Bred to handle harsh terrain and weather, Walers are exceptionally tough horses. The legends of their time on the battlefield are deeply interwoven with Australia’s history and culture. Glenn Morrison explores the tough questions. Is Waler blood now flowing in wild brumbies? And does culling put these horses at risk of extinction?
At the heart of Australia’s Riverina in the town of Murrumburrah about 340km south-west of Sydney, sits a grand bronze statue of Australia’s greatest war horse, the perhaps impolitely named ‘Bill the Bastard’.
The life-sized piece wrought by sculptor Carl Valerius depicts horse Bill and rider Major Michael Shanahan carrying to safety 3 Tasmanian soldiers from no-man’s land amid the Battle of Romani in Egypt during World War I.
A feat for any horse, the heavy carry was accomplished under the worst of possible conditions, on a battlefield.
According to author Roland Perry’s account in the bestselling non-fiction work Bill the Bastard, Bill was a cantankerous chestnut stallion of 730kg and some 17.1 hands – that’s about 1.73m to the shoulder.
One of more than 130,000 Australian horses transported overseas to serve in World War I, Bill, like most of the mounts, never returned to Australia.
His last burden had been the body of John Simpson Kirkpatrick, a stretcher bearer providing first aid on battlefields and ferrying wounded soldiers to medical help on donkeys, the man behind Aussie legend Simpson’s Donkey.
Major Shanahan – reportedly the only man who could ride the spirited Bill – was several times wounded in action, ultimately requiring the amputation of his left leg above the knee.
As for Bill, he died in 1924. Buried at Gallipoli, Bill’s actions made him an Australian war legend to rank alongside Simpson’s Donkey.
Bill’s ancestors were wild bred for strength and resilience to handle Australia’s harsh terrain and weather and were named for their origins as a “New South Waler”.
But they became known by the shortened handle first coined in 1846: a Waler.
The bronze statue of Bill the Bastard in Harden, Murrumburrah. Credit: Michael McCormack MP, Facebook.
The brumby as heritage
In the years since the First World War, the Waler breed has been repeatedly and poignantly linked with a national settler identity, a trend Australian National University researcher Isa Menzies calls “brumby-as-heritage”.
Brumbies, or wild horses, are well represented in Australian literature and film, the Man from Snowy River being but one instance where romance riding an alpine brumby finds a place in Australia’s postcolonial heart.
However, Australia’s brumby population has also grown to become the world’s largest, estimates now ranging upward from 400,000 to a million. They can be found grazing Australia’s North and Centre, parts of Western and South Australia, and in southern alpine and sub-alpine areas, such as the Snowy Mountains.
Not native to Australia, such feral horse populations are known worldwide to degrade the environment, destroy ecosystems, eliminate native species and spread weeds. It’s a matter widely researched by science and well-covered in Australia media.
Such problems are global in extent. And burgeoning feral horse numbers are often managed by culling.
But horse advocates argue culling can be cruel if not done properly. They prefer horses be rehomed, populations fertility controlled and argue horses may even benefit biodiversity in some cases, such as for fire management. And they are keen to ensure enough horses are conserved for heritage reasons.
The heritage argument – that the bloodline of the culturally significant Waler is found within Australia’s wild brumby populations – prompts a difficult question: must saving the environment cost us our cultural heritage?
Surprisingly little science has been done in the field. And – so far at least – genetics has not confirmed that Walers are running with brumbies, nor even an exact nature of a Waler breed.
But that might all be changing.
Australian wild brumbies roaming national parks. Credit: Skitzpix/iStockphoto.
Ill-defined breeds
Data released in May 2024 by the NSW Government revealed more than 5,000 wild brumbies were shot at Kosciuszko National Park since aerial culling recommenced in 2023.
Earlier efforts to rehome or move some of the horses were deemed a failure by Government, and a culling restart supported by Australia’s Biodiversity Council as the “most humane option”.
The Park’s stated aim has been to reduce herds to 3,000 by 2027 to meet legal obligations, from a mean estimated starting population of around 17,000.
But whether Walers are among the brumbies being shot remains an open question.
Australian equine geneticists in the know readily acknowledge there are few published research studies of the Waler.
Emeritus Professor Frank Nicholas of Sydney School of Veterinary Science at the University of Sydney investigated brumbies at NSW’s Guy Fawkes River National Park in 2001, after aerial shooting there had culled more than 600 horses.
“I was appointed the chair of a heritage working group,” says Nicholas. “It was just on the Guy Fawkes River horses, so it was very, very specifically narrowed down to just one geographical area.
“The job of our working party was to work out whether the Guy Fawkes wild horses have heritage value. And the genetics of them was part of that. But it was a very tiny part.”
For more than a century, horses had been bred inside what is now the Park’s perimeter, some in managed mobs, others on unfenced country.
Many horses from New England district had been drafted for military use since the 1890s, including during the Second World War by the Australian Light Horse.
Nicholas’ team reported their heritage findings in 2002 and published the peer-reviewed article ‘A Phylogenetics Analysis of Brumbies’ in 2003.
Their research used blood samples from 16 horses from Guy Fawkes River National Park and 20 Walers sourced from Australian properties, the samples having been sent to The University of Queensland’s Australian Equine Genetics Research Centre.
Guy Fawkes wild horses, they concluded, had a high genetic similarity with Arabian-type breeds and saddle and harness light horses (for example, Thoroughbreds), and were also genetically similar to Walers.
The team concluded the horses had “local cultural heritage value using the criteria of the Heritage Council,” the professor told Cosmos.
“This was to do with the way that there were generations of people in and around the Guy Fawkes River National Park who had been involved in capturing them, and all the romance of that.
“And this was real; there were people for whom this was very important.”
But the exact characteristics of both horse breeds remained ill-defined.
Raised in nature
Genetics research published only this year in Nature places the practise of horse breeding as having begun about the time wheeled chariots showed up on the Eurasian steppes, sometime during the third millennium BCE.
Horse husbandry helped the species Equus caballus give a gentle nudge to our history by widely producing a best mix of horse strength and mobility to aid human endeavour and travel.
Horses first arrived at Australia’s east coast in 1788, long after a unique Australian biota and ecology had evolved sans horse.
Originally sent from Britain as much-needed muscle to aid a fledgling Sydney colony, the horses were a mix of breeds, including of Arabian, Andalusian and Thoroughbred blood.
Initially, lands around the colony were grazed without fences, which meant horses regularly escaped, the first recorded in 1804 according to the Australian Government.
At first, therefore, Walers were not bred per se, but rather “raised in nature”. And that produces a different horse.
As University of Queensland ecologist Magdalena Zabek writes in Wildlife Australia: “Domestic horses are selectively bred for speed, height and high rates of reproduction.
“In wild horses, natural selection has favoured different attributes. Flexible behaviour allows them to survive and reproduce under a wide range of ecological conditions and withstand climatic extremes.”
The Waler Horse Society of Australia and the Fédération Équestre Internationale provide more exacting (yet still somewhat imprecise) descriptions of a Waler, the latter as “a combination of multiple breeds in an effort to combine their most desirable qualities: the African Cape horse, Thoroughbred, Arabian, Timor pony, and likely some draught breeds, like the Percheron, Shire, and Clydesdale.”
The combination, they say, makes for a horse that can handle “extreme weather, challenging work conditions, and little food and water.”
But can genetics define the brumby as a breed or breeds? And is a Waler one?
“It’s impossible to define a breed,” says Nicholas. “A breed is what a group of people call a group of animals, basically. That sounds frustratingly vague, but in practice it works well.
“[However] the concept of breed is still enormously useful. So, if a group of people get together – which is exactly what happened with the Walers – and they said… we want to declare this group of animals that have this particular set of characteristics or this particular pedigree background a breed, and we want to call them Walers, and we have established a pedigree recording system for them, then it becomes a breed. There’s no official… government rules and regulations.”
Nicholas recalls that during the Guy Fawkes study, some New Englanders thought the wild horses might be sufficiently genetically unique to justify them being conserved on that basis.
“But the limited data that we had didn’t provide any supporting evidence for that idea at all,” he says.
“The whole idea of a brumby is that it is either a domesticated horse that’s escaped, or the descendant of domesticated horses that have escaped.
“So the idea of them being genetically unique to any large extent, given there’s a continual flow of horses in and out of these national parks and has been ever since horses have been in them… it would have been truly amazing if they were sufficiently genetically different from Australian horse breeds to warrant them being conserved solely on that basis.”
A 2013 study of genetic variability in Waler horses at Texas A&M University concludes the Waler is a mix of three-quarters Thoroughbred, along with Arabian, Timor Pony, Suffolk Punch, Clydesdale, Shire, Cleveland Bay, Welsh Cob, Hackney Pony, Percheron, other British Native Ponies and perhaps a little Belgian Draft.
But that’s not satisfying horse advocates, and neither is it the end of the Aussie Waler’s tale.
Re-tracing a Waler’s ancestry
Retired humanities academic and horse advocate Dr Jill Brown keeps wild horses on a rural property in Victoria.
Her mobs include several “wild-caught foundation bloodline horses”, or Walers, including from the Tanami Desert in Central Australia, where Walers have been bred since the war.
Brown calls the Waler the Australian equivalent of the American Quarter Horse, a “breed developed to meet the diverse needs of early settlement”.
“My great-grandfather bred Walers for export to British India,” she says, “and I grew up hearing stories about our special Australian horse.”
Early this year, Brown fronted a 2024 Inquiry into the Proposed Aerial Shooting of Brumbies in Kosciuszko National Park. She was representing a lobby group called the Heritage Horse and Environment Protection Alliance.
“There is a strong connection between Australia’s wild horses the brumbies, and our heritage Australian breed, the Waler,” Brown told the inquiry.
“If we get rid of all of the brumbies, we get rid of any possibility of re-establishing the Australian Waler horse.
“Once they’re gone, we can’t ever get them back.”
In this sense, Brown believes Walers are endangered.
Jill Brown with her wild-caught Waler stallion. Credit: Supplied by Jill Brown.
Indeed, the Rare Breeds Trust of Australia (using separate criteria) ranks the Waler not only as a breed, but as “vulnerable”, meaning there are fewer than 300 breeding females and 30 annual registrations.
Either way, a new scientific study may help to clarify the matter.
“There is a study currently being conducted by the University of Sydney,” says Brown, “under Dr Brandon Velie, to establish the genetic status of wild brumbies.
“That work is going to supplement and extend the work currently being done on DNA collection with regard to the wild-caught Walers, which is being done through the University of Texas as part of the global equine genome project.”
Velie confirmed to Cosmos that his group was “in the middle of a large genomics study exploring all wild horses in Australia.
“Upon conclusion of the study,” he says, “we aim to provide the most up-to-date genomic evidence to address to what extent wild horses in Australia are either genetically subdivided into sub-populations within and between national parks, genetically unique (including information on Walers, as well as Timor Ponies from the NT), or inbred (compared to other horse breeds).”
For now, though, Walers must remain on the sidelines.
“Unfortunately,” says Velie, “the vast majority of the work my group has done to date has focused on wild brumbies.
“And although we do have samples from Walers, we have yet to generate enough genomic data for a robust genomic analysis of Walers.”
Butterfly and Took, a wild caught Waler mare and her foal. Credit: Supplied by Jill Brown.
But the Waler advocates are not giving up.
On a website called the Waler Database, horse advocates argue the key to a future for the Waler breed is to establish their ancestry via DNA and parentage testing.
“If you think your brumby may be a Waler, please get them DNA tested,” they urge.
Testing is explained on the site and instructions given for collecting hair samples for DNA analysis.