Gone to the dogs
Sunday, 15 February 2026
Mike White is a senior writer and columnist.
OPINION: I’d driven past it goodness knows how many times, without stopping.
Chances are, you have too: On the left as you head towards Cromwell, a wee cluster of tin sheds, just before you hit the lake.
It’s the home of the Lowburn Collie Dog Club, and it’s become a bit of an iconic highwayside site. Something quintessentially Kiwi, something unadorned and unaffected, something down to earth, down the road.
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Early each year, the club convenes for two days to hold its trials, exhibitions of stealth and skill, noise and bullying.
It’s the relationship between humans and their best friends in one of its most wonderful forms.
In a week that’s given us Super Bowl LX, the Winter Olympics’ opening, and the start of the T20 cricket world cup, I was far more entranced with the Lowburn dog trials.
Dog trialling actually began not far from here, in Wānaka, in 1867.
The Lowburn club started in 1914, following arguments among locals about who had the best dogs, and trials have run ever since, bar breaks during the Depression and WWII.
In the late 80s, the club’s grounds were threatened by the Clyde Dam, which was set to flood the Clutha River valley to create Lake Dunstan.
But local pressure and benign belligerence saved the day. The hero was landowner Charlie Perriam, who stared down Ministry of Works bureaucrats until they agreed to re-route the road to save the trial grounds, and re-locate the club buildings above the tide line.
As you drive past the club, you’ll glimpse Charlie’s Bar: That’s Charlie Perriam.
One of the reasons the bar was built in the first place was because competitors used to disappear down the road to the Lowburn pub during trials, and it was a bugger of a job to get them back to the grounds to run their dogs.
Opposite Charlie’s Bar is the cookhouse, where sustenance is served, from cold meats to sweet treats.
In the old days, they had two coal ranges, burning in the fury of midsummer.
Meals were prepared by women called Mavis and Mabel and Nellie and Winnie and Fay and Eunice. Just as fashion has seen such names vanish from popularity, so too has electricity and efficiency seen the extraordinary skill of cooking scones this way become extinct.
But dog trialling remains the same.
Out at the long head event (dogs sprint up an improbable hill, hook round and hunker above three sheep, and then herd them down the slope to a circle where their master waits), Neville Hore was just coming back from running one of his dogs.
“You’d think the dog would need a drink, but I do,” Hore joked as he grabbed a Speight’s and waited for his next run.
It was hot, one of those days when the sun was so fierce it faded the blue in the sky.
The dogs did need a drink, tongues drooping, lungs pumping, as they lay in the slim shade of utes.
Hore, a two-time national champion, was soon back in action, with his dog Frank.
Keeping an eye on them was Kerry Chittock, another top triallist.
He watched as the sheep got away a bit from Frank at the top, and Chittock figured it might wreck Hore’s chances of a win.
“But you never know. And you never give up - and that’s one guy that never gives up,” Chittock said, pointing his chin at Hore.
“A bit like on a rugby paddock - you’re not going to get on the team if you want to give up.”
Chittock had been a musterer since he left school, owned a farm for 30 years, and when he sold that, “I thought, bugger it, I want to have a good go at the dogs, before I go in the hole. And that’s why I do it.
“People say, ‘Oh, you should go and play golf.’ This is my golf.”
Frank brought the merinos down to the flats fast, and soon had them in the circle with Hore. He had a black patch around his left eye, and the physique and gait of an endurance athlete.
Hore was sanguine about their run.
“Well, I got them back, eh,” he said, smiling a smile that hinted it was more about the sport than the result.
The result wasn’t bad, though. Hore and Frank got third, with Chittock and Tilly winning, after two days of competition.
All weekend, tourists in campervans roared past along the highway that separated the trial courses from Charlie’s Bar and the cookhouse.
On their way somewhere, on their way to some sight everyone else was also going to, on their way to get photos exactly like everyone else’s, for their social media bragging.
You kind of wished they’d slowed down, pulled over, and got out, and for a while, watched one of the most modest but magnificent spectacles you can see in New Zealand.
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