Australian Screen

Teacher’s notes

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This black-and-white clip shows aspects of the New South Wales wool industry, including a shearer using hand clippers to shear a merino stud sheep. A number of sheep are then herded from a holding pen into a large woolshed where shearers use mechanical shears to remove their fleece. The footage includes men sorting and grading fleeces before the compacted bales of wool are branded according to grade and loaded onto trucks for transportation to wool stores located close to the port of Sydney.

Educational value points

• The clip focuses on wool-growing, which had been the staple industry of Australia since the 1800s and the main source of the country’s economic prosperity until relatively recently. It was fostered by the availability of large areas of grazing land and a huge demand for wool from overseas markets. While Australia remains the world’s largest producer, generating a quarter of the world’s wool, changing fashions and lifestyles plus competition from cotton and synthetics have drastically cut the demand for wool.

• About 80 per cent of the approximately 100 million sheep in Australia are pure merino. Merinos are suited to Australia’s hot, dry climate and produce a heavy fleece of fine wool. Twenty-six Spanish merinos were introduced from South Africa in 1797, and later more merinos were imported from France, Britain, Germany and the USA. Careful crossbreeding has produced distinct breeds of Australian merinos, including four basic strains, the Peppin, Saxon, Spanish and South Australian merino.

• The Australian wool industry was pioneered by the Reverend Samuel Marsden and John Macarthur, an officer with the NSW Corps and his wife Elizabeth. Macarthur and Marsden both obtained sheep from the merinos brought to Australia in 1797. Marsden exported the first bale of Australian wool for commercial sale in 1807, and the rivalry between the two men helped establish the industry. However the breeding experimentation and persistent promotion of the sale of Australian wool in England by the Macarthurs meant that their contribution is better remembered than that of Marsden’s.

• Within 50 years of the introduction of merinos to NSW, wool was Australia’s main export. Historian KG Ponting wrote in 1961: ‘Because of the merino, Australia in less than 100 years, passed from being a disposal ground for English convicts, to one of the most important members of the British Commonwealth’ (The Wool Trade, Past and Present, Columbine Press, 1961). In 2007 a photographic competition, ‘Australian Wool to the World’ and other celebrations were launched to mark the 200th anniversary of the export of the first bale of wool.

• This clip shows shearers using hand and mechanical shears to remove the fleece from a stated average of 130 sheep per day, a physically demanding job requiring a high degree of skill. Today most shearers use mechanical shears, which were introduced in the 1880s. Shearers are paid per sheep shorn and typically shear about 100 per day, although a top shearer or ‘ringer’ (the fastest shearer in the shed) can shear between about 200 and 300 a day.

• Practices in woolsheds have changed very little since the 1930s when this clip was made. The shearing team still consists of shearers, rouseabouts (shed hands), wool handlers, wool classers, wool pressers and a cook. A major shift is the employment of women in this traditionally male industry (shearers would sometimes cease work if a woman entered the woolshed), although the physical demands and nomadic lifestyle of shearing means that there is only a small number of female shearers.

• Wool-handlers are shown in the clip removing imperfect wool from the fleece, a practice known as skirting. This is done at a skirting table where the fleece is thrown up with the outside out. The skirting table has wooden slates or tubular steel rollers spaced apart to allow second-cut wool to fall through. Second-cut wool is produced if a shearer does not cut close enough to the sheep’s skin and makes a second-cut to remove the remaining wool.

• Once the wool has been skirted, a wool classer classifies it according to its strength, fineness, length and whiteness. The wool is then placed in bins, such as the baskets shown in this clip, until there is enough wool to press into a bale, a job performed by a wool presser. The bales are stencilled with codes to describe the wool, such as AAAM, with triple A indicating that it is of the highest quality and ‘M’ standing for merino, or BLS, which indicates that the wool came from the belly of the sheep.

• The clip shows the work of cinematographer and photographer Frank Hurley (1885–1962), who throughout his career documented social and industrial changes occurring in Australia. Hurley was the official photographer on a number of Antarctic expeditions in the early 1900s, as well as during both World Wars. His documentaries about the Antarctic expeditions and two feature films were well received. In the 1930s Hurley was employed by Cinesound to make documentaries for government and private sponsors.