Hanging with My Peeps I Mean Sheeps

This past weekend Canberra's exhibition park hosted a show for Great Southern Merino sheep - so we went. This wasn't a tourist thing - this was a working event for sheep stations (we'd call them ranches in the US) from parts of New South Wales and even Victoria.

We went and watched experts assessing the ewes and rams in a pavilion that had about 400 sheep. Such bleating! It was interesting to see them assess these critters. They look pretty dirty and brown from the outside, but pull the surface layer back and it's fleece as white as Little Bo Peep's favorite lamb. I must admit to being a little nervous when people were leading rams back to their pens. They looked pugnacious, and I think those horns could do some serious damage.

We watched one ten-year-old boy straining to keep his ewe under control - it weighed easily twice as much as he did, but he handled it pretty well, with some help from mom. But this was serious stuff. This show wasn't just for ribbons and pride and socializing (although there was plenty of that), but the judging was also establishing benchmarks for the next day's auction of rams, which can fetch up to US$12,000.

In the adjacent pavilion were, in addition to various nutritional supplement booths and a product that will make the fleece fall off the sheep (no shearing needed) a bunch of ladies spinning fleece into wool. Australians are serious knitters and, being in one of the world's greatest wool-producing countries, a bit disdainful of acrylic fibers...

There were also huge piles of fleece with information about the different grades of fiber. Not that I could see or feel the difference, but obviously wool isn't all the same, and different grades of wool (based on how long you leave it on the sheep, age of the animal, and who knows what other factors) are used for different things, with the finer grades being suitable for light-colored wools, and the coarser ones for things like carpets.

One common anti-Canberra joke (about as common as anti-Washington jokes in the US) is that Canberra is "a good sheep station spoiled." Before being established as the capital of Australia, Canberra in fact WAS a sheep town, so the show this weekend was entirely appropriate.