In 2019 it must be difficult for many to imagine life without electronic communications, rapid road and air travel, farm mechanisation and all of our home comforts.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
By 1872 on Wantabadgery Station, a remarkable innovation washed woolly sheep before shearing to reduce the cost of freight by removing contamination such as soil, vegetable matter and the “grease” or lanolin, as transport of wool at that time was by slow and costly bullock wagon.
Previously, sheep had been washed by swimming or pushing them across a pool of water and then shearing them after they dried.
A lagoon near Tenandra was used for this purpose with similar washing practised on the Jewnee and Merribindinah Runs.
A much more efficient operation was introduced on Wantabadgery Station by Walter Windeyer alongside Wantiool Creek just north of the big 1870 woolshed.
The Gundagai Times of November 9, 1872 reported how a Robey & Co 12 horse power steam engine with a centrifugal pump lifted large volumes of water from ‘Wamboo’ (Wantiool) Creek to a tank then into a shed below where 150 sheep were “shower soaked”.
They were then transferred to a “sweating soak”, a closed chamber filled with surplus steam from the engine for about 50 minutes, then moved under high pressure water jets to clean the fleeces. As many as 11 men were involved, many of them aboriginal men from the Merribindinah camp near Bethungra.
Wool washing was only performed once after the Macdonald brothers took over in 1879 although some properties elsewhere continued into the 1890s.
The proximity of rail transport at Junee also helped reduced the overall cost of wool transport. In his diary, Falconar Macdonald noted about the October/November 1879 shearing that the wool wash went well but it was difficult to get the men to operate the jets “as they could not stand the water”.
The water would have been cold and under high pressure and they needed to stand in it to adequately clean the sheep.
About 1500 sheep per day could be washed and after drying, were shorn in the nearby 22-stand woolshed. Shearing was still undertaken using hand or blade shears until the introduction of the powered handpiece which was developed by Englishman Frederick Wolseley in 1888.
On November 4, the station paid the wool washers, the total cost exclusive of rations was $120.65.
A total 23,849 ewes and lambs were shorn in the 1879 season, a number that doubled as pastures were improved.
