1973
As the Ogilvie sheep increased, they moved their cattle further and further out, where they had room to forage on timbered hillsides or the heads of valleys. Their flocks required much closer watching. Rather more, in most cases, than those sunstruck, simple-minded shepherds gave. This would have kept Edward out in the bush for long periods, sometimes days at a time. Each flock was grazed at a considerable distance from the next.
Sheepmen normally divided their animals into flocks of three hundred or so breeding ewes, or four hundred wethers, each with their own shepherd. These assigned convicts had to take their flocks out before sunrise, returning by sundown to portable yards made of hurdles or brush fences. A watchman had to count them in, while the shepherd counted them out again next morning. And woe to the man whose tally was short. The watchman slept in a flimsy wooden structure like a tall sentry box, keeping a good fire and a dog to scare the dingoes away. The hurdles, usually cut from swamp box, ironbark or gumtrees, had to be shifted daily to fresh ground, a precaution against footrot, catarrh or the dreaded scabby mouth, which could rapidly infect a whole flock.
Edward would soon have learnt how to treat this often fatal disease. It was unpleasant work. You cut away wool from the infection, bled the skin and bathed it in a strong mixture of turps and tobacco water. There was also a prevalence of blowflies. Cutting out the maggots was not romantic either. Nor was the castration of lambs, nor the cleaning out of yards in a stench of sheep’s urine and trodden ordure.
Equally difficult at times was handling the shepherds themselves. Theirs was perhaps the most monotonous occupation known to man. They lived in utter solitude on greasy mutton chops and doughy damper they baked themselves. Only the most witless of them remained at this dreary work. Crawling after sheep, the less docile, sharper types called it, absconding whenever the chance occurred. The rest degenerated into lonely hatters, mumbling all day around vacant, sun-baked landscapes, drawn on compulsively by the tinny bells on leading wethers, or drowsing under a kurrajong till an angry master stirred them, often threatening a taste of the cat-o’-nine-tails, especially if a sheep or two was lost. Mostly they were simple, unlettered, sour-mouthed derelicts stupefied by raw grog and the soporific sun. Keep the flock moving, were their instructions, but unhurriedly, let them feed as they go, check the front runners, weed out the sick and maimed and aged, watch for the wild dogs that attack even by day, rest them under the shade trees in the midday heat, never crowd or hustle them, for a broken-winded sheep is as good as dead.
‘The shepherd who walks quietly among them,’ wrote Cunningham, ‘is a gentle and careful man.’
From Merton’s records there were not many such men.
The Ogilvies took extreme care over the shearing, which happened in November; and over the sheepwashing that preceded it. Each flock was made to swim a creek, preferably with a clear sandy bottom, for three days in succession. Only then did the washing begin. Two men entered the water, the downstream man lathering each sheep with a softening grease, passing it to the second who scoured the fleece, after which the animal was forced to swim upstream as a rinse. If the landing place was sandy or bare, the sheep was bedded down on newly mown grass. After feeding, the flock was penned closely together in straw-bedded folds, or on well-grassed earth, until each fleece was fully dry. Once the yolk stood up clean and yellowy-white, William pronounced it ready for shearing.
Without cheap labour, painstaking work of this order would not have been possible. Yet it was just this intensive care that enabled Australian wools so rapidly to dominate the English market. Back of it all were those homeless wandering shepherds, tailing after the tin-tinkling sheep bells in their white smocks or moleskins and cabbage tree hats.
Squatter’s Castle: The Story of a Pastoral Dynasty,
Lansdowne Press, Melbourne, 1973