Jondaryan Woolshed is a living museum. It allows you to experience the rural life of pioneering Australia.

The first sheep arrived at Jondaryan Station in October 1843 and construction of the huge Jondaryan Woolshed began in 1859. It became operational in 1861.

In 1972, after a celebration to commemorate the centenary of Jondaryan State School, the Woolshed' s then owner, the Rutledge family, donated it to the Jondaryan community.

Why not enter the Woolshed through the East Wing, and follow the route taken by the sheep, which emphasises the actual historical process of the Woolshed.

The second entrance is right here, where the wool bales finally emerged ready for transportation.

Transporting Wool

Jondaryan had up to 28 teams of bullocks and horses pulling wagons carrying wool down to the port at Moreton Bay.

In the 1860s these heavy wagons could not get up and down the range so they travelled around it, all the way into New South Wales.

A bullock wagon could only travel three miles an hour, but bullocks were much cheaper and more reliable than horses. Bullocks were tougher and could pull heavier loads.

When Jondaryan railway station was built in 1868, wool was carried from the Woolshed to the railway head by horse wagons, then transported by rail.

Once the wool arrived at the port, it was loaded on to a coastal steamer and taken to Sydney where it was unloaded and checked by the selling agent. The grower could sell it to the agent at a much-reduced price and receive payment more quickly, or ship it off to be sold in Europe.

Horse drawn wagon with a load of wool bales

An example which allows visitors to touch it and walk around it.

A pile of bales which builds an overall physical picture of the immensity of the work done here.

Stenciling

Every bale is stencilled so that all information about its wool is clearly visible. The stencilling includes the property' s name, the class of wool and a number for each bale. The stencil is applied after the wool has been compacted in the press. Stencil ink, similar to boot polish, is brushed over the stencil with a boot brush. Stencil ink comes in the form of a cake of soap that has to be wet before it' s applied.

Back in the 1860s, the man who operated the main wool press would also stencil the bales because he knew their contents. Today, the woolclasser applies the information with a marking pen.

Many men who worked at the Woolshed stencilled their names and dates on the rafters. They were not all shearers. Joe Ladner was a teamster in 1900. He carted wool from the shed to the Jondaryan railway head three kilometres away. Can you find his name?

Real dogs

Exhibitions of the sheep dogs occur in this space.

The best dogs for working with sheep are the Australian kelpie and border collies. Both are known as 'sheepdogs' . A good sheepdog is a valuable asset to any working station.

The dog is the natural enemy of sheep and this is where its control lies. Two types of sheep dogs are used -- a 'paddock dog' and a 'shed or yard' dog. The paddock dogs muster the sheep whilst the shed dogs 'push' the sheep into the yards and shed, and run along the backs of sheep.

Scales

Wool was very valuable. Up to 80 workers handled the wool on its journey to the port, so Woolshed owners recorded how much left the station in a log book, to ensure that none went 'missing' .

In today' s woolsheds, the wool press has scales built into it so the wool is weighed while it' s being pressed. In the 1860s, scales were separate from the press. The men who operated the press weighed the wool once it had been pressed into bales.

Real sheep

The Australian merino sheep originated in the Spanish merino and is the result of 2000 years of breeding. Originally, the Spanish jealously guarded their breed, but after their defeat in the Napoleonic Wars during the 1700s, they saw the French disperse their precious stock to many different countries, including Australia.

John Macarthur obtained some and began crossbreeding to produce the Australian merino. By 1803 he had over 4000 head of almost pure Australian merinos. He also obtained merino sheep from England, France, Germany and America, which gave him a diverse bloodline.

The first sheep arrived on the Darling Downs on 4 June 1840, when the Leslie brothers brought 5700 sheep from Macarthur’s own flock at Camden. The first sheep arrived at Jondaryan in October 1843.

Wilding Screw Press

All woolsheds have wool presses. When Jondaryan Woolshed was built in 1861 two wool presses were installed. The Wilding screw wool press was used prior to the Ferrier wool press. It used the same principle as the Ferrier wool press but instead of winching the monkey down it was screwed down. This required more men to operate than the Ferrier because a number of men were needed up in the rafters to wind the wheel.

Woolclassing

There is only ever one woolclasser in the shed no matter how many shearers are there.

After the fleece is skirted, it is presented in the most attractive form possible to the classer. Up to the beginning of the 1860s, wool was classed on the sheep’s back. From 1862 on, it was classed after the fleece had been shorn from the sheep, as it is still today.

Many qualities have to be assessed:

Strength This is affected by the living conditions of the sheep.

Fineness Now known as the ‘micron’.

Colour The whiteness of the wool.

Vegetable matter Burrs or other vegetable matter mean the wool will be downgraded.

Length The longer the fibre the more valuable.

Style Does it have a nice, even crimp?

Lustre or brightness This is where a woolclasser’s skill is paramount. The classer assesses the feel of the wool, the brightness of the wool and the general lustre of the wool.

Once all the above has been considered, the woolclasser classifies the wool. Once classed, fleeces are put in separate bins for each class until there is sufficient wool to press into bales.

The woolclassing table top is just over three metres by about one-and-a-half metres and is generally made of slats.

The woolclasser has the most important job in the shed. The woolclasser receives the wool from the skirting table folded in a certain way and takes one staple of wool from the same spot in every fleece and determines its class.

High-class wool should never be mixed with low-class wool, or it simply will not reach its potential value.

After grading, the wool is baled into separate categories determined by a number of factors, including its strength, colour and length.

Woolshed Community

The Woolshed is the center-piece of Jondaryan, but many other historic buildings have been relocated here from the district.

The original Jondaryan Station was centred on the far side of nearby Oakey Creek where the old homestead is today.

By 1859, Jondaryan Station had 25 substantial buildings, including an accommodation house, church and school. There was also a large vegetable garden to supply the 200-strong population, including 30 school students.

The Australian gold rush in the 1850s and 1860s had a detrimental effect on all grazing communities but Jondaryan fared better than most because of the enlightened policies of William Kent I, then manager of Jondaryan. He preferred to employ families over single men, and even paid the wives of his workers half the salary of their husband in addition to the husband’s salary. A very enlightened man who was years ahead of his time.

To have a better understanding of our rural past and how people on the station lived, be sure to visit the other buildings and experience their unique atmospheres.

Skirting table

After a sheep is shorn the roustabout removes the belly wool from the board and places it in a basket. The picker-up then takes the fleece and with a skilled movement throws it out on the skirting table to be trimmed. Skirting is trimming the edges of the fleece so that it can be presented to the woolclasser.

The table is made of rolling slats, which allow the ‘locks’ to fall through to an area underneath. Locks are the sweat ends, dags and short cuts.

There must be access from all sides of the table. Four men called skirters usually worked the table, assisted by roustabouts and picker-ups. It takes up to 48 seconds to skirt a fleece.

In the 1860s, Jondaryan Woolshed had three tables operating at once. The job of a skirter was not physically hard but very consistent and continuous.

Over the years with better breeding, fleeces have become larger and so have the tables.

Click go the shears boys, click, click, click
Wide is his blow and his hands move quick,
The ringer looks around and is beaten by a blow,
And curses the old snagger with the bare-bellied yoe.

If you think shears make a clicking noise then unfortunately you’re mistaken. The writer used some poetic licence to add to the imagery of shearing. When used well, shears glide through the wool with no clicking noise. The action of a shearer is to push the razor sharp blades through the wool with a ‘squeeze’. Most shearers had two or three sets which they sharpened every night.

Fortunately, the rest of ‘Click Go the Shears’ does capture the mood of the Australian woolshed. The shearer’s ‘blow’ refers to his arm movement. The ‘ringer’ is the shearer who shears the most sheep in that shed and he is being beaten by one ‘blow’. He is cursing the old ‘snagger’ who is the eldest shearer in the shed and the ‘bare-bellied yoe’ is a ewe with a completely-bare belly.

Blades

Hand-held blades used in the 1860s were seven inches long and had one long spring. In the 1880s blades evolved to be double sprung. Blades were usually (and still are) imported from Sheffield, England.

Mechanical shears using combs were installed at Jondaryan Station in 1890, only two years after they were first introduced into Australia. To entice shearers to use them, they were paid a bonus of 10 shillings per week.

In the 1880s, steam engines drove the mechanical gear. It wasn’t until after World War Two that Jondaryan Station updated to a motor-driven system. Then in 1968 electricity was used.

In 1983 there was a shearing revolution. Until then, shearing combs had always been two-and-a-half inches wide. Some shearers from New Zealand caused a stir by introducing larger three-and-a-half-inch combs into Australia. This allowed for more wool to be shorn with each blow and faster shearing. The width of combs had always been strictly regulated by the Shearers’ Union. But after a massive strike by the Union, the advantage of a wider comb was acknowledged and accepted.

Equipment displayed to complement the atmosphere of the Woolshed as a real workplace such as tar bucket, bags, caps, brooms.

Imagine being a SHEARER in the 1860s. In the early days of Australia’s pastoral industry the shearer’s lot was not easy. Shearing has always been the most physical back-breaking labour, but particularly so in the blade-shearing days.

The shearer worked long hours, 6am to 6pm. More often than not, living conditions were very primitive. But often the most difficult task was to gain work. The shearer had to travel long distances by foot or pushbike in search of work and often would arrive at a woolshed only to be turned away.

But there was a positive side -- mateship. A real bond was forged amongst the shearers and the shearing community.

The EXPERT sharpens the cutters and combs on a circular emery wheel, a type of grinding machine. It was driven by an overhead belt which came down from the line shaft. The expert also oils the line shaft. Shearers change their combs after shearing about 20 sheep. The shearer’s cutter is changed about every 10 sheep shorn. This makes for a lot of sharpening. It takes about five to 10 seconds to sharpen a comb and three to five seconds to sharpen a cutter.

The PENNER-UP pulls the sheep into the catching pens. There were always a couple of men monitoring the catching pens and keeping them full for the shearers.

Each catching pen at Jondaryan Woolshed can hold 30 sheep. There are 26 catching pens and there would have been six penner-ups working at any one time.

The shearers would yell to the penner-ups ‘Sheep-O’ when more sheep were needed in their catching pens.

The PICK-UP BOY picks up the fleece after it has been shorn, and throws it on the skirting table. There was commonly one Pick-up Boy for each four or five shearers.

The ROUSTABOUT is the general ‘dogsbody’ of the Woolshed. He sweeps the boards of ‘locks’ to keep them away from the shearer, keeps the boards clean and picks up the belly wool and puts it into an open wool pack.

He also applied tar to sheep flesh wounds after they had been shorn. When shearers used blades there were often wide flesh wound cuts that needed tar to seal the wound.

In today’s shearing shed, the wounds are not as serious and needle and cotton are used for the mending.

Being a roustabout was often seen as an apprenticeship to becoming a shearer.

Feel the silence, the lanolin and sweat

This is Queensland’s oldest operating woolshed. During its heyday, the 300-foot long Woolshed accommodated up to 88 blade shearers. Together with the classers, teamsters, wool pressers and roustabouts, they worked as a team, with each worker playing their part in shearing over 5000 sheep a day.

Back in the 1860s, a fleece hit the floor every eight seconds. Approximately 10 million sheep have been shorn in this shed yielding approximately 500,000 bales of wool.

Steeped in Australia’s history and tradition, this Woolshed offers a vivid insight into our proud rural heritage.

Come here in the early morning and experience the silence. Then imagine the team of men, the thousands of sheep and the sheer hard work that made it such a thriving woolshed community.

Sheep Psychology

It is true that sheep will always follow. If one moves they all do. And the Woolshed was designed to put this idea to work, to help move the sheep efficiently through the shed.

A number of narrow lanes, called races, channel the sheep into certain directions. Once one sheep starts to travel through a race, the rest follow. You can see a race at the back of the east wing where a laneway hits a blocking gate and the sheep are diverted into catching pens.

In another process called ‘halving’, a large number of sheep are progressively reduced to a small number. The sheep travel from a race through a gateway and are ‘halved’ into two separate pens. These pens lead into another race which directs them into the catching pens.

Are sheep really stupid? They certainly do tend to flock together and avoid being on their own, but this is a survival device, as there is strength in numbers in defending against predators. Their main predators at Jondaryan are dingoes, foxes and crows.

The Slatted Floor

The slatted floor is an integral feature of the Woolshed. In the Jondaryan Woolshed it is made from wild apple wood which doesn’t splinter and damage sheep hooves. The slatted floor lets manure fall through to underneath the Woolshed.

Trap doors around the Woolshed allow the manure to be cleaned out at the end of the season -- not a popular job.

It is imperative that sheep have empty stomachs by the time they reach the shearer because they are then more manageable. It also avoids manure being mixed up with the wool which would reduce its value.

Water

Water was a crucial factor in determining where sheep stations were established. Early graziers were totally reliant on surface water for their stock. They needed large areas of land with enough surface water to maintain their stock numbers.

Jondaryan Station was well situated, with Oakey Creek very close by.

Up until the 1880s water was used to wash the sheep before they were shorn, except for rams and pregnant ewes. They were not washed, for fear of harming them.

On Jondaryan Station the washpool was about two miles downstream from the homestead and consisted of a stone-paved pool on the edge of the creek. Water was pumped from the creek up to a ship’s tank on high stands.

Sheep were let down a chute to men waiting in a washpool. The men turned them over and over in the water under the powerful spout coming from the tanks, until all the dirt was washed from the wool.

Branding

Each grazier or property has a registered, identifying brand which differs in colour and position on the animal.

After sheep are shorn they are placed in the counting-out pen. They are then taken to a race and branded. An all-paint brand is stamped on with a branding iron. Sheep are also earmarked.

Early brands were bitumen tar based and therefore were non-scourable. In the 1950s CSIRO invented a type of branding paint that was scourable.

Shearing sheds are necessary because the wool needs to be dry. Jondaryan Woolshed is 300 feet long (91 metres), and in it 52 shearers and numerous other workers could process 3000 sheep a day. At one stage the Woolshed housed 88 blade shearers. In 1892 it was the biggest shed on the Darling Downs.

The Jondaryan Woolshed cost 3300 pounds (equivalent to $2 million today) to construct and, when completed in 1861, was the finest in the colony.

The Station’s owners, Kent and Weinholt, built the Woolshed using ironbark, slabs, local red cedar and imported corrugated iron.

Originally intended to have a shingle roof, Jondaryan Woolshed used a new material -- galvanized iron prefabricated in England. The galvanized iron had been hand-rolled, hand-dipped, hand-wrought and hand corrugated.

It arrived late and the first shearing in the Woolshed took place under tarpaulins erected over the shearing boards.