The Sheep Shed

As everyone may have now realised, I'm not all that incredible at keeping a day to day journal, particularly as what I'm now writing about happened at least 6months ago. Internet connection is also not all that reliable. So what I've decided to do is condense my time working in NSW into general categories including some dated events.

So probably the most significant part of life here... The Sheep Shed, and just sheep in general!

A surprising amount of the work seems to be moving sheep, and if it’s not moving sheep it’s something to do with sheep… every day! My first day at Wallendbeen was moving sheep on horseback actually which was quite fun and only occurred once since and I fell off… oops! They have 2 different breeds on the property; cross breeds and merinos. Cross breeds are generally bigger and merinos have better wool. 

Now before you can actually do any work with the sheep, you have to muster them all. For that I had one, occasionally 2 good sheep dogs and a quadbike. Oh and I first had to learn the names of all the paddocks (not fields) on a 1500acre property so I knew where to go and get the sheep from, and more often than not move them to.

 Now this job alone can take all day, especially if it’s a particularly big mob (not flock) and they have the run of about 6 paddocks and can get onto the country along the creek (not stream) where you do not want to drive anything other than a quadbike and you can lose the dogs in the length of the grass. They really do just give up trying and wait for you.

Once you’ve gathered all the sheep from every end of the earth, or so it seems, you have to get your assembled mob from wherever it is you’ve managed to assemble them, to wherever it is they need to be, whether that be another paddock or the sheep yards. Next bit of fun!

Moving them will normally involve roads, gateways and just you and one dog no doubt behind the mob with no one ahead to make sure they go in the gate when they get to it. So there is a lot of hoping, particularly when you’re following a mob of 1000+, you can’t see the front and you just really have to hope those sheep at the front turned the right way. If not, at some point when you notice they’re all going the wrong way you have to somehow get past them all, to the front before they get to a main road, turn them around and start hoping again. Now if you have a really good dog you’re fine, you send the dog to the front and block the retreat yourself… I didn’t have that luxury.

Then after all that, you then have to take a vehicle with a trailer and chase down all the ones that get left behind. In theory there shouldn’t be any but in a poorer mob you have the old and the sick that just couldn’t keep up (or stand up) and the ones that were just too plain stupid to walk in the right direction. There’s exercise for you. Stupid lambs take a lot of running down, then you have to hold onto them long enough to carry back to the trailer, or if you’re lucky enough to have a second person, wait for the trailer to come to you. And then there’s the big ones whose fleece alone weighs nearly half as much as me, yet alone the weight of the actual sheep (exaggerating slightly maybe)!

Upon getting the sheep to the yards (unless you’re just switching paddocks) are you drenching? Backlining? Vaccinating? Tagging? Jetting? Draughting? Or just shearing?

Now draughting, backlining, vaccinating, tagging or even jetting follow just about the same process. The sheep are run 60 or 30ish, depending on whether they’re lambs or full grown, into a race and shut in. you work down the line shoving the ones you’ve done behind you so you know where you’ve been.

Now drenching involved a knapsack on your back attached to the drench gun in your hand with which you shoot a dose of the liquid into the mouth of each sheep.

Vaccinating, likewise but instead of a gun, a syringe that gets jabbed into the back of the neck.

Backlining a spray gun and the idea is to get one line down the back of each sheep right from the neck to the bum. It takes a bit of practise to get it all in one go!

Tagging is basically an ear piercing gun. Load a tag in, put the ear between each side and squeeze.

Now of all these I would much rather backline. No effort involved, but I really did not like vaccinating. I could never really be sure I’d got the syringe through the wool and into the back of the neck, and they hated it more, or so it seemed. Any of them I could do quite easily on my own, particularly if it was only lambs.

(Waiting in the yards)

Draughting sheep requires more effort and more people. Basically it’s separating the sheep: lambs from ewes; ewes from wethers; those ready for selling; any way you want to split them really. Done by running the mob in a constant stream through a race while someone operates a 3way gate at the end, splitting them into separate yards. I could never get the hang of operating the gate fast enough but keeping them going through was difficult enough, though apparently a good dog can do it alone! To get them moving constantly you had to move some up into the small holding yard and start pushing them through the race. Of course they wouldn’t go so you have to start by physically turning them and pushing them through. Then you go back for more until they realise they can get out that way and they all start moving. Then you have to fill the small yard back up. But you have to do this before it empties so the next lot know where to go, but not when there’s so many left that turning and going through the gate seems easier. Fun!

Then becomes a brainteaser puzzle of moving all the now separated mobs through the yards to wherever they need to be without muddling any up! 

(Out of the yards)

And all this before they even get to the shearing shed and they really hate going in there!

The actual shearing starts at 7am. This means getting up to the shed, ready to work before 7. Initially I had to sweep the entire shed out because it obviously hadn’t been done since the last shearing.

My job was to try and act as rouseabout, aka, remove the fleece and sweep after each sheep. Now there’s a particular way to pick up and throw a fleece. You supposedly hold the two back legs in your thumb and forefinger, gather the rest of it with your other fingers and there you go. In theory you can hold an entire fleece in just your fingers and throw it perfectly spread on the table. I cannot.

The fleece gets thrown on the table for the classer to grade the quality of the wool, the fleece gets rolled up and put into a press and sixty or so fleeces get pressed into a bale.

Dirty wool (stain) gets bundled into one ‘bin’, sweepings off the floor into another and the ‘skirts’ (lower quality bits from the edge of the fleece) in another. The bellies are shorn off first and separated. And on goes the process, with the pens being filled when necessary, a job just as difficult as getting the sheep into the shed in the first place.

At 5pm the shearers leave and I carry on working. I have to bale up all the aforementioned wool in the separate bins in the press, sweep out the shed and take the sheep back to whichever paddocks they need to be in. Shearing day was a long day for me.

Oh and not to forget trying to keep the alpaca somewhere out of the way all the time too!