CHAPTER IX
LIFE ON THE SHEEP STATIONS
SOME of the Australian squatters and their managers live like lords. Their low, one-story houses roofed with galvanized iron have a score or more rooms looking out over wide verandas that run along the front. There are many servants and the station is often more like the estate of a feudal baron than that of an ordinary farmer. Most of the sheep men are well educated, many are college-bred, and their homes show all the evidences of culture and taste. One squatter has a picture gallery that cost him one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, and others have music rooms and fine libraries. The leading Australian and London newspapers are to be found at all the stations. Whatever else is lacking, one is sure to see a well-read Sydney Bulletin lying about.
Most of the stations have large stables, with horses for the use of the men employed on the estate and for pleasure riding and driving, as well. They are usually well supplied with guns and fishing tackle, and not infrequently have tennis, cricket, croquet, and golf grounds.
Far from being slack about social forms, the people on the best sheep stations are more careful about matters of etiquette than those in the cities. It is the usual thing to dress for the evening, and, although there may not be a stranger within fifty miles, the men will appear night after night in dinner coats and the ladies in décolleté gowns. In travelling through the country every gentleman carries a dress suit with him: If he goes away from the railroad he usually tucks his evening clothes in his saddle bags or in the back of his automobile.
No matter how far out in the country they may live, both men and women pay a great deal of attention to dress, and on some of the stations a hundred miles from nowhere the latest fashions are as much in demand as in the Australian metropolis. Many of the belles of the Queensland “bush” come regularly to Brisbane and carry back wardrobes to astonish their rivals. The fair country girls of New South Wales get their fashions from Sydney and those of Victoria send to Melbourne for new clothes once or twice a year. A great deal of ordering is done by mail. One reads a good deal about the loneliness of the life in the “bush,” or “out back,” or “in the back blocks,” as the rural districts of Australia are called here. But it is my observation that, except in the most sparsely settled areas, the station dwellers have a social life of their own. For one thing, they have become used to the great distances and make nothing of visiting trips that we should consider long journeys. It is not uncommon for a young man or a young woman to ride or drive fifteen miles to take a cup of tea with a friend. At the dances, guests come from forty and fifty miles around, dance all night, and then start back at daybreak. The stations are noted for their hospitality. When a caller arrives, whether friend or stranger, everyone takes it for granted that he will stay overnight.
The automobile has worked wonders in both the social and the business life of “outback” Australia. Long inspection journeys or trips to town are now easier matters than when horses were the sole means of getting about. A homestead may be one or two hundred miles from the nearest railroad station, but the owner thinks little of running in to take the train for a business trip to the city. Sometimes, of course, the country is soaked with rain and the motor cars must be laid up for a few days. But, in general, the automobile has replaced other vehicles and is considered an absolute necessity. This is especially true for those who run several stations. I have heard of one man, for example, who has five ranches at an average of seventy-five miles apart. Two of these he visits every week, while he gets around to the others at least twice a month. He keeps a car on each of the properties as well as one at Melbourne, where the stock and wool are marketed. His bill for gasoline, oil, and repairs is more than five thousand dollars a year, but he considers this merely necessary overhead, as he says he could not well carry on his business without the cars.
Saddle horses are still indispensable on the big farms, however, and there seems no likelihood that Australia will ever stop breeding the fine horses for which she is famous. Besides, these people are racing enthusiasts, and there is great rivalry between the stables of many of the sheep men. Every town has its track, to which the station men come from a hundred miles around whenever there is a race meeting.
The big stations are often owned by syndicates or wealthy men living in Sydney or some other city, the ranches being in charge of managers, some of whom started in as “jackeroos.” “Jackeroo” is the name given the young man who begins as a ranch hand with the idea of learning the business. In the old days he was frequently a well-born young Britisher sent out ostensibly to gain experience in sheep raising, but really to be kept out of the way of mischief at home.
The “jackeroos” were divided into classes, each with its special nickname. The “gold tail” paid sometimes as much as fifteen hundred dollars for the privilege of watching the sheep and learning how to handle them. He usually stood well with the proprietor and had something of a place in society. The “silver tail” paid nothing and, as a rule, got nothing except experience, while the “copper tail” was paid a small stipend for his work. The “experience” of the “gold tails” usually consisted in hunting, galloping at breakneck speed over the vast plains, horse racing, and making love to any attractive girls they could find. After a year or two some returned to Old England. But many stayed on and became real sheep men, winning their share of the Golden Fleece.
To-day the “jackeroos” are sober and serious young fellows, mostly sons of overseers, managers, and small graziers, who get wages from the start. Their status differs from that of the other station hands only in their having separate living quarters and, on some ranches, eating at the owner’s or manager’s table.
Like the men, the women on the sheep stations are much out of doors, and many of them have in times of necessity taken over the management of great flocks.
Shearing sheep is done with machine clippers, which are quicker than hand shears, less wasteful of the wool, and not likely to wound the sheep. A good workman will shear one hundred sheep a day.
Australia supports sixteen sheep for every person in her population. Millions of acres of land unsuitable for farming or cattle furnish sufficient pasturage for sheep.
A big sheep station nowadays is, as I have said, a large-size business proposition, requiring competent managers and overseers. On the more important stations there are bookkeepers and storekeepers. Nearly every one has its blacksmiths and carpenters, its gardeners, hostlers, garage men, and men of all work. The managers are skilled men who get high salaries, for the station’s profit depends largely upon them. They are usually expert sheep breeders and are always trying to improve their stock. I know of one manager, for instance, in charge of fifty thousand sheep, who asserts that he has increased his wool crop more than seventy-five thousand pounds a year by developing sheep that yield heavier fleeces. At an average of, say, thirty cents a pound, an additional seventy-five thousand pounds of wool would mean twenty-two thousand five hundred dollars a year more profit, or enough to pay the salary of an expensive manager several times over.
I might be inclined to doubt this manager’s claims had I not learned from government officials that the average weight of the Merino fleece for all Australia has been increased by three pounds. This is largely the result of expert breeding. Some of the best fleeces now run to eight and nine pounds each.
The sheep-station men who lead the most lonely lives are the boundary riders. They go along the fences day after day and see that the gates are closed and everything is all right. They spend their time in the saddle, riding forty, fifty, and sometimes a hundred miles daily. They carry their blankets with them and sleep on the ground, hobbling their horses beside them.
The real aristocrats of the sheep business are those who clip the wool from the animals’ backs. Sheep shearing is almost a profession in Australia. There are thousands who do nothing else, and they form one of the most important classes of Australian workmen. In the old days the sheep shearer was dependent on the wool growers, taking work wherever he could get it and living in any kind of quarters the station might see fit to give him. But this has changed, and now he dictates terms to the sheep men, with special laws in every state to back him up. The employer must provide decent accommodations and had best handle the men with gloves, or else he will have to reckon with the shearers’ union, one of the most powerful in the Commonwealth. When shearing time comes, the squatter signs a contract, made out according to a prescribed form; and, as a rule, this agreement is rigidly lived up to by both parties. One of the union rules most strictly enforced is that no shearer can be compelled to shear wet sheep. Yet, if he has arrived in the station and finds the sheep wet, he must be paid for the time he waits for their wool to dry out. This is sometimes a hardship for the employer, for even in dry seasons the heavy fleeces absorb considerable moisture.
The season lasts for nine months. Gangs of shearers start in Queensland, where it is warmest, and then work their way south from station to station until they reach the island state of Tasmania. From there some of the shearers go over to New Zealand, which has a still later season.
Every station has its shearing shed, with barracks for the men. The shearers furnish their own food, buying it of the squatter at wholesale prices. Each gang of shearers has its own cook, and they usually live very well.
In the past many of the shearers were drunkards. They would work at a station until the job was completed, and then take their wages to the nearest public house and there consume them in liquor. Sometimes, they would hand their money over to the saloon-keeper and tell him to keep an account and put them out when the money was gone, a bargain promptly fulfilled by the publican. To-day many of these men are frugal and temperate. They shear for a few years, getting a thousand dollars or more a season, and then invest their savings in stock of their own.
Nowadays the sheep are practically all sheared by machines, somewhat like a barber’s clippers, which are run by steam, compressed air, or electricity. The clippers are fastened to a flexible tube like that connecting a dentist’s drill with its motor. They consist of little knives which move backward and forward over each other at the rate of two thousand times a minute and cut through the wool as a hot knife cuts through butter, taking it off more smoothly and cleanly than by hand. I have seen sheep shorn in this way so that their skins were as smooth as the nap of fine cloth, and as they scampered off they seemed to be clad in soft, white, velvety coats. The managers tell me that, as compared with shearing by hand, the machines save from a quarter to a half pound of wool per sheep, and that there is less danger of cutting the skin than in hand shearing. The average number shorn by each machine is a little more than one hundred per day. Some men can shear more than one hundred per day by hand, and one man is known to have cut the wool from three hundred and twenty-one sheep in one day with a pair of hand shears.
After the wool is shorn it is sorted according to the part of the animal from which it came. On some stations it is put up in bales of three hundred and ninety pounds. Getting the wool to market is a considerable item in the station’s expenses, especially if it is situated far from a railroad. While motor trucks and tractors are coming into use, much of the clip is still hauled on carts drawn by oxen. Some carts will carry ten tons, a yoke of eight or ten oxen being used to pull them.
The bullock drivers, or “bullockies,” as they are called in this land of nicknames, are familiar figures in Australia’s sheep country. Many of them have no other homes than their great, creaking carts, and these often form the homes of their families as well. Such outfits sometimes even include goats to furnish milk on the way.
The “bullockies” spend their lives crawling along the lonely roads behind their slow-moving oxen. In the back blocks they will tell you stories of big loads and record trips. One bullock driver hired a brass band to meet his biggest load of wool at the edge of the railroad town, which he entered with a flourish that brought all the population out to do him honour. A New South Wales “bullocky” drove a team of forty-two oxen ninety-two miles with a load of one hundred and forty-four bales of wool. His team was yoked four abreast and they were kept on the move by the cracks of a whip loaded with ten pounds of shot to weight the lash. Their driver probably used also a steady stream of the profanity for which all Australian “bullockies” are noted.
Another character of the life of the sheep stations is the “sun-downer,” a tramp whose like I have not met in any other part of the world. He will not work, but he travels about on foot from station to station, carrying a can for making his tea and a blue blanket for a bed. From the colour of his blanket he is sometimes called a “humping bluey.”
When the “sun-downers” arrive at a station they call upon the manager, demand food, and always get it. They are so common that custom has fixed their ration at one pound of flour, half a pound of sugar, and two ounces of tea. In some places little shanties have been put up to accommodate them overnight. Some of these tramps are men who have made a failure in Australia, but many of them are rovers from all over the world, ship deserters, and adventurers, who, after a season or two, move on to some other land.
Many a sheep station is a community in itself, with its carpenter and blacksmith shops, its laundry, and its outlying houses and native huts clustered around the dwelling of the owner or manager.
From the time he can be lifted to a horse’s back, the Australian is an enthusiast about riding and racing. Even a small meet may be the signal for a general holiday and an exodus from work.
The boundary rider is much away from home, spending his days in the saddle and many of his nights in the open. It is his job to see that the rabbit fences are intact, the gates closed, and the flocks secure.