216 THE PASTORAL AGE IN AUSTRALASIA 



steam-wasliing have been introduced. The sustained 

 rise in the price of wool and the rapid growth of pastoral 

 industries have made such developments practicable 

 and such expenditure remunerative.* In such direc- 

 tions, as in many others, it is probable that the daughter- 

 land has far outstripped the Mother-country whose 

 slower steps she was at first content to follow. 



Sheep-shearing is doubtless one of these. The speed 

 and the skill with which sheep are shorn on Austrahan 

 stations is possibly unexampled. The shearers are a 

 very different type of men from the con\dcts who were 

 the first shearers, or the reckless, drunken hands who 

 succeeded them. They belong to the most powerful 

 trades-union in Australia, and, by means of the Court 

 of Arbitration or the Wages Board, they can dictate 

 their own terms to the pastoralists. The head ofiice 

 of the Union is called upon by these to provide stations 

 with shearers and shed-hands ; while the employer is 

 required to furnish suitable machinery, and, if the 

 machinery is not in good condition, the workers may 

 successfully claim legal compensation from the station. 

 The men are now sober, of good character, and earn 

 large sums. Arriving at a station on their bicycles, 

 they race through their task, and then hasten to another 

 station where they have " booked a stand." There 

 is a minute division of labour in the industry. Besides 

 the shearers, there are penners-up, wool-rollers, pickers- 

 up, piece-pickers, cooks, and rouseabouts, with " the 

 boss of the board " at their head, or the shearing over- 

 seer and shearers' " rep." Along with this division of 

 labour necessarily companies an equally high degree 

 of organization. A code of rules, made by the men, 

 the squatters, or the court, binds the system in an 

 organic union. 



It would be as idle to repeat twice, or twenty-times, 

 told tales of yardirg and drafting, mustering and 

 tailing, on a cattle-station as of shearing on a sheep- 

 station ; vivid narratives of all such station-procedures 

 * Batge, pp. 50-1, 97. 



