Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

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.”