On the Sheep’s Back

Manawatu Times, Volume 63, Issue 106, 7 May 1938, Page 9

On the Sheep’s Back

Picture Australia as a giant saucer. The six million of its population live mainly on the rim, a few hundred thousand in tho interior, and it is the few hundred thousand who maintain the country, writes Mr. Albert J. Wetten in the Windsor Magazine. Australia literally lives on the sheep’s back, and there are 110,000,000 backs in the country, or nearly 20 for every man, woman and child living under the' Southern Gross, lu Australia a ranch of half a million acres or so is by no means rare, and there are holdings that run over ten thousand square miles, where the pastoralists count their flocks by hundreds of thousands and it takes a day on horseback for tho owner to reach his home after entering the front gate. Such enormous stations are necessary, particularly in central and western Australia, by the fact that the land is very poor, due to lack of rainfall, and it is not uncommon to allow three acres to one sheep. The real Australia is in the thudding hoofs of the boundary rider’s horse as he musters the sheep; in the bleating and deafening bawling of a thousand paddocks; in the roar and clamour ot' the shearing sheds and the heavy labour at the dipping troughs.

All these, and the culmination in the Wool Exchange where the future, for the next 12 months, of six milliou people is definitely decided. Australia lives on the sheep’s back.