[Letter Concerning Sheep Farming in Australia]. ; Women

Broken Hill, Australia, 1937. Good. Two 8¾” x 6 7/8” sheets folded inside original 3½” x 5½” envelope. Four-page handwritten letter, about 575 words plus sketched drawing. Letter very good, creased at old folds; envelope about good, lacking 2” section, though both addresses unaffected.

This is a fantastic letter written by an American woman describing sheep farming and fleecing in the Australian outback.

Signed “Aunty” and addressed to “My dear Charles” (clearly a nickname for the recipient, one “Miss Alice C. Smith” of Watertown, Massachusetts), this letter goes into all-encompassing detail about working with sheep on an Australian farm. Mrs. Burrell observed that her present location, Netley Station, was “much like our large ranches in the west” and ran to about 600,000 acres with a whopping 85,000 sheep. “This is shearing time,” she wrote, and “it is very interesting.” The letter meticulously describes the work entailed in shearing and transporting the animals, sorting and grading the fleece, and the climate affecting the whole process. She also addressed other aspects of her sojourn (“I have not yet been into one of the mines – women are not very welcome underground”) and sketched out a drawing of the “sheep run and sheds,” tables and stalls where the fleecing occurred, and the “press where wool is baled.”

A delightful introduction to sheep farming in Australia written by an American woman.