Farewell Tiger Hunter, a resolute legend of the bush and back roads of Bribbaree

In 1983, a searing industrial dispute over shearers combs saw union officials facing off against farmers over a front gate west of Young, and just as diplomacy was winning the day, a bunch of horse floats rolled up and out poured six polocrosse players.

Some say they were whirling stirrup irons but “Tiger” Hunter said it was just ropes they wielded as they pushed through the bilious gathering, lining up before the gate ready for any lack of restraint.

Tiger had been mid-match down at Bribbaree when the call came that he was needed.

“I just said to the lads we’d better go, so we loaded the floats and went up there,” he said.

Their arrival couldn’t have been more surprising to both sides, certainly to AWU hardliner Ernie Ecob who had just about seen it all.

But it most certainly commands a chapter in local folklore, one small tale among a huge cache of stories around the multifaceted, certainly fabled Maurice “Tiger” Hunter who passed away last week.

A man of the land, Tiger was a teller of tales, spinner of yarns. A bit of a rogue in riding boots, he’d enter a pub on a horse, chase brumbies in the mountains, turn a loss at a polocrosse match into “we let them win”, enjoy a few beers but still turn up with his horse in a float well before dawn on Anzac Day. A man with a strong sense of duty, he was loyal, polite, principled, stubborn, fiercely competitive, highly opinionated and he was underpinned by humaneness and compassion.

It stands to reason his father, Bill, would defer to calling young Maurice “a little Tiger” because there was no mistaking his capacity to raise mischief.

Raised tough, back in the post-Depression late 30s their family persevered with farming at Condobolin, where the first two crops failed [grasshoppers, rabbits] before yielding an income from the third.

Bill and Elsie would eventually return home, settling at “Kilburnie” between Thuddungra and Bribbaree, with their four children.

Of his childhood Tiger said it was, “absolutely wonderful, had nothing but had plenty”.

When the nation groaned under plague populations of around 600 million rabbits, Tiger said you could see them travelling up the Bribbaree Road like a wave of water; so as war raged across Europe, it was a very different type of war he was involved with as a youngster, alongside others, trapping rabbits for lorries already bulging with carcasses.

Land where slopes fall to plains were his backyard; his early memories were seasoned with adventure atop “Bomber”, a small pony who started life in 1939, the same night a Tiger Moth aircraft had force landed in a paddock nearby and so named for this conspicuous event.

Tiger didn’t much like institutions, but attended the tiny weatherboard Thuddungra Public School.

He courted trouble, the harmless endlessly entertaining type where rocks would be chucked onto the roof of homesteads until someone came raging outside, to scarpering feet.

And there were his run-ins with the law during regular escapes from Canberra Grammar School, which he attended as a boarder.

“One time we nearly got to Hall and we looked up and saw a police car coming, so we pulled up, put our bikes on the side of an old tank on the road and hid in the tank,” he said. “The sarge, he was good about it, he used to come and get us all the time.

“He walked around and he said, ‘How’re you going boys?’ Not too bad, Sarge. ‘Where are you off to?’ We’re going home until you come along,” Tiger recalled, “and he said to us, ‘Next time you hide you might want to put your bikes behind the tank.’”

Tiger had some great loves – the first was Margaret Napier whom he would meet at a ball at Bimbi Hall, thanks to his date for the night, Helen Nowlan, who introduced them.

Margaret and Tiger were married 54 years, raising five children – Michael, Victoria, Howard, Lisa and Matthew on “Richlands”, the family property at the base of Bribbaree Mountain on Hunters Lane.

He said the family’s greatest test was the loss of their house to fire in the 1980s. “We had five children and nothing else, not even a toothbrush.”

He also loved horses. If he took a liking to one it would never leave “Richlands” and any event involving a horse, Tiger would be there, sidling up on a giant black gelding with an unmentionable name, pushing and shoving his way though, until he was almost on top of you, laughing and ready with yarns.

In the saddle he was carefree and at ease, fearless and unflappable, formidable in competition.

Tiger was still astride a horse until just last year – as he turned 87, 48 years of that playing polocrosse tournaments, including five Australian Masters.

While eking out a stronghold for generations of Hunters, there’s no mistaking that rare genetic predisposition of horsemanship he credits his father Bill with, that remains inherent in his children and grandchildren, all first-rate riders, including Young’s own Man from Snowy River, King of the Ranges in grandson Kieran Davidson.

Next week as Tiger is laid to rest, stories will abound. Among them likely the one he told up bush from back in the 80s, as drought prevailed and farmers were shooting sheep.

It was November, and he was arguing the price of a mob of 375 young ewes.

“He wanted 20 cents and I wanted 25 cents; I wasn’t prepared to lose five cents a sheep to a buyer,” he said, “but as I was taking the mob back to the paddock, I heard the Sydney City Mission were looking for donations.”

Nobody, especially sceptical farmers at a local Pastures Protection Board meeting, believed that Tiger could pull off his next move.

But the upshot was 375 needy families in Sydney received large boxes of meat for Christmas.

A service to celebrate Tiger’s life will be held Tuesday 23 July at St John’s Anglican Church Young, commencing at 11 am. This will be followed by a private family burial.