Vintage Bon Jovi blasts from the tinny speaker of a portable radio inside Balala Station’s woolshed as shearers skim their handpieces along the bodies of compliant wethers. A young rouseabout flings a fleece over a wooden table worn smooth from years of lanolin and Balala’s owner, Richard Daugherty, plucks matted wool from its edges.
It’s also a haven for the family as grass withers in the paddocks beyond the house. “To come in out of this dry weather and walk into the garden — it gives you hope,” Toby Nixon says. “You’ve only got to walk around and hear the birds to know you’ve got a healthy environment."
“I’ve now been accredited with the Responsible Wool Standards (RWS) because I don’t do mulesing, I have best animal practises, and I’m regenerative.”
Richard is committed to farming differently on the 1250-hectare
tract of land outside Uralla in the New England region of New South
Wales that he bought with his wife, Sarah Burrows, 12 years ago.
“We were really lucky that this property hadn’t been sprayed out
and ploughed up,” Sarah says. “It had been poorly treated, but it
was ready for someone to care and look after it.”
It’s a long way from Botswana where the couple met in 1999, while both working at luxury safari camps. “I sometimes think ‘what the heck am I doing here?’,” Sarah laughs. When they decided to move back to her homeland with their two children she voted for a beach house but Richard’s love of animals won out. “This is like heaven for him,” Sarah says. “He lives in a beautiful bit of the world with incredible wildlife and deals with animals on a daily basis.”
South-African born Richard takes his stewardship of the land seriously
and has adopted many holistic farming practises and is working to
conserve koala and turtle populations. “It’s farming with nature,” he
says, “and you can do it by looking at all the systems from the sun, to
the plants, to the soil. They all have a place within the ecosystem and
we need to fit in with them.”
Balala is one of the oldest wool-growing properties in the district, established in 1841 before even the township of Uralla. It existed as its own community with 37 families, a general store, a bakery and a blacksmith - the remnants of which can still be seen on what Richard and Sarah call ‘the Street’. The pair are slowly renovating the original slab huts for their sleeping and living quarters, after fixing up what was the schoolhouse for Sarah’s mum. “We don’t want to lose the entire history of the place,” Sarah says, “and we’ll do everything to maintain as much as we can.”
As the sun sets over Balala, Richard is drenching the last of the sheep with kelpie, Artie, at his side - spraying a lice treatment down their backs that looks like a blue landing strip. They bounce out of the yards and back into their paddocks, freshly-shorn and ghostly under a full moon. “My main challenge is for myself,” he reflects, “to know that I can still make a living and do it differently. I want to farm in a manner that is working in the system and not trying to fight it.”
