Before we go much further it is important to know what was taking place in Australia with the collapse of the wool market and how that may have influenced the proliferation of the meat sheep breeds.

 

Here’s a fact that sounds made up but isn’t: in the late 1980s, a good stud ram could sell for more than most people’s houses – the highest priced sheep sold at auction in Australia for $450,000, paid for a Merino ram owned by Collinsville Stud Merinos, at the Royal Adelaide Show in 1989.

 

Wool was that valuable. Australia, quite literally, rode on the Merino’s back, and for a while the sheep seemed happy to carry the load.

 

Then someone had the bright idea of guaranteeing wool growers a minimum price no matter what happened in the rest of the world. It was a lovely idea that worked fine for twenty years.

 

Then the floor price got pushed up to 870 cents a kilogram right as the Soviet Union fell apart and China stopped buying. Nobody wanted the wool. The government had to buy it anyway, because that was the deal.

 

By 1991 there were 4.7 million bales sitting in sheds around the country that nobody would touch. That’s roughly a year’s entire production, just……waiting.

The whole scheme finally collapsed in February that year, and overnight the price dropped by more than a third.

 

What followed wasn’t pretty. Farmers were paid a few dollars a head by the government to destroy sheep nobody could afford to feed anymore. Imagine spending decades building a flock, then watching the bank statement tell you it’s worth less than the diesel to truck it to the saleyards.

 

It took until 2001 for the last of that wool mountain to finally sell – ten years to clear one bad decade.

 

But here’s the part that actually matters for our story. Somewhere in the wreckage of all that, a few farmers started asking a question nobody’s grandfather would have dared ask out loud: What if the sheep itself was the problem? What if there was an animal that didn’t need shearing, didn’t need crutching, didn’t need a small fortune in chemicals just to stay alive?

 

One of those farmers had just lost an entire stud empire to that very crash. Rather than walk away from sheep altogether, he went looking for something completely different, on the other side of the world.

 

That search is how the Damara found its way to Australia. Sometimes the best ideas come out of the worst years.

 

The Damara is more than an amazing animal, it’s genetic make-up propagated numerous new robust breeds amongst them the Meatmaster and a number of other composites. This narrative amongst others will be preserved to tell future generations the story of the most amazing sheep breed – the Damara.

 

 

Photograph © courtesy of Ulrick Trappschuh