O'Connell, one of the nation's foremost working dog trainers, is never so candid, of course, for fear of causing offence. But the notion that any errant behaviour on the part of the dog owes to the dog and the dog alone is, he told me, the central misconception grounding attitudes to working dogs in Australia.

"The people here," he said, motioning towards the dozen or so who were attending Elanco's exclusive training event in Skipton, "they are good people, but they don't have the knowledge to train a working dog, and too often they resort back to the old methods because it's all they know, it's all they've seen."

'Old methods', in this context, is something of a polite euphemism for training methods that turn primarily on fear, sometimes violence - the received wisdom that working dogs can only be perfected or 'broken in' through a blended combination of pain and punishment.

But reality is otherwise, says O'Connell, who has devoted his life to erasing these misguided truths from the minds of generations of farmers across south-east Australia.

In O'Connell's view, it's not dogs which require 'breaking-in' as such, but people, or at least those who recognise fear and coercion as an element of the natural order of things, rather than anathema to positive outcomes.

"Society has moved on in many ways," O'Connell explained to me. "We've had horse whispering for 20, 30 years - there's no more of this 'breaking in' things."

"But we're dragging the chain big time when it comes to our working dogs, and we need to smarten up."

O'Connell is one of those people who has a certain, almost ineffable presence about them - the kind of quiet confidence which naturally puts him at ease with most people. He's also one of those gifted souls who finds teaching and public speaking as easy as breathing.

"This idea that we need electric collars or need to 'knock that out of it and this out of it'," he said, with all eyes trained on him. "I'm damned if know where it fits into training at all. It just doesn't, it absolutely doesn't."

"I've seen all that, and I've seen the results of it - it's an act of violence. We hear about violence against women, violence against children, well to me you can also have violence against animals, and it's usually the males who are the perpetrators."

It's true O'Connell expressed himself with gravity, but it was without pretence. He avoided sounding sanctimonious precisely because his sole mission was to sheet home the death of these ideas, and everyone knew it.

Away from the group, it emerged O'Connell's views were coloured by his formative years, having "cut his teeth" on a farm in western Victoria where the old ways of doing things prevailed.

"I grew up on a farm where all the stock work was done on horses out in the bush with working dogs," he told me. "I used to see things, awful things, that I didn't like happening," he added, without elaborating.

"It was then I thought, 'there has to be better way of doing this', so I started playing around [with different methods] and taught myself."

With hindsight, it proved to be one of those singular life-changing moments you commonly encounter in novels, it having marked the dawn of O'Connell's overarching philosophy to working dog training.

At once radical and simple, its target was nothing more, and nothing less, than mutual respect: the notion that without mutual respect and trust, the relationship between man and dog is doomed for failure.

"There needs to be mutual trust and desire to like each other and trust each other - there's no other way," he said.

From this was born a comprehensive, fail-proof dog training system, based on positive reinforcement. Perfected over decades of trial and error, the same system saw O'Connell go on to claim seven state trial championships and become a judge in several other state and national championships - achievements which of themselves lend an irreducible force to anything dog-related O'Connell says.

Listening to O'Connell, the first thing you learn is that the defining condition of any good dog handler is patience. From this, it follows that the natural starting point, when training a working dog, is to temper expectations.

"I have a rule of thumb that a one-year-old dog is the equivalent of a seven-year-old child, so if you've got a six-month-old pup out working sheep on its own, you've really thrown them into the deep end," he said, adding that "it's the equivalent of a three-and-half-year-old child driving a B-double."

O'Connell himself only starts to train his kelpies in the art of the working dog when they have some "grey matter" - say, around the age of three; the reason being, he said, that dogs - like humans - carry the same propensity to burn-out if worked too hard, too soon.

"You need to let them grow into their work; they'll choose when they're ready," O'Connell said. "They all have the desire to work, but you've got to go by their temperament - if they're not ready, give them a big pat, and then gradually bring them back, giving them that opportunity. Eventually the light-bulb comes on."

To demonstrate the point, O'Connell - who hails from Hamilton way - would mine his quarry of useful stories, drawing on his life experience as both a trainer, kelpie breeder and as a farmer in his own right. In this instance, he told the class about Wasabi and Thelma - two young kelpies he said he'd trained, but not named.

The difference in temperament between the two kelpies, in the beginning, he said, was palpable. Unlike Wasabi, whose natural instincts saw him take an eager interest in the stock, in Thelma the sheep sparked little more than an idle interest, at least at first.

"Thelma went in [the sheep yard] twice and did nothing," he said. "So, we took her straight out, gave her a big pat and brought her back later - a month, two months, or a week or a day. We did that twice, and the third time she come back, 'bang!' she was into it."

The importance of matching the dog's genetics with the task at hand was also brought into sharp relief, as was the futility of tying up a young pup to watch older dogs in action: "Don't think [the pup] will learn anything - it's just psyching them up," he told the group.

Using his own untrained, three-year-old kelpie Milly as an example, O'Connell then imparted the cardinal importance of using implacably clear body language vis-à-vis the dog.

"Dogs are very aware and responsive to people's body language," he said, as turned himself around, so he was coming from behind the stock - something, he says, reduces the dog's stress. "A dog is a lot happier coming to the back of you than it is to the front of you."

Standing in a small sheep yard with six or seven sheep, O'Connell then gently guided Milly back and forth using a rake - or "arm-extension", as he called it - all the while showering Milly with emphatic praise - "good dog, good girl" - when she did the right thing.

As Milly aptly demonstrated, in quick time the dog learns the meaning of the commands, enabling the dog handler to discard the rake and instead control the dog's movements off their own body - first, by using their arms, and then - if particularly confident - the discreet movement of one's feet.

"See how I'm just encouraging her to use her natural instincts - you need to make it so she gets her confidence up. That is dog training, that's how easy it is," O'Connell said. "It becomes an absolute pleasure to get out of bed in the morning."

Later, O'Connell told me that dogs have no way of understanding people who yell and scream instructions at them, especially when the meaning of those instructions haven't been made clear.

"[Dogs have] got no idea what that human noise is, which is why we've got to find a way of showing the dog what [those instructions] mean," he said, adding that the lock and key in all of this was positive reinforcement.

"The dog doesn't get her reward [the praise] unless she does exactly what I say," he said. "That's why it's so important you constantly praise them as they're learning what the command means."

Expanding on this, O'Connell laboured the point: "Positive reinforcement is not just a fluffy word. There's no reason to raise your voice or use pain or fear or anything negative; it's just all about working in sync with the dog."

"Use the arm extension to show the dog what you want it to do, put a command in and when it does it, praise it. It will learn."

As it happens, O'Connell's methods are backed by science, with recent studies revealing that dogs trained via the 'old ways' had high levels of the stress hormone, cortisol, and were invariably tense and withdrawn as a result. The dogs who underwent positive reinforcement conversely didn't disclose any difference in their cortisol levels.

The truth, O'Connell said, is that anyone can have a first-class working dog - provided they are schooled in the methods of positive reinforcement and have the patience to form that all important bond with the dog.

Citing the late Greg Prince, one of Australia's most celebrated dog trainers, O'Connell said it was - as Prince famously claimed - possible to train a dog in eight hours.

"That doesn't mean you get up on Sunday morning and by Sunday night you have a trained dog. It means you have a whole lot of five- or ten-minute sessions," he said, noting the eight hours don't account for all the time you need to spend with your dog as a companion, a friend.

"Dogs aren't a piece of machinery where you can just leave them in a kennel or shed - that's bad. A dog has an innate desire to be a part of a human's life; the most important thing is that you have them with you at every opportunity."

Some fifty years ago, at the time the United States formally recognised the Australian kelpie as an official breed, a brief New York Times article appeared, detailing the dog's innate tendency to brilliance.

"Directed by sign and whistle, [the kelpie] rounds up the sheep and can read hand signals even at a distance," the article read. "In sheep stations Down Under, owners brag that it would take half-a-dozen men to accomplish the work of one kelpie when it comes to moving a flock."

When I mentioned this to O'Connell, he wasn't surprised. In his view, the summation, if anything, probably understated the true worth of working dogs, especially kelpies.

"I've seen dogs do things that 100 humans couldn't do, I really have," he said. "They're the unsung heroes of the nation and deserve to be celebrated, but they're not treated accordingly. There's just a total lack of knowledge out there."

Towards the end of our conversation, the full significance of O'Connell's life struck me - the way he had woven the emotional and physical pain he'd observed in dogs as a child into the fabric of his own life to forge a path away from the old school of doing things.

When asked to reflect on the most satisfying part of his training schools, he paused, and exhaled slowly, and then his answer came.

"I want to make dogs' lives better by teaching people that pain or fear is detrimental to the outcome," he said. "Two or three years later [after the training sessions], you get feedback. You also get the ripple effect, where people have shared their tips with others, and that's rewarding."

"When I achieve that, and when I'm out with a young dog somewhere nurturing them and I can see that they're learning, that's when I'm in my happy place."

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