Building the Ark

At Black Springs, in the high country near Oberon, Rod and Marianne Wilkinson run one of the most important Damara studs in Australia — a place built, more than anything else, on record-keeping and sheer determination. Their story starts a long way from sheep altogether.

Rod Wilkinson grew up in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) during the Bush War, and by eighteen was in the army. By the war’s end he was serving with C Squadron of the Rhodesian SAS, known to the other men as “Blades,” for his surname. When the war ended, he turned down a position as a game warden and an offer from the South African Army, training instead as a lithographic printer with one goal in mind: using the trade to leave Africa. He landed in Sydney on Australia Day, 1988, sponsored as a skilled tradesman, remembering the feeling as the wheels touched the tarmac more than the date itself — years of uncertainty and danger lifting all at once. His first job was with the company that had sponsored his immigration; he later moved into running printing presses across government and commercial work in Canberra.

Marianne’s story began much closer to home, on a 2,500-acre mixed farming property in the high country of the Central Tablelands of New South Wales that her father, a returned RAAF pilot, had taken up after the war and named Brae Park. She was driving the farm tractor by seven, and in the same paddocks made bows and arrows from willow sticks with her siblings — restless energy that would eventually carry her to a world archery championship. The family farmed the valleys and left the high country above them untouched, the same kind of country she would return to decades later to build a very different Brae Park of her own. The original property didn’t survive: when her father’s health failed, it was sold, clear-felled, and later became the pine plantation it remains today. Marianne trained as a registered nurse and spent much of a forty-year career in operating theatres, twenty of them in a tertiary trauma theatre, and represented Australia at the World Field Target Archery Championships in France in 1994, placing tenth.

Rod and Marianne met in a bookshop and married in 1994, raising two children through thirteen demanding years in Canberra before both reached their limit with the hours their work demanded. They moved to Orange in 2007 for a quieter life, and it was there, looking for nothing more than something low-maintenance to keep the grass down, that they bought six ewes and a ram from the Omega Damara Stud — sheep that, unbeknownst to them at the time, carried Sherana bloodlines. More stock followed, including the ram Harrison and later Roadsend Beauregard, and an Excel spreadsheet became their method of tracking every birth and death from the earliest days.

When the Orange property was rezoned residential in 2012, Rod and Marianne bought a bare block at Black Springs and built a shed house to live in while the flock moved out ahead of them — along with one uninvited passenger, a chicken named Chookie who decided the sheep and the Wilkinsons were her flock too. By March 2010, Brae Park’s flock was formally registered with the Damara Sheep Breeders Society of Australia, one of around thirty studs listed nationally, and Rod and Marianne resolved early to keep meticulous, traceable records — a discipline that would prove essential.

Through the early 2010s, new export compliance costs, a meat-processing industry built for European carcass shapes the Damara didn’t suit, and a punishing multi-year drought combined to collapse much of the Australian Damara industry. Stud after stud closed. Rather than retreat, Rod and Marianne set out to buy up whatever genetic diversity they could find as those studs disappeared — rams from the closing Jarrara, a rediscovered foundation ewe line traced through a 2018 dispersal near Wellington, rams from Springmount and Talinga, and pedigree information from Brookside. None of it was glamorous, and some of it went wrong before it went right, but it preserved bloodlines that would very likely not exist in Australia today otherwise. Brae Park’s genetics also began moving internationally during these years, with embryos, semen and rams exported to Wales, New Zealand and Malaysia.

The Covid-19 pandemic reversed the industry’s fortunes almost overnight, as renewed interest in self-sufficiency sent demand for Damara sheep soaring. Alongside rebuilding the flock, Marianne took on the presidency of the Damara Sheep Breeders Society of Australia, working with the Society’s active members to tighten membership rules, tie registration to genuine ownership and breeding, and write the breed’s first proper Breed Standard. She continues to field enquiries from prospective new studs around the country.

Life at Brae Park isn’t without its lighter moments — including Horse, a rescue kitten raised by the family dog after her own mother’s death, who cleared the property’s mice and rat problem within weeks and has run permanent night shift ever since, much to the visible disgust of the sheep she likes to block in gateways. Marianne and Rod remain candid about what four decades of this work has cost them personally, hoping mainly now for a little more time together. What they’ve built at Black Springs stands in deliberate contrast to the childhood property Marianne lost — not an ending, but a quiet, ongoing act of preservation: spreadsheets, pedigree records and bloodlines carried forward from studs that no longer exist, holding together a breed that very nearly disappeared from Australia altogether, and hasn’t.