Eventually, The Peppin Merino

Press, Volume CV, Issue 30977, 5 February 1966, Page 4

Eventually, The Peppin Merino

Search for the Golden Fleece. By Frank Clune. Angus and Robertson. With illustrations, bibliography and map. 225 pp.

No-one would deny Mr Clune s persistent diligence m search of historical truths. His reading for the purposes of this book has been wide, long and varied in books, official documents, newspaper files, diaries and letters. In addition, he has conducted interviews and travelled what must be thousands of miles m visiting the places he talks about. As a result he has been able to correct some mistakes in history recorded on memorial stones and elsewhere.

But in this reviewer’s opinion the general result of his researches is a book cluttered with facts. In consequence, the student seriously in search of the golden fleece has to hack his way through the jungle, discarding irrelevancies, exercising patience and undertaking stupendous feats of concentration and memory. Eventually the reader does arrive at his goal, the Peppin Merino, but it is only after Mr Clune, entangled in the strands of the slowlydeveloping fleece, has “gone walk-about” countless times. If he cares to, the reader may console himself with the knowledge that from each digression he will be returned to the point of departure after an indefinite lapse of time—after, say, exploring with Mitchell or Sturt, watching the growth of a tiny settlement in the NeverNever, accompanying squatters and overlanders on their treks, or fraternising or clashing with aboriginals. To put it bluntly, Mr Clune, a painstaking gatherer of facts, has gathered more strands than he can handle as a writer. If he has dis-

carded any of them as irrelevant to the subject suggested by the book’s title, it is not apparent, and the student reader is left with the job of disentangling the strands that matter.

The story begins with a “heigh-ho and away we go” and the arrival of the First Fleet in Port Jackson on January 26, 1788, with convicts, officers and men of the garrison, sailors and an assortment of live stock, including 70 sheep bought at Cape Town which by September 28 had been reduced to one after competing foir grazing with indigenous kangaroos and emus. Thereafter we meet numerous far-seeing settlers, including John Macarthur and his wife Elizabeth, the Rev. Samuel Marsden, William Cox, the remarkable Scottish family of Furlongs, and Janet Templeton. Recognising the need for a wool industry, they, or some of them, imported Spanish Merino stock from King George Ill’s stud flock at Kew, Louis XVl’s flock at Rambouillet, and from the ori'ginaily-royal flocks of Saxony. Its purity preserved and its quality improved by careful selection, the Merino flourished under Australian conditions and its fine longstapled wool was highly favoured in Britain. In the meantime explorers such as the Hume brothers, Hovell, Sturt and Mitchell were discovering the hinterland and its rivers, and sheep men from New South Wales, and Van Dieman’s Land (Tasmania) in search of watered pasturage were spreading into the Riverina and into what is now Victoria and South Australia. They took possession of vast unfenced areas of grassed or salt bush country either legally or by “squatting” and

faced the perils of droughts, slumps and hostile blacks. Other notable names begin to appear in the chronicle—such as Henry O'Brien, Brodribb, the Howe brothers, Augustus Morris, James Tyson, and the spectacular Ben Boyd (who controlled more than 2,000,000 acres at one time). And so, after Riverina separationist movements, gigantic fore-closings and bankruptcies, bush rangers' depredations and bank robberies round about Deniliquin, we come to the famous George Hall Peppin from Somerset and his sons who wrote their name on the Australian Merino through knowledgeable selection and the introduction of American blood. Writes Mr Clune: “In 20 years the Peppins doubled the size of the old-fashioned Merinos bred by Macarthur and others, and also doubled the weight of wool shorn from this new breed.”