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.
