Glimpse - Your Stories from Abroad

Boonoke shone from the pages of the coffee table book, the crown jewel of Australian sheep stations. In the pictures, rose gardens rambled around the restored homestead. The jackeroos (trainee stockmen), leaned confidently on their motorbikes in moleskins and oilskin dusters, golden-shot hair ruffled by the breeze.

I had to go.

I was a sheepman’s daughter, on a pilgrimage to the birthplaces of the world’s sheep breeds. Now I was en route to the country that dominated the world wool market, Australia—and to Boonoke, the station that used to dominate them all. It was the only station that could claim the pure bloodlines of the Peppin Merino, the greatest Australian sheep breed.

Despite carefully reading each page of my coffee table book on Australian stations, I had neglected one crucial part: the copyright date. It had been published 20 years ago. So, when I arrived to Boonoke, I was surprised and disappointed to see that it was not the glorious sheep station it used to be. The ram shed was vacant, the homestead was empty, and the secretary couldn’t tell me what had happened to any of the previous stud managers. The only thing that remained from the pictures I'd seen were the roses, which were being nicely kept by a gardener.

I stood on the porch and watched as the jackeroos arrived for lunch, wheeling round on their motorbikes. They pulled off their helmets, arms and shirts dusty and smudged, bright eyes unmarked by squinting.

I was assigned to ride with Paul, a 28-year-old with bright orange hair and a bachelor of science in applied agriculture.

“If you want to see what Boonoke was at its height, you’ll have to go to the Conargo Pub to see their photos," he said as we bumped along in the Ute (utility vehicle, or pickup). "Turn-of-the-century stuff: championship rams, breeders, classers… the sheep colonized the Riverina. Everybody owed their success to the sheep industry.

“You won’t see many places betting their future on sheep now. Boonoke’s one of the last. Back then, no one believed that anything but sheep could survive out here. Then they put in all the dams and supply channels for irrigation. Now it’s all about rice and wheat.

“Given where the wool market is going, I wouldn’t be surprised if they got rid of the sheep entirely," he continued. "Don’t take my word for it. Talk to the stud manager. Then you turn it over in your Yank brain and decide.”

So I did. The stud manager, Jim, listened to my question impatiently, then asked, “Do you sleep under a wool blanket or a doona?”

A doona was a cotton duvet. “A doona,” I admitted.

“That’s right. My kids sleep under a doona, I sleep under a doona. What do you think my kids’ kids will sleep under? A doona. Think about it. People go from their centrally heated homes to heated cars to centrally heated offices. They don’t need a wool jumper. They can get a bloody synthetic coat that’s just as warm, twice as light, that you can throw in the washing machine, and it’ll last.”

“But wool is classy. It’s tradition. It just needs to be promoted right.” Jim shrugged, disbelief clear in his smile. “You do that. You go back to America and drum up business for our wool.”

That afternoon, we worked in the yards. The “classer” was going through the young rams and classing out any that were too small, were poorly proportioned, or had uneven wool.

The jillaroo, Emma, kept the sheep moving forward by tapping them on their backs with a length of PVC pipe. A third of the rams milled in a separate paddock, where they’d be shipped away that afternoon. Dave waited outside the yards, motorbike humming, ready to take the last ones out to pasture.

From across the yard I could hear Jim. “Fucking bloody bastards, come on.”

During the break, or smoko, Paul told me that his parents had sold their sheep and plowed up pastureland to plant chardonnay grapes, converting the sheep shed into a hobby winery. Paul’s ambitions were greater: He wanted to buy a header and travel across Australia, driving for the great grain farms.

No one dreamed of sheep anymore.

After smoko, Jim sent Paul and me out to dispose of two of the “weaner” rams. One had broken its leg; the other was wheezing sickly and wouldn’t survive the trip to the sale.

When we arrived at our destination, a sandbank at a far end of the property, Paul parked the Ute upwind so that the breeze wouldn’t blow the smell in through the windows. He checked for the knife in the pouch behind the seat as I got out, rubbing my damp arms in the hot sun. Flies twirled around my nose.

There was a scramble in the back. Paul had the tailgate open and was pulling the first ram out. “Come on. You gotta come now.” He flipped it over, crouched down, and took out his knife. The ram was lying with Paul’s knee on its neck. The other one still crouched, cautious, in the back.

I turned my head away.

“Are you sure you want to stand there?”

I realized what Paul was saying. I moved upwind, away from the scene. In the sandy soil beyond the culvert, there were sheep in various stages of decay. Skulls half buried with full sets of teeth, decaying wool and hide pulled tight as leather, old leg bones kicked up, bodies decomposing in the sun. No one had made an effort to bury the bodies.

“We call this Pet Cemetery,” he told me, calm and easy. “The least they could do is push the dirt up over them. The smell is horrible on a hot day. You try to kick up some sand to cover them, and you just find more corpses underneath. They’re buried for ten feet under here.”

“The soil must be rich.” We laughed, a hard joke.

 “You’re lucky, today is cooler.” Paul let the sheep’s head go. He stood with his foot on its neck and watched it struggle. It wasn’t dead yet. He bent down again.

 “Why don’t they just sell them?” I asked.

“Too much work. You can’t make any money off them. Not enough to pay for hauling them to the sale and wasting half a day.”

Paul stood up. The sheep was dead. He set his knife down, went to pull out the next sheep. I opened the tailgate for him. He crawled inside, grabbed the sheep, and pulled it out. This one was a smaller one. It had hid in the corner, hoping it had been forgotten. Of course it hadn’t.

Paul set to work again. The afternoon sun threw shadows on the bodies.

I left five days later. I shouldn’t have expected Boonoke to live up to the glossy photographs of its past. But was the sheep’s history in Australia just a carcass to be buried to make way for rice and cattle? I didn’t think so. There were other stations in Australia still betting on sheep. I just had to find them.