Lanolin Lust (a child's dream)

Crescendo of a Sheep Obsession

I first met sheep as an antipodal child on a vast dry continent in a previous century.

Following a great war, while Europe and Asia rebuilt then reinvented themselves, this isolated colony breathed a collective sigh of relief and resumed rounding up sheep.

Equally relieved, though still nervous at the impending return of so many unrequited soldiers, sheep resumed destroying habitat and breeding profusely. Twenty five years later they peaked: 180 million fleece-accoutered ovines, about seven for each strapping Aussie male, flocked ten thousand a time between various paddocks.

In those carefree Boy-like-Smiley childhood days it was oddly unlikely (foreigners are surprised to learn) to bump into a woolly friend on the street. Like native Australians and kangaroos, sheep tended to avoid the city. But there was another way of introduction, in parts, so to speak.

A marvelous Australian company named "Crusader" began my (figurative) love affair with our follicled scorched-earth root-nibblers.

Crusader was, we nowadays say, a value-adding outfit, refining wool to produce cloth and from that, clothes. My school trousers and pullover (or "jumper", so named because kangaroos wore them) were branded "Stamina, by Crusader Cloth", and proud of them I was!

For school projects we shiny-eyed beggars wrote to Crusader Cloth and Stamina conglomerates requesting a sample kit. Postwar was an austere time, manufactured goods excruciatingly expensive (a lifetime acquisition) and children still to be found at school in bare feet.

Those innocent carefree days - drinking free, government-supplied milk at morning break, romping in the ash pits of the local lead smelter after school (Not the only irony lost upon us).

When our 'sample kit' arrived it was the most wonderful thing a child could possess. Sheep! God bless sheep - the kit awash with bits of them!!

Those gorgeous wool samples in all their brilliant variety, texture, and delightful lanolin odor. Plus a bonus pack of beautifully painted watercolor cards, illustrating an esoteric world of sheep farming and wool refining in a wide brown land - to be a part of which was every child's dream, for at least ten minutes at school next day.

Our revered Crusader Cloth company had a mission, implicit in its trade mark, to seek out strange, foreign fabrics - and destroy them. [In the Crusader trademark, notice the fine print? Lest I invoke a fatwa from the morally-challenged, may I refer you to the dictionary definition of "muslin"?]

[PS: Crusader made no exception for Muslin Delaine - it was in bed with the enemy and couldn't be trusted!]

Getting back to the story (not easy on the SheepOverboard website due to correspondents' propensity to have no story to begin with) - well, that is how I first met sheep.

My ovine love affair began, like my childhood, when this numerically tiny nation produced one third of the world's wool, a figure that continues today.

So persistent, resourceful and inventive were those early Aussie battlers they would have produced 99% of the entire world wool clip without the aid of sheep, if need be.

"On the sheep's back" was our national motto. If you cannot read Latin, let me assure you those very words are inscribed, in that language, on the Australian Coat of Arms [as we learned, wide-eyed in pride, from an ex-shearer teacher with a cunning smile]. For those of you yet to visit this miraculous, industrious little Scandinavia down-under, the 'coat' on our Coat of Arms is made of wool, and the 'arms' are that of Skippy.

'Tis a curious irony, a stranger will observe, that most Australians have never spoken to a sheep, but frequently share a table with them at restaurants.