Another Australia Day, another Lambassador ad.

After a ten year stint, the irascible Sam Kekovich has been replaced by modern multi-cultural icon Lee Lin Chin. I’ll leave an analysis of the marketing implications of the swap to Gruen. Instead, I want to look at the central claim of these ads and ask why the heck eating lamb is supposed to be Australian. After all, it’s not as if they’re native to Australia. Although Australia Post seems confused on the issue as in 1938 in a series of stamps celebrating Australian native animals, the 5d stamp was of a Merino.

For better or worse (and often worse when you think of the environmental impact), sheep have changed Australia irrevocably. You have to wince through CEW Bean’s constant references to “the blacks”, but his 1910 book On the Wool Track offers an amazing glimpse into a land on the cusp of changing.¹ Bean chases the slow disappearance of Old Australia in front of the steady roll out of Modern Australia; although his Modern Australia is basically our Old Australia and ours would be his Sci-fi Australia.

Although he doesn’t seem overly concerned about it, he reports on wide-spread ecological changes that had happened within the lifetimes of his interviewees: scrub being trampled into dust and pine forests taking its place, land turning so barren all the soil is blown away and deposited so high on abandoned shearing sheds you could drive a horse and buggy up onto the roof.

Not only that, but he reports on the men (and sorry, but it really is the men he reports on) that sheep made and broke. He talks about how boundary riders, a legendary figure to modern Australia, at the time of his writing, had only just replaced the “hatters”—slang for Australian shepherds. These men were apparently “almost wild” and “feared neither God nor man” (p. 53). But just as the sheep made those men, they discarded them. In quests for ever greater profits, great stretches of Australia were fenced off from dingos, removing the need for hatters. Wells were sunk and tanks erected in (often unsuccessful) attempts to drought proof the farms. Those who constructed these works brought civilisation with them, and left traces of it behind like a muddy footprint when they departed.

In contrast with Australia Post’s ideas, the first sheep to Australia arrived with the first fleet, some 100 of them, from the Cape of Good Hope. For the first few years of the colony, the majority of sheep seemed primarily to be African and Indian breeds, slowly being interspersed with purchases from Europe. This seems to be about as multi-cultural as the Australian diet got until the 1950s.

It was the wide-scale introduction of the Spanish Merino that made the Australian sheep industry really come into its own and drove this expansion of “civilisation”. Although Governor Macarthur is often credited with the introduction of the Merino to Australia from South Africa, he didn’t import enough to have a great impact. Instead, credit needs to go to George Hall Peppin, who bought merinos from Germany and France to form on of the world’s most successful studs.

At this point, you may be wondering why, if the Merino is a Spanish breed, do all these sheep appear to be coming from anywhere but Spain? In essence, the history of the Merino is full of a surprising amount of subterfuge and espionage… For sheep.

Up until the end of the 17th century, it was widely acknowledged that Spain produced the best wool in the world. Consequently, in spite of several flocks being given out as gift by the royal family (from which the Saxony sheep are descended), it was prohibited to export sheep from Spain. Like an upstart teenager, upon knowing they couldn’t have any, Britain immediately needed to have some. This involved smuggling sheep overland from Portugal through continental Europe, sending sheep back as spoils of the Napoleonic Wars, and even allegedly a sting operation involving the Spanish ambassador’s wife.

Nevertheless, after laying his hands on some fine quality merinos (and, controversially, possibly some other breeds) George Hall Peppin and his family set about breeding a finer class of sheep for Australia. They were astonishingly scientific in their approach, considering Mendel was only just doing his punnet squares at the same time, and a thorough theory of genetics wouldn’t be discovered for another forty-odd years. This exacting patience led to what many seem to believe is nearly the perfect sheep. Amazingly, one of the factors that was most important about the Peppin merino was that its wool was long and bulky, and so perfect for the mills of Europe. Consequently, the merino sheep is arguably the first industrial animal.

Which I suppose gives a nice sort of symmetry to this entry—it turns out we created the merino just as much as it created us.

(Assuming you’re reading this from Aus)

Academic Sources

Bean, CEW 1910, On the wool track, John Lane Company, New York.

Parsonson, I 2000 The Australian ark: A history of domesticated animals in Australia, CSIRO Publishing, Clayton.

Lee, T 2011, Wanganella and the merino aristocrats, Hardie Grant Books, Richmond.

Verhoeven, D 2006, Sheep and the Australian cinema, Melbourne University Press, Melborune.