The hundreds of sheep men at the show looked much like a crowd of Yankee business men. They were all landholders, and many had farms which would be considered principalities in the United States, but some of which are looked upon as quite small here. For instance, at the dinner closing the event I asked whether the vice-president of the show had a large station. The reply was that he had not, for his holdings comprised only about sixty-five thousand acres. Another man pointed out to me owns two hundred thousand acres and another has half a million acres, all fenced.
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.