On a warm midsummer day, from down a steep hill, Grace, an exuberant New Zealand sheepdog and class clown, suddenly breaks from the flock of sheep she’s meant to be herding. From there she bolts headlong towards a brim-full cement water trough, where on arrival and with an almighty splash, she demonstrates the canine equivalent of a textbook belly-flop (well, if ever there was a textbook for canine belly flops). Rounding up the sheep at Waipuru Station, Footrot Flats country.
Credit: Anthony Dennis It could be scene (panel?) straight out of Footrot Flats , the beloved and long-running New Zealand daily cartoon strip by Murray Ball. The main characters of the humorously sardonic, celebrated strip were border collie sheepdog “The Dog” and his owner Wallace “Wal” Cadwallader Footrot who live on a farm called Footrot Flats near the fictional town of Raupo. Hugely popular in Australia, the cartoon strip spawned dozens of books, a stage musical and a successful animated feature film, Footrot Flats: The Dog’s Tale with its hit theme song, Slice of Heaven becoming an unofficial Kiwi national anthem.
I’m visiting Grace’s home, or to be more exact, Waipura Station, an 800 hectare sheep farm only 10 minutes from Gisborne, a city of 35,000 on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. I’m here as part of a shore excursion from Silver Muse, one of the luxury cruise ships that forms part of the Silversea fleet. Ball was born in Fielding, a town elsewhere in the North.