Out of the Karoo

This chapter follows the embryos themselves — 11,450 of them, 2,819 Damara — from Johannesburg to Perth, arriving in the same year Australia’s national quarantine system was itself under the most searching review in its history. Tim Coakley’s own account of the landing, including AQIS officers meeting him on a street coincidentally named Fricker Road, sits alongside the recipient properties that took the embryos on: Wyvern Park, Kojonup, and Coakley’s own Bunyip Park, where — in a detail previously unrecorded — the first Damara lambs born in Australia actually arrived, alongside three Dorper lambs smuggled unknowingly into David Thorn’s fine-wool Merino batch.

From there the chapter tracks the breed’s uneven, often accidental spread. Clynton Collett and Ernest Connan judge Damara’s Australian show debut at Perth in 1997, then tour working farms deep into the state by trailer. Denis Russell, having found the SAABCO auction too expensive, builds his own enterprise independently through Albie Higgs’s Himba-sourced genetics and a later purchase of pregnant recipient ewes. And the SAABCO relationship itself curdles: Garnett’s Merino oversupply proves unsellable, South African breeders feel misled, and a meaningful number — Collett foremost among them — walk away to supply Australia independently instead.

That walkout has long consequences. It deepens into the substantial Collett–Hall partnership that built one of the country’s largest Damara studs, and it splinters Australian Damara governance into four separate, previously undocumented organisations: the official DSBSA, Neil Garnett and John Hall’s rival Damara Breeders Group, the Australian Damara Association and Keryn Cooper’s grassroots Wheatbelt Damara Growers Group, which eventually folded into the DSBSA as its WA regional arm. Two composite breeds — Garnett’s SheepMaster and Collett’s Meatmaster — emerge directly from the wreckage of the original deal. The chapter closes on a wider, ongoing pattern: Damara genetics entering Australia through many independent, often overlapping channels across more than a decade — Francois Marais and Petra Scholtz’s Stormfontein consignment among them — rather than through any single, tidy gateway, setting up the founding of the DSBSA itself as the next part of the story