CHAPTER VII
THE LAND OF THE GOLDEN FLEECE
THERE were large flocks in the days of the patriarchs, when Abraham and Lot had to separate to get new grazing grounds. It is written that King Solomon sacrificed one hundred and twenty thousand sheep when he dedicated the Temple at Jerusalem, and we know that Mesha, King of Moab, gave Jehoram, King of Israel, one hundred thousand lambs as tribute. We have read also of Job’s “cattle upon a thousand hills.” The sheep kings of those days must have had immense farms, but they were nothing in comparison with those of Australia. In the state of Victoria there are six sheep stations of more than one hundred thousand acres each; in New South Wales are nearly two hundred of like area, and Queensland has ranches so extensive that one will support upward of one hundred and forty thousand sheep. In the whole Commonwealth there are eighteen estates carrying more than one hundred thousand head each.
Yet, even at that, there are old timers who consider these farms small. In the early days, when land was taken up in great parcels at less than nominal rates, there were men who acquired tracts the size of the state of Rhode Island. James Tyson, one of the most noted of the stock kings, owned three million acres and died worth twenty millions of dollars, an unheard-of fortune at that time. Samuel McCaughey, who came to Australia practically penniless in 1856, when sheep raising was on the decline because of the gold fever, picked up blocks of land and bought flocks of sheep until he finally had one million head, owned a million acres outright, and leased a million or so besides. At one shearing he clipped a million and a quarter pounds of wool.
Nowadays the tendency is away from these enormous holdings. With a view to getting more people on the land, all the state governments have done something toward their reduction. Moreover, closer settlement frequently means greater production from the land, for the smaller holdings are not generally devoted to sheep alone, but are used for wheat growing, dairying, and other farming as well. In districts where at one time a property of two hundred thousand acres was thought not too large to provide for one man and his family, five thousand acres is now considered a good pastoral proposition. Sometimes a five-thousand-acre farm, well cultivated and improved, pays better than two hundred thousand acres did in the past.
The sheep ranches used to be merely wild lands, where flocks were grazed on the hills and valleys with a few shepherds to watch them. The present sheep stations are more like farms. The land is fenced in great fields, or paddocks, of eight hundred acres or more. Some contain several thousand acres, and single paddocks may have from two to twenty thousand sheep. Our American consul at Sydney tells me of one station he visited, which had wire fencing enough to reach from New York to San Francisco, enough roads to make a highway from New York to Baltimore, and enough employees to populate a good-sized town. I have travelled over other stations quite as large, and I have been amazed at the vast extent of the fencing.
In the great “back blocks,” where sheep ranches of 100,000 acres are common, it takes days and even weeks for the bullock drivers and their teams to get the wool clip to the nearest railroad.
The Australian sheep men have brought the Merino to its highest perfection and doubled the weight of its average fleece since the breed was first introduced.