CMO to CRO

How do you survive when the land you love turns hostile? In The Horses Too Are Gone, Mike Keenan transforms what could be a single drought story into a study of endurance, ethics, and change across rural Australia. The drought of 1994 isn’t just weather—it’s the crucible that exposes every weakness in people, systems, and landscapes. You follow him from Myall Plains to Mt Kennedy, carrying families, drovers, horses, and cattle across collapsing markets and parched ground. Each decision—whether to feed, sell, or move—becomes an existential gamble. But this is more than survival; it’s a reflection on belonging, technological change, and moral responsibility when the institutions of law and nature both falter.

Human and ecological interdependence

Keenan’s Australia is an organism: people, plants, and animals interlock in a fragile web. The kurrajong, Mitchell grass, and brigalow each play a role, revealing how biology sets the limits of survival. When modern power saws shred kurrajong branches, what’s lost isn’t just shade—it’s generational continuity. Likewise, when farmers cut Mitchell grass for wheat or clear brigalow belts, short-term profit undermines resilience. Drought forces you to listen to the land again. Trees, grass, and animals cease to be scenery—they are indicators of balance or collapse. Keenan’s ecological realism makes his work akin to writers like Eric Rolls or Mary Durack, who treated landscape as a living interlocutor, not resource inventory.

Practical leadership under duress

The book’s rhythm follows crisis management: checking feed and water, planning droves, repairing bores. Mike Keenan leads by necessity, not authority. Each scene—hauling pipe at night, roadtraining weak weaners, shuttling cows sixteen at a time—teaches how leadership in the bush fuses technical and moral intelligence. He balances economics and humanity, knowing that each wrong move costs either cattle lives or personal dignity. To lead here means accepting pain: his knee crushed, his hands torn, his choices doubted by banks and family alike. You come to understand resilience not as stoicism, but as daily improvisation under pressure.

Community and gender as infrastructure

Keenan dissects drought’s social anatomy: resilience is communal, and women form its hidden architecture. Sal holds the household through months of absence and risk; Annette, Joan, and Jenny run the informal networks of food, gossip, and care. Masculinity lives in pubs, droving camps, and makeshift alliances—but without women’s unpaid logistics, the system collapses. His portrait of the Hamilton family at Rowallan shows social economy in action: people loan horses, plumb broken pipes, and offer bread before rules. This interdependence challenges easy rural myths—the bush hero cannot exist without domestic labour and local generosity.

Law, justice, and moral frontiers

In these remote ranges, law travels slowly. The Roma court scenes reveal rural justice as part-theatre, part-discretion. Mike’s arrest for illegally using a mare shows how statute collides with circumstance, echoing the colonial tale of Harry Redford—the mythic drover tried for taking bullocks but acquitted because the jury admired his bushcraft. Institutions exist, but enforcement depends on place, personality, and local memory. Against this backdrop, the Wild Bunch emerge as mirror images of the official system—thieves by law, but community fixtures by reputation. They force you to ask whether moral order in a frontier landscape is better sustained through formal policing or negotiated custom.

Symbols of change and loss

When “the horses too are gone,” what’s really lost is a way of perceiving and working. Horses—Circus, Yarramin, Vodka Jack—embody a form of knowledge that connects muscle memory, geography, and relationship. Their decline marks mechanisation’s victory and the erosion of an older bush ethic. Technology brings speed but not grace; tractors and roadtrains can replace labour, but not belonging. Keenan’s farewell to horses doubles as elegy for an identity defined by touch, smell, and endurance rather than spreadsheets and subsidies.

From drought to philosophy

Beneath every rope burn and failed auction lies a philosophical question: what does it mean to inhabit a country that’s both beloved and lethal? Keenan insists that survival requires humility before systems larger than commerce or courage—the climate, the ecology, the human community. The lesson is realistic but not hopeless: improvisation, shared labour, and ecological restraint can align survival with stewardship. You don’t defeat drought; you learn to live intelligently within it.

Core message

In the end, this book teaches that the bush tests not only endurance but ethics. The fight for cattle becomes a meditation on how integrity, cooperation, and respect for the land are the only sustainable currencies in a world that will keep burning, flooding, and drying without warning.

Every drought is an exam in realism. Keenan’s chapters on decision-making show how economic theory collapses into moral arithmetic when weather, health, and markets fail. You’re forced to inventory your world: feed left, bore depth, calving schedule, bank pressure. Each option—feed, sell, move—has visible pain built in. Feeding burns capital, selling invites ruinous prices, moving risks loss en route. Keenan’s planning at Myall Plains becomes an operations case study: quantify the crisis, identify time windows, and plan for partial rather than perfect survival.

Mapping a plan under uncertainty

His staged plan—advertising in Roma, scouting Amby Creek, splitting mobs—shows structured improvisation. It’s leadership by triage: decide what you can save, accept what you’ll lose. The insight lies in his empathy; he treats drought choices not as business optimization but as relational ethics—balancing duties to cattle, elderly parents, and the family home. His “checklist” blends logistics with humanity: who feeds the sick cows, who minds Mum, who handles local politics.

Markets, timing, and local intelligence

Drought crises compress time. Market slumps at Wodonga or freight backlogs make decisive timing everything. You learn that sound choices rest on real data and local knowledge—Wheat Board quotas, Mitchell grass viability, drover reputation. Sal’s oats rationing or Billy Little’s $1,800 per week droving quote show the concrete arithmetic behind each gamble. Ideal management disappears; only fast, humane judgement remains.

Lesson

Effective crisis leadership combines empirical assessment, empathy, and social organization. You cannot save the farm alone—you save it through people, numbers, and speed of response.

Drought turns water into currency and faith. At Mt Kennedy, every day revolves around the bore: start the diesel, watch the tank rise, pray the rods hold. Keenan’s detailed accounts of bore pulling, sabotaged pumps and fibreglass repairs reveal rural engineering at its most visceral. When the pump fails, there’s no plumber to call—you pull twenty-five rods by truck headlight. Water is both chemistry and morality: whoever repairs a bore restores life itself.

Machines with moods

He calls engines temperamental creatures—Southern Cross diesels that can kick back and throw a wrench. Maintenance becomes ritual. You balance run time to conserve fuel yet keep troughs full. Caroline and Rob Carr’s midnight repair scene represents partnership and technical grit, proof that survival demands hands-on literacy in every moving part of your infrastructure.

Logistics and trust

You also see social hydraulics: lending diesel, borrowing clamps, shuttling cattle sixteen at a time. Mechanics like Clayton and neighbours from Rowallan embody invisible infrastructure—friendship as plumbing. Swap the term “supply chain” for “borrowed Toyota at 3 a.m.” and you understand rural logistics. In this world, improvisation and human goodwill keep bores running as much as spanners and fuel drums.

Principle

Water security isn’t infrastructure—it’s networked competence: machines, neighbours, and the will to keep turning the crank even when your knees give out.

Movement defines rural survival. You learn that droving is both art and administration: paperwork, friendships, pacing cattle six kilometres a day between bores. Keenan’s accounts from Roma to Amby Creek transform logistics into literature. Every kilometre reveals risk—trucks bog, border rules shift, drivers clash. Yet the orchestration—the roadtrain, drover, and horse support—shows a complex human symphony keeping animals alive during collapse.

Infrastructure and improvisation

Planning a move needs maps of bores, permissions, day–night unloading windows. Each failure—a missing ramp, a fouled bore—spells losses. Quality drovers like Smokie or the Old Boy are difference-makers; their discipline becomes moral as well as practical. Keenan’s narrative insists that logistics in the bush are improvisation, never abstraction.

Human drama on the road

From pub fights at Mitchell to night unloading at Hebel, every logistical detail has human consequences. Pay disputes, exhaustion, and weather interact in real-time. Keenan highlights an often-missed truth: rural systems fail when social cohesion cracks. The mob walks only as fast as its drover’s decency.

Operational Insight

Efficiency equals empathy plus logistics. Machines move animals, but people move systems—and both are fragile.

In Keenan’s world, isolation breeds cooperation. Outback life runs on an unwritten law: don’t be a troublemaker, help when asked, and pay debts in kind. This ethic sustains everything from bore repairs to social peace. Scalp, the Hamiltons, Joan, Annette, Noel—all act from loyalty, not profit. The bush cannot survive on contracts; it survives on character.

Women as centre of gravity

Female labour underwrites the rural economy. Sal keeps Myall Plains standing; Annette and Joan feed and organise communities. Their resilience is unromantic but decisive—without them, men’s heroics amount to nothing. Keenan portrays women as stabilisers in chaos, a truth often absent from pastoral myth. (Note: this echoes the gender realism in Patsy Adam-Smith’s histories of the rail and bush.)

Pubs, kin and trust networks

Pubs in Roma or Muckadilla double as employment exchanges, gossip nodes and moral courts. Through bar talk and favours, you see how information flows faster than technology. Children like Nick and Richie inherit these codes, bridging generations as continuity agents. Keenan wants you to see that in the outback, community isn’t sentimental—it’s structural. Social capital literally keeps cattle watered and families housed.

Social Lesson

Relationships are infrastructure. Women’s unpaid labour and men’s public cooperation sustain survival as surely as rain or money.

Beyond drought, Keenan examines authority and law in thinly policed spaces. The Roma court, the Wild Bunch raids, and stock squad warnings reveal that rural justice depends on local discretion and practical outcomes. His charge for unauthorized horse use shows how rules designed for cities misfire when applied to desperate survival. The magistrate’s verdict—context over code—illustrates frontier ethics: law bends to circumstance when lives are on the line.

The Wild Bunch paradox

The Wild Bunch embody the blurred line between crime and custom. They steal and intimidate but also maintain a rough camaraderie. Mike’s confrontation resolves not in gunfire but negotiation—branding cleanskins together. It’s a moral realism: violence declines when both sides recognize shared dependence on the same fragile ecology. The police, aware of their own limits, quietly tolerate local accommodation.

Rural law as living memory

The reference to the legendary Harry Redford ties modern justice to colonial myth. The bush cultivates forgiveness for practical self-interest: survival trumps retribution. Formal policing merges with communal codes, creating a hybrid governance system that works not through texts but through reputation and restraint.

Moral Insight

Where institutions fail, ethics of necessity emerge. Frontier justice may be flawed, but it reminds you that social peace in isolation depends more on empathy than punishment.

As the narrative widens, Keenan reframes drought as symptom of ecological-economic imbalance. Clearing brigalow and pine belts, planting buffel grass, and over-reliance on mechanised agriculture create a boom–bust cycle. The same system that produces profit one year leaves bare dust the next. Add collapsing cattle prices and bank retrenchment, and you see a self-reinforcing trap. The farmers aren’t mismanaging—they’re compelled to gamble within a flawed national model.

Environmental feedback loops

Aboriginal fire regimes once maintained mosaics of renewal; modern clearing homogenises vulnerability. Keenan shows that leaving tree corridors and resisting total clearing improves both ecological stability and market endurance. Buffel grass’s “three-year luck” typifies false security—lush years breed debt, followed by erosion. His argument sounds early ecological economics: short-term intensification breeds long-term fragility.

Market and policy neglect

Without subsidies or safety nets, rural citizens bear systemic risk alone. Keenan predicts historians will label the 20th century’s inland expansion a “great agrarian blunder.” It’s both lament and policy call: if national prosperity rests on land, stewardship must count as economic rationality, not charity.

Takeaway

Ecology and economy share one ledger. Every decision that boosts yields today writes tomorrow’s loss—unless you plan for resilience rather than extraction.

The title phrase “The Horses Too Are Gone” captures the disappearance of a cultural ecosystem. Horses once structured labour, pace, and pride. When they vanish under motorised efficiency, something human vanishes too. Horses like Circus and Yarramin are individual characters whose deaths mark the erosion of bush craftsmanship and kinship with animals. The decline of horsemanship parallels the decline of self-reliance and sensory intimacy with country.

Skills turned heritage

Noel’s brumby breaking, Mick’s bull marking, or Bill Anderson’s racing know-how represent embodied wisdom—skills learned by touch, not manual. As machines replace them, entire vocabularies fade. Keenan treats this not as nostalgia but as philosophical loss: when the relationship between human and land becomes mediated by fuel and finance, humility disappears.

Continuity through adaptation

Yet he ends without bitterness. The same communities adapt. Horses recede but the code—courage, care, cooperation—endures in new forms of work and family. The literal horses may be gone, but their ethic—patience, mutual dependence, and grace under strain—remains Keenan’s prescription for surviving the next drought.

Symbolic Insight

The horse stands for a vanishing moral ecology: when you lose your oldest companion to efficiency, you risk forgetting what partnership with the land once meant.