Sheep station a giant among shrinking trade

On the edge of the Nullarbor, the seven-week shearing season at one of the Goldfields' last great pastoral stations is in full swing.

Guarded by two metre-high netting and well-serviced with water bores and dams, Rawlinna Station has survived the proliferation of wild dogs which has nearly wiped out the sheep industry in the region.

The station is so large it encompasses an entire degree of latitude and has its own ecosystem.

The gauges measure 12 millimetres of rain in the north each year but only 9mm in the south.

This year Rawlinna has produced about 60,000 merino sheep, most of which will pass through the shearing shed over the next few weeks.

While there are a few concessions to modernity, getting fleece from station to market is about as reliant on human strain and intellect as it was 100 years ago.

Inside the shed, the ancient sounds of labour and livestock mix with the buzz of electric clippers and heavy metal blasting from portable speakers.

Each ewe is dragged from its pen by a burly shearer who gets to work taking their wool and, sometimes, a trickle of blood where the electric shears cut skin instead of fleece.

Liberated of its heavy coat, the sheep bounces down a ramp and into the yard, leaving a team of roustabouts to sweep and tidy the wool into piles where it is sorted, graded and pressed into bales.

The soft fleece taken from young weaners could find its way to Italy, where it will be made into $10,000 suits.

Rougher stuff might end up in carpets.

With about 80 percent of WA's wool exported to China, Rawlinna Station manager Michael Simon sees a bigger picture for his team of young shearers and shed hands "earning a quid off sheep".

"Everything you see here goes overseas," he says, pointing to the bales of wool being loaded onto a truck.

"These teenagers directly influence Australia's trade account."

They may be earning a quid, but once the shearing season is over the team of 27 contract workers will head elsewhere.

Michael says stations like Rawlinna want to employ more locals, but remoteness and competition from other industries, like mining, means they struggle to retain jillaroos and jackaroos as permanent staff.

Michael first came to Rawlinna as a shearer in 1987, a time when the Kalgoorlie pastoral area was home to about 300,000 sheep.

But by the late 1990s, falling wool prices, droughts and wild dog incursions forced most pastoralists to de-stock and there is now less than one per cent of that total left in the region.

Michael says the old markets in the northern Goldfields, where pastoralists used to be able to sell their lambs, have all but disappeared.

He remembers the day he delivered 70 bales of crutching wool - the stuff taken from ewes to keep them healthy between shearing seasons - and was told this doubled the Goldfields' production for the year.

"It was then it struck me how an entire industry had been abolished," he says.

Australian Wool Exchange figures show production in the northern Goldfields and Kalgoorlie declining from nearly 12,000 bales in 1995 to just 1000 today.

Michael now refers to big pastoral stations like Rawlinna as being part of a "cottage industry".

If not for the netting enclosing Rawlinna's 2.5 million acres, he says the station would have joined the others.

"It's our saving grace, without it we wouldn't have a business."

But Michael says the public perception of the issue - the bloody image of ripped throats and mutilated sheep - is not how the dogs have wrought carnage on the industry.

Pastoral stations like Rawlinna rely on producing a certain number of lambs per flock.

This model fails if the dogs scare ewes from weaning their young.

"The real impact of dogs is they like to live near a water hole," Michael says.

"This means the sheep won't go there and their lambs will die.

"You can have one paddock (protected by fences) and get 98 per cent lambing and the next one over with the dogs will get four percent."

O'Connor MP Rick Wilson visited the station this month to hear about the challenges facing Rawlinna.

He fears we are heading towards losing an entire industry.

"It's a tragedy there's not many (pastoral stations) left," Mr Wilson says.

In his past professional life as a farmer, Mr Wilson ran a 15,000-head merino sheep operation near Katanning.

It has given him years of insight into the industry's importance.

He says there will never be a wholly-virtual market to take the human element from wool because "you still need to touch it".

From station to ship, the whole supply chain that produces a uniform quality of wool relies on look, touch and subjective judgment.

"Wool is tactile," is how Michael describes the process.

A core of wool will be pulled from each bale once it reaches market so it can be tested for fibre thickness and the percentage of weight made up by vegetable matter and lanolin.

When it is washed, buyers might examine its brightness, whether the fibres are clean and white and how much they break.

But the process started back in the shearing shed with the wool classer who examined each pile of wool straight off the sheep's back.

She takes strands between her fingers, pulling them to see if they break and looking for tensile strength, or if the fibres have tips on the end and the many crimps characteristic of prized lambswool.

This means jobs on the ground which can only be done by a professional - there just aren't many left in the Goldfields.