Saturday 21st May 2022
Well it was the best night sleep I have had then entire time we have been away. No noise, nice, warm and cosy in our roof top tent, even though the temperature dropped to 3°C. When we woke at 7.15am it was still only 4° inside the tent and outside. So we waited until about 8 to venture outside.

Today’s plan was to join an APT tour group that was arriving by plane to do a tour of the station. We heard some history about the station, it’s connection to the Woomera Defence facility, the sheep business and some other incidental information. Some of the sheep station information was quite interesting. I will tell you a little of what I remember. Hopefully I get it right, if I don’t check it out on google for the facts. 

The station is very large and they run between 25-30,000 head of sheep and about 300 head of cattle. The logistics of getting that many sheep in to shear was quite interesting. The sheep can only walk about 15km a day for 2 days before they need to rest them for a couple of days. So they will muster from the northern most paddock with a gyrocopter and motorbikes for 2 days collecting up to about 3-4,000 sheep along the way and try to get down at least 2 paddocks in that time. They will then leave the sheep there for a couple of days and move to the western paddock, moving these sheep a couple of paddocks east over the next 2 days, then hold them in a paddock for a couple of days. They then head back to the north and repeat, and so on and so on until they have therm all in the holding yards. They then split them into 4 groups based on their tags. Ewes, lambs, hoggets and a 4th group I can’t remember. Then they go in to be shorn in their groups. After the ewes are shorn they are then scanned via ultrasound to see if they are pregnant. The ones that are pregnant are trucked back out to the paddocks with the rest of the shorn sheep. And the ones that aren’t pregnant get put back in with the rams to hopefully end up pregnant this time. They try to put them back to the same paddock as they like the comfort of the same home, just like humans. They hire shearing company who contract the shearers at shearing time. The company handle all the facets of shearing, plus feeding the shearers and any problems associated with the job. They even bring their own cooks but are provided with hoggets for cooking. They work from 7.30am until 5.30pm with a break every 2 hours. They earn about $4.10 per sheep, so a gun shearer could shear between 250-300 sheep a day. But on average they do 100-150 per day. Still pretty good money at that rate. The bales of wool sell for between $1200 and $1700 a bale. When they get $1200 it is a very lean, tight year but at $1700 they can do improvements and life is a lot easier. The gyrocopter cost $110,000 but will pay for itself in a couple of years as it cost $40,000 a year to pay for mustering help. Dog fence is currently being replaced 1600mm high with 400mm width at the base to keep the dingoes out. There is 1 kangaroo per square km on the outside of the fence. Inside the fence on their property side the population is 15 per square km. They cull about 2000 a year. Pay a contractor for this. They have their own solar power with 12 lithium batteries for storing the energy. We heard a sad and unlucky story about one of the graves on the farm. All in all it was a very interesting morning. 

This afternoon we went for a drive around the property. First stop was Deputy Dam, then Nipple Hill, then the centre point of SA and finally Mt Paisley. The scenery and views were amazing. At the top of Mt Paisley you could see across the plains forever. It was quite incredible. We joined Margie and Peter, plus a couple of telemetry workers for happy hour around the fire. It was quite an interesting evening. 

We headed back to camp at about 8pm, which was late to get started on dinner and was cold as we had been sitting around the fire for 2 hours, so David got us another fire going again. Yippee!

I am sitting by the fire doing my blog again tonight. Hopefully I can upload it tomorrow. We have had fun filled day again today.