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Updated: May 5, 2025
The body of the woolshed, floored with battens placed half an inch apart, is filled with the woolly victims. This enclosure is subdivided into minor pens, of which each fronts the place of two shearers, who catch from it until the pen is empty. When this takes place, a man for the purpose refills it.
That's the way to draft stock, whether they're cattle, sheep, or horses; then every man can buy what he likes best, and isn't obliged to lump up one sort with another. We had time to have a bit of dinner. None of us had touched a mouthful since before daylight. Then we began to see the buyers come. There'd been a big tent rigged, as big as a small woolshed, too.
They're going to take up a back block and do the thing regular: Marston, Starlight, and Company that's the fakement. They want us out to make dams or put up a woolshed or something. I don't see why they shouldn't, as well as Crossman and Fakesley. It's six of one and half-a-dozen of the other, as far as being on the square goes. Depend upon it, dad's turned over a new leaf.
In ten minutes the vast woolshed, lately echoing with the ceaseless click of the shears, the jests, the songs, the oaths of the rude congregation, was silent and deserted. The floors were swept, the pens closed, the sheep on their way to a distant paddock.
It is in the station-house or in the adjoining woolshed that the service is held. Seldom is it conducted by an ordained minister, for the number of such is small, and each priest has a large territory to visit. His arrival on horseback is not always known beforehand, but in the evening the "squatter" assembles his family and dependants, the men of the station, and perhaps a few neighbours.
The station homestead, so lovingly descanted upon in the advertisement, consisted of a two-roomed slab hut; the woolshed, where the sheep were shorn, was made of gumtree trunks roofed with bark. The wool went down to Sydney, and station supplies came back, in huge waggons drawn by eighteen or twenty bullocks, that travelled nine miles a day on a journey of three hundred miles.
The holding of these races was an elderly institution, and was followed at night by a servants' ball given by one of the squatters. Last year it had been Beecham's ball, the year before Bossier's, and this year it was to take place in the woolshed of James Grant of Yabtree. Our two girls, the gardener, and Joe Slocombe the groom, were to be present, as also were all the other employees about.
And the Unionist labour men were making themselves a nuisance going round the stations burning the grass of squatters who employed non-Union stockmen and shearers in one instance, threatening to burn a woolshed. And there hadn't been any rain on the Leura for a month past, and weather prophets were predicting a drought. It was dreadfully prosaic and boring.
These comprised the dwelling house, a long, low, commodious building, furnished most comfortably in English fashion; the men's huts, comprising three sleeping rooms, the kitchen and dining-room for the hands, the store, dairy, etc., with an enclosed yard, formed one group, while at some distance away stood the woolshed and sheep yards, paddocks, stock yards for cattle and sheds for cows and working bullocks.
He put up his two pairs of shears, put on his coat, and walked out of the shed. Many wild tales are told of woolshed rows. I knew of one squatter stabbed mortally with that fatal and convenient weapon, a shear-blade. The man thus summarily dealt with could, like most of his companions, shear very well if he took pains. Keeping to a moderate number of sheep, his workmanship could be good.
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