DESPISED GOAT

Hauraki Plains Gazette, Volume 51, Issue 3176, 30 September 1942, Page 8

DESPISED GOAT

MILKERS OF OUTBACK ARISTOCRATIC ANGORA BIG HERDS IN SOME COUNTRIES Although the goats on the hills surrounding Paeroa and Waihi are held in contempt by local residents, the goat is a useful animal in New 'Guinea and Australia, where, in the great Outback, they provide the milk supply—and sometimes the meat. Alien in their ancestry, goats have become part of the fauna over wide tracts of sparsely settled country, and make almost pastoral scenes near many a homestead in Australia. And who can forget those vast herds of goats in Egypt and Palestine, with the dark-skinned Arab women goatherds, accompanied by naked little children to help keep the flocks together. In Australia On the overland journey from Alice Springs to Darwin, one meets goats at homesteads and miles from anywhere. The lubras go “walkabout” daily with scores or hundreds of goats, take them ovex' stony ground or sandridges to feeding grounds, which, to all appearances, could hardly support a kid to 1000 acres. But goats, as everyone knows, browse happily and thrive where sheep would starve in a week or two.

The goat of the Inland serves the Inlander both in life and in death. It provides him with milk; and the flesh of the goat he eats, either boiled or roasted, in the form of chops and of joints. But goat’s flesh becomes palatable only when you are used to it

and when beef and mutton both are “off” the menu.

In the far north of South Australia, in the West and outback in Queensland, goats are abundant, and in most places annual goat race meetings, with bookmakers and all are- held. Each goat carries a name . and number on the “saddlecloth,” and the riders are usually blade boys and white boys of the outback towns. 1 A race meeting in New Zealand is tame compared with one of these outings. The Angora ’

Angora goats, bred for the sake of mohair, are kept by a few enterprising people in Victoria. There were fleece-bearing goats in the days of Ancient Egypt and the Greeks and

the Romans, but they were not comparable to our modern thoroughbred Angoras.

The Angora, of course, is named after the country where this variety of the wild goat of Persia (Capra aegargU'S) originated. The mohair goat spread over' a large area of Turkey nowadays, is chiefly the product of the last century, and does not closely resemble the original type. All domestic breeds were derived probably from the one wild species, Capra, aegargu's; and the evolution of the fleece-bear-ers is an interesting story. More than 60 years ago, Sir Shmuel Wilson published a pamphlet on the Angora goat. A Melbourne merchant named Sechel was the pioneer of the mohair industry in Australia. In 1856 he imported seven Angora goats, purchased at Brdussa, and consigned by way of Constantinople, to Melbourne. These were the first of the breed to reach Australia.

The outback flocks are not kept for the sake of their fleece; but mainly for food. The goats you meet with out where the blackfellow still hunts

with spear and boomerang and holds corroborees that are more than makebelieve, ■would look shabby beside the long-fleeced Angoras, the aristocrats of Gotitland.

relief likely in that direction, a group of North Island farmers has started the biggest vegetable plot in the Dominion—lo 72 acres of it. This, appropriately enough, is at Pukekohe, where Bill Massey grew spuds: and Bill’s son, ,T. N. Massay, M.P., was one of the three delegates from the Pukekohe Production Committee who arranged a contract with the Government—the

Government agreeing to take all the produce at market prices. The Agriculture Department takes friendly cog*nisanee of the arrangement, but the Government made it clear it couldn’t guarantee to release labour. The committee delegates .said that wouldn’t worry them. They’d get the labour. Quite a good effort and a good spirit, and it wouldn’t have been possible had not the Farmers’ Union taught the men on the land how to organise and co-operate.”