If you were the youngster leaning against the woodshed dividing wall you would have grown up considering the massive tall timber posts to be part of your landscape. The schooling you had may be in large part from your mother, an incredibly able woman. You might model yourself on the strong men in front of you, skilfully extracting their livelihood from tough dawn-to-dusk seasonal labour requiring high technical skills and physical skills and courage. You will have probably assisted to deliver new born lambs and hand-reared orphan ones, set broken legs of calves, have ridden half-wild horses and learned how to muster various animals. There is a brutal beauty about the harsh upbringing of outback people. The high market value of the merino fleeces is only one kind of value – the other values are harder to measure.
