern Queensland.[8]
3.A letter in 1896 to the Sydney Morning Herald says that baroombie is the word for horse among the Aboriginal people of the Balonne, Nebine, Warrego and Bulloo Rivers.[9]
4.Baramba, which was the name of a creek and station in the Queensland district of Burnett, established in the 1840s and later abandoned, leaving many of the horses to escape into the wild.[10]
5.It has also been suggested that the name derives from the Irish word bromach or bromaigh.[9]
Early horse imports[edit]
Horses first arrived in Australia in 1788 with the First Fleet. They were imported for farm and utility work; recreational riding and racing were not major activities. By 1800, only about 200 horses are thought to have reached Australia. Horse racing became popular around 1810, resulting in an influx of Thoroughbred imports, mostly from England. Roughly 3,500 horses were living in Australia by 1820, and this number had grown to 160,000 by 1850, largely due to natural increase.[11] The long journey by sea from England, Europe, and Asia meant that only the strongest horses survived the trip, making for a particularly healthy and strong Australian stock, which aided in their ability to flourish.
Origin of feral herds
Horses were likely confined primarily to the Sydney region until the early 19th century, when settlers first crossed the Blue Mountains and opened expansion inland. Horses were required for travel, and for cattle and sheep droving as the pastoral industry grew. The first report of an escaped horse is in 1804, and by the 1840s some horses had escaped from settled regions of Australia. It is likely that some escaped because fences were not properly installed, when fences existed at all, but it is believed that most Australian horses became feral because they were released into the wild and left to fend for themselves.This may have been the result of pastoralists abandoning their settlements, and thus their horses, due to the arid conditions and unfamiliar land that combined to make farming in Australia especially difficult. After World War I, the demand for horses by defence forces declined with the growth in mechanization, which led to a growth in the number of unwanted animals that were often set free. Throughout the 20th century, the replacement of horses with machines in farming led to further falls in demand, and therefore may have also contributed to increases in feral populations.
Brumbies roaming in the Australian Alps of south-eastern Australia are thought to be descendants of horses which were owned by the pastoralist and pioneer, Benjamin Boyd.