When Beck Smith needs something done on her 53,000-hectare cattle station, all she has to say is “righto”.

Smith has trained her pack of working dogs, including sprightly three-year-old border collie Duke, to spring into action as soon as they hear that simple command.

“It’s the magic word,” she said from her property near Stonehenge in Queensland’s channel country.

“If they hear that word, that means we’re out of our pens, we’re allowed off the car, we’re allowed in the yards and we’re allowed to go and do some work.”

It appears to have done the trick for Duke, who has taken out a national working dog challenge by covering 556-kilometres in three weeks’ work.

On Monday the goodest boy was crowned the winner of the Cobber Challenge, which uses GPS collars to track the distance, speed and hours clocked up by farm dogs across Australia as they work livestock.

NSW farmer Denzel Bambridge and his kelpie-collie cross Buck came in second place, covering 316 kilometres.

Tahlia Carroll and her kelpie Stan, also from NSW, came in third, covering 184 kilometres.

Over the challenge’s decade run, competitors have clocked-up combined distances equivalent to 2½ laps around Australia, according to the organisers.

Smith said she wasn’t surprised by the enormous distance Duke covered, considering he has to zig-zag around thickets of mulga scrub on the vast outback property.

“I’m grateful that it was him and not myself,” she said.

“I wouldn’t be as happy as he is at the end of it, that’s for sure.”

The leggy black and white canine has proved a once-in-a-lifetime dog for Smith, who went against her better judgment and bought him when she already had another pup in training.

After devastating floods inundated much of their region in early 2025, Duke loyally helped Smith on an eight-hour trek to get a sick bull to safety.

“Every time I lost sight of the bull, Duke would turn up and then go back to the bull and we finally got him home,” Smith said.

“Because of Duke, I got the bull home where he needed to be.”

Duke is part of Smith’s beloved “zoo crew”, alongside goats, poddy calves, ducks, geese and a muster cat named Mango. The outback menagerie keeps her company as she manages the farm alone.

“There’s been plenty of tears and everything this year, but if I didn’t have animals it would have been a lot tougher.

“They say a lot by saying nothing at all.”

-AAP