CHAPTER VIII
IN THE GREAT WOOL MARKET
SYDNEY is the chief wool market of Australia. It annually ships hundreds of millions of pounds to Europe, Japan, and the United States, and it has some of the largest wool warehouses on the globe. Let us take a walk through one of them. We are in a great room covering many acres. It is roofed with glass and upon its floors are thousands of bales of wool, each as high as your shoulder and marked with the name of the station from which it came. All are wrapped in yellow bagging, but the tops are open and the white wool seems to have burst forth and to be pouring out upon the floor.
In parts of the warehouse are mountains of wool which have been taken out of the bales, and in other places men are repacking the wool for shipment. Thrust your hand into one of the piles. Now look at it! It shines as though it were coated with vaseline and your cuff is soiled with the grease; for this is unscoured wool, just as it came from the sheep’s back.
All of the Australian wool clip is sold at auction, and the sales are attended by wool buyers from England, continental Europe, the United States, and Japan. We see many of them in the Sydney warehouses dressed in overalls and linen coats to protect their clothes from the greasy wool. They go from bale to bale, taking notes of each man’s stock, in order that they may know how much to offer when it is put up at the Sydney Wool Exchange.
The Exchange is near the wharves in the heart of the city. It is a long, narrow room, much like a chapel, with an auctioneer’s desk like a pulpit in one end of it. The various wholesale dealers or commission merchants are allotted different days on which they may auction off their stock, and on those days the buyers come to bid. As many as ten thousand bales are sometimes sold in one day, and single sales will foot up as much as three quarters of a million dollars. Cable reports are received as to the prices in the great wool markets over the world, and the excitement rises and falls with the quotations.
I had a chat with one of the largest wool dealers. He told me that some years ago almost all the wool of Australia was shipped by the squatters direct to London, and there resold and reshipped. At present the greater part of the product is shipped to commission agents at the Australian ports, to which the textile-manufacturing countries send their buyers.
The prices of wool vary according to quality, and the quality varies with the breed of the sheep and the part of the animal’s body from which it is clipped. The coarse wool sometimes brings only about eighteen cents a pound, but for the last ten years the price of the best wool has averaged forty-four cents a pound in Australia and has gone as high as a dollar a pound in London. Some flocks have won such reputations for producing fine wool that their fleeces always bring better prices. I have before me a list of some of the wool sales of one year, showing that certain wool growers got as much as five cents a pound more than the market rates.
Few people realize how many factors enter into the quality of wool and go to determine its value and use. The grading of wool is a science and must be done by experts. It is taught in the agricultural colleges of Australia, and at Sydney there are night classes where the students learn about sheep and wool. They study the different breeds, and practise grading and classifying baled wool, which is sent to the school by the dealers. In apron and overalls, each student goes through the bales picking out the good and bad wool and sorting it according to quality. He is taught also how to shear sheep, how to scour wool, and, in fact, every process in the growing and marketing of the product. The English mills often send their young men to Australia to learn the business at first hand. Some years ago there was a blind buyer at Boston who operated with success, making his purchases by the touch and odour. He could tell not only the quality of the wool, but the section of the country or the part of the world from which it came.
Because it is well adapted to dry climates, the Merino sheep is the breed preferred in Australia, although the strain is modified by cross-breeding to suit different conditions. The sheep on the great plains country are of the large, robust type found to give the biggest returns on such areas. On the highlands, where the pasturage is lighter and the climate colder, a small Merino is raised that yields an extra fine fleece. In the western part of the state of Victoria is still another type, which produces the best Merino wool in the world. Upon this wool certain mills in Europe, America, and Japan are absolutely dependent for the manufacture of some of their goods.
Wools differ in their wave or curl and in other particulars that will show up in weaving. The other day I was shown some Merino wool under the microscope. To the naked eye the wool, as it comes from the sheep, seems to be made of fine curly hairs. It is only by putting it under a microscope that one can see it differs from hair. Enlarged to the size of a lead pencil, each wool fibre is seen to be covered with sharp scales which overlap one another like those of a fish. The scales are so close together that there are several thousand of them on a piece of the fibre an inch long. The fibre is so fine that a pound of it can be spun into a thread one hundred miles long. When wool is spun and woven, the scales interlock and thus give the thread or fabric its strength.
I have had a talk about the growth of Australia’s wool industry with one of the old-time squatters, a man who has been raising sheep for many years and who has now about fifty thousand head in two different stations. Said he:
“We have fewer sheep in Australia than we had ten years ago. Here in New South Wales we then had nearly forty million, and to-day we have approximately thirty-three million. We have lost some by drought and some by overstocking, and have now just about what we can easily feed.”
“Where did your first sheep come from?” I asked.
“They were brought over from England by the convicts,” was the reply. “When Captain Phillip came here in 1788 he brought twenty-nine sheep and other live stock. These sheep did very well, and a few years after that Captain Macarthur started the movement to make a sheep country of Australia. Macarthur was a military man with a scientific bent. He had a farm near Sydney and experimented in crossing some East Indian rams and Irish ewes, and as a result produced wool better than that of either of the forebears. He then experimented with the Merinos. You know, perhaps, that up to that time the finest wool all came from Spain, which had always been noted as a sheep-breeding country. Hoping to keep a monopoly of the trade in the best wool, the Spanish government forbade the exportation of any Merino sheep. But Captain Macarthur got some from the flock of King George III of England, who had originally secured them from the King of Spain, and also imported several Merinos from South Africa.
“The British government gave him a grant of ten thousand acres of land on which to continue his experiments, and in a short time he proved that Australia could produce sheep as well as Spain and that Australian wool was as fine as the Spanish. It was long before the wool exportations amounted to much, but the flocks steadily increased and the character of the wool improved, until now we raise more wool and better wool than any other country on earth.”
Australia’s greatest single source of wealth is sheep, of which she has more than any other country in the world, producing a half billion pounds of wool, besides vast quantities of mutton.
Bush life is not all isolation and hard work. Every big station has its saddle horses, and both men and women are accustomed to long rides to dances, tea parties, or picnics.