In a time of shrinking flocks and short horizons, this historic sheep
station is playing the long game and doubling down on wool.
Nothing feels hurried inside the woolshed at Woomargama Station, even though everything is happening at once. Shearers fall in and out of unison while lambs stream through the pens towards them, hooves tapping against wooden floorboards. There’s no chatter. Who can be heard over the whirr of electric handpieces and nineties pop blaring from a speaker? Besides, there’s too much work to do.
The station spans 2,630 hectares north of Albury in New South Wales, where the Great Dividing Range eases into gentler country—fertile flats and rolling hills with granite outcrops that push through the ground like bones. There are box gums so old that five men linking hands couldn’t circle them, yet even they are shedding boughs in the dry. This is thirsty country, and the lambs in the shed are drought babies
“They dropped in pretty tough conditions,” says Michael Heeske as he works the back pens using pops of air and sharp whistles. He’s the station manager and the son of a shearer who’s fluent in the language of the yards. “They should go ahead now and stop putting so much energy into growing wool.”
At the other end of the shed, young women—brokers and marketers—are clustered around the skirting table, stretching fibre between their fingers. “Why wouldn’t you love wool?,” one asks when the question of its appeal comes up. She’s genuinely puzzled. “I’m even wearing merino undies,” says another.
Owner Clare Cannon is with them, watching as fleeces are thrown and sorted. “It’s an exciting time, but then a very stressful time,” she says. Wool tells the story of the sheep that grows it and the country that grows the sheep. Here, she’ll see the results of careful management and breeding decisions, set against the backdrop of drought.
“When you send your wool down, you think: ‘Are we going to have the right length? Are we going to have the right micron?,’” Clare says. She’s aiming for 18.5, fine wool that’s soft-against-the-skin and destined for textile and fashion houses around the world. Provenance, she believes, matters now more than ever.
Her family has owned the station since 1965. Clare took over 14 years ago after the death of her mother with a clear-eyed understanding shaped by an old adage: you don’t own the land, the land owns you. “I wanted high conservation values and high animal welfare values,” she says, “and a real purpose in many ways.”
A Legacy Carved
Every afternoon, as if set to a clock, the sky erupts into clouds of cockatoos, their screeches punching through the cab of Clare’s ute even with the windows wound tightly shut. “They’re a bit annoying,” she says with a wry smile, as she bounces towards the part of her property she calls the “jewel in the crown”.
Cockatoos are the most conspicuous by-product of her family’s planting program, which has established 100,000 trees over four decades. But there are plenty of others too, with names like dusky moorhen and hoary-headed grebe—some critically endangered, all tricky to spot without a set of binoculars and a keen sense of what you’re looking for.
Clare arrives at a paddock called Wilde after one of the station’s first European settlers. Wilde by name and wild by nature, it’s scrubby box-gum woodland scattered with logs and waist-high grass. No sheep, no cattle, just the odd black-faced kangaroo and low call of frogs hidden somewhere in amongst it all. 600 hectares that will forever be allowed to flourish in its natural state.
“Not long after I took over the property, two conservationists came to me and said they’d like to put a third of it under covenant,” Clare says of the agreement that binds not just her, but all future owners. It gave shape to a conviction she’d always carried—that care for the land had to be bigger than any one person’s ambition. “It’s my legacy,” she says, “something I feel very proud about.”
Changing the Pattern
Woomargama Station was settled in 1838 and once employed enough people to support a village with a pub, school and church. By the time Clare’s parents came along, it had been through six owners and two wars. Her mother restored the woolshed and homestead; her father installed a spring-fed reticulation system to feed a system of troughs. In 1973, Ronald Reagan visited when he was governor of California, not yet President. A decade later, Prince Charles and Princess Diana passed through.
Much of its history is still on show. Poll Hereford bulls sprawl in a paddock overlooking a lake with a small jetty. Mature oak and elm trees surround the homestead, parapets just visible above the canopy. Paddocks carry the names of former owners, Clare’s father, managers who ran the place. Acknowledgement that ownership here has always been temporary.
But the patterns of management have shifted. Most of Woomargama’s clip is now sold through ZQ Merino, an ethical wool program that connects growers directly to buyers and sets clear expectations around animal husbandry and land care. For Clare, it’s less about accreditation than accountability. “You feel your wool really matters,” she says. “That you’re no longer an invisible partner in the supply chain.”
Across the property, new fencing winks in the midday sun, part of a move towards smaller paddocks and tighter rotation, and once the dry breaks, manager Michael will get started on renovating pastures—introducing deep-rooted perennial grasses that hold the soil tightly and thrive on short, sharp grazing. “Moving toward being as prepared as we can be,” he says.
The station will join around 2,000 merino ewes to 37 rams this year, well under its normal stocking rate, and a deliberate response to seasons that have demanded restraint. Rams are chosen for their resilience: wrinkle-free and suited to the realities of warmer, wetter summers and longer dry spells.
Back at the woolshed, the last of the lambs have been pushed down the chute and emerge all knobbly and nude. Eyes blinking wide, they bunch in with their flock, suddenly aware of every breeze. Not distress, just adjustment. They’re free now to feast on whatever they can find in the paddock; free to grow and thrive as they should. Just like the land they call home.
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