City Slickers Meet Jackaroos Down Under Australian Course Gives Students Hands-On Experience In Everything There Is To Know About The Art Of Sheep-Shearing

If you were to recast the entire “City Slickers” movie (the first one) so that it featured three guys who had never met before … if one of the guys was an Austrian who wore a brand-new cowboy outfit every day, the other a recently discharged U.S. Naval engineer who grew up in Texas without ever riding a horse, and the third guy was, well, me … if you replaced the herd of cattle with a herd of sheep … if the two ranch hands and the boss and his wife spoke Australian, not Texan … if you got rid of the Jack Palance character altogether, as well as the supermodel who fell for the total doofus … well, then you’d have the exact story of the Australian cowboy/cowgirl training school I attended, except with a totally different plot.

At first, I thought a “jackaroo” was a breed of kangaroo I hadn’t yet seen. With only minimal conceit, a woman at the tourist information office in Sydney set me straight when I asked if they had one in the zoo. She then offered to find me a jackaroo course.

That’s more or less how I ended up at the Echo Hills Jackaroo (and Jillaroo) school. Pete, the bearded Papa Smurf-like owner, picked me up at the bus station in his Land Rover and drove me out to the ranch, where, after a few customary welcome beers - that I was later billed for - I met my fellow jackaroos: Tony, the Austrian, and Dave, the naval engineer.

This “station” (farm) had cows, sheep, dogs, a 90-year-old hermit named Doug, and kangaroos bouncing all over the place. I had arrived during sheep-shearing season and Pete told me I would learn everything there was to know about the process.

The first thing I had to learn was how to crack a whip. This looks very easy, especially watching Indiana Jones do it. But let me assure you it is anything but. I used a 6-foot-long whip - supposedly twice as easy to use as the bullwhip Harrison Ford used - but it took me over an hour not to get the hang of it. Will and Rob, our good-natured 24-year-old jackaroo instructors, must have demonstrated proper whip technique roughly 30 million times before realizing we would probably never quite get it.

I’d circle the whip over my head, bring my arm down, snap my wrist and the end of the whip would, at high velocity, invariably bounce off the ground and directly into my gonads. This didn’t always happen. Sometimes I’d hit myself in the face. At any rate, none of us became accomplished enough with the whip to use it while riding, primarily for the acoustic purpose of getting sheep to move.

“It would be bad,” Will explained, if we whipped ourselves while on horseback “and even worse” if we accidentally whipped our horses.

“How do we make the sheep move without a whip?” I asked.

“By whoopin’ and hollerin’,” Will replied. Will was the charming lunatic of the pair.

My first horse, Ribbon, was a beginner-steed intended for someone who needs three telephone books to see over the steering wheel of a compact car. I looked like a firstclass moron with my feet practically dragging on the ground. Ribbon had everything but training wheels. And still I had to, by Echo Hills regulation, wear a standard-issue hockey helmet to ride her.

In retrospect, I could have brought the whip along and attempted to crack it without worry; it would have taken nothing less than a 90-jigawatt bolt of lightning in the rear to make this horse run. After I proved myself by getting Ribbon to take three steps unassisted, I was able to transfer to the larger Lucille, who was only in a partial coma.

“Lits go mustah sem woolies outtada paddock!” Will announced.

“Vas iz dat?” asked Tony, so that Dave or I didn’t have to.

“Herding sheep out of the field,” said Rob in his best American accent.

Riding about 100 meters apart, we walked our horses across the hilly, burr-infested terrain. Rob and Will cracked their whips. Tony yelled “Ha!” I yelled “Hi-ya!” And Dave would occasionally mutter “whoop” with the sort of unbridled enthusiasm you might expect to hear at a funeral.

Every so often, as we crossed the paddock, a reminder of Australia would pop up in the form of a kangaroo. We’d stop and watch the roo bounce across the open field, then up and over one of the fences.

The sheep, who were usually milling around in small packs, began trotting away from us before we’d even get close. By the time we reached the end of the paddock, we found upwards of 1,000 sheep standing against the fence. The best way to control the flock is with a sheep dog. This requires no effort whatsoever. The dog simply runs around and bites any sheep who even thinks about breaking away.

But we didn’t have a dog. We had to herd them ourselves. The key to this is keeping them in a flock, where sheep will pretty much behave. If, however, one sheep broke off from the pack, suddenly adopting the will of an anarchist and the athleticism of Barry Sanders, it was nearly impossible to catch, especially with my less-than-stellar riding skills.

Eventually - and it took a few days to get into the swing of things - we learned to “muster” the flock into the shearing shed. The shed was the heart of this farm. Inside, it could have been 1996 or 1906. The lanolin was so heavy in the air it moisturized my skin as I walked around.

Inside, there were five shearers, each holding an industrial strength set of barber’s clippers in one hand and a sheep in the other. Before I saw these guys in action, I was unaware that shearing sheep is considered an art. There are actually major competitions for shearing and one of our shearers, a guy named Andrew, makes several thousand dollars each year just in shearing award money. Other than that, they get $1.50 per sheep. That’s why they kept stopping every few hours to count them.

Mick, one of the shearers, got a sheep started for me and then let me take over. I gave the beast a haircut she will never forget; it would have embarrassed a Chia-Pet.

I then tried my hand as a “rouse-about.” Rouse-abouts gather up the freshly shorn fleeces and toss them like picnic blankets onto the wool-classing table. Tony and Dave were instantly experts at this. When I tried it, I don’t think I picked up the fleece correctly and it just landed in a big clump. Peter, the wool-classer, had to carefully spread out my fleece wad so he could get rid of the grungy bits around the edges and determine the grade of the wool by, as far as I could tell, just looking at it. I also tried this for a while and discovered I had no talent for it.

After the wool was sorted, I helped a guy named “Dutch Pete” pack it into several bales (yes sir, yes sir, three bags full) with the very macho hydraulic wool-compressor. I liked this machine a lot. Unlike the other aspects of sheeping, this required minimal talent. You just loaded wool into this giant garbage compactor and pulled a lever. I had finally found my discipline.

Next, we took the naked-looking shorn sheep and marched them onto a conveyor belt. This was difficult because - and I’ll bet you didn’t know this - sheep have a particularly strong aversion to conveyor belts.

Once on the conveyor belt, we took turns “branding” the sheep with an Echo Hills symbol dipped in special paint; “drenching” them by forcing a Water-Pik filled with medicine into their mouths; and “back-lining” them by spraying their backs with bluish gook to prevent lice. Then, the sheep were ready to be mustered back out into the paddock.

It took several days get a grasp of all this, not to mention a riding rash that will be with me for weeks. I didn’t exactly feel qualified to seek farm work after my training, but Pete, the station owner, told me, right before I left, that I was indeed a jackaroo.

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: If you go Jackaroo/Jillaroo Sheepfarming Course at Echo Hills Station, outside Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia. Phone: (067)69-4217. Bus-pickup from Sydney. $349 (Australian) for six nights, including breakfast each morning and one dinner. Further reading “Here’s to Ewe: Riddles About Sheep.” Burns, Diane L. Lerner Publications 1990. “Sheep and Wool: Science, Production, and Management.” Prentice-Hall 1988. Australian Tourist Commission, Century Plaza Towers, 2049 Century Plaza East, Los Angeles, CA 90067; (310) 229-4870 or (847) 296-4900. “Insight Guide to Australia.” APA Publications 1996, $23.95.

The following fields overflowed: DATELINE = TAMWORTH, NEW SOUTH WALES, AUSTRALIA