a day ago
Coloured wool from Polwarth sheep popular with crafters around the world
In 1971, Wendy Dennis had an epiphany while under the shower.
"I thought, 'Why don't I breed coloured sheep?' Because it's already got a colour, you don't have to dye it, no chemicals. Breed them."
Wendy was newly married to a farmer in south-west Victoria and the global resurgence in home crafts such as spinning and knitting natural fibres was just beginning.
Up until that time, most "coloured sheep", namely anything with not entirely white wool, usually ended up on the dinner table.
"So I rescued a few coloured sheep out of the 'killer' paddock, [where they were] ready for Sunday lunch," Wendy, now 83, recalled.
Wendy's husband Dave remembered the moment.
"People are starting to spin coloured wool," Wendy told him.
"'I'm going to have those killers. You can't kill them,'" Dave Dennis recalled her saying.
And so a unique flock was born where the recessive dark wool gene replaced the dominant white wool one.
"There are so many different colours. There are all the blacks and greys then there's the browns and fawns," Wendy said.
In the half century since the flock began the Dennis family's wool has been sent to craft enthusiasts around the world to be fashioned into all manner of things.
The wool is keenly sought after because the sheep are the Polwarth breed which produces a unique fleece.
"Australia's first breed of sheep and it all started with the Dennises in 1880," Wendy said.
In that year Richard Dennis launched the breed, named after the local electorate.
It was the result of the cold, damp climate causing fleece rot in the dense wool of their merino flock.
"That bit about water collecting in the fleece and not being able to expel was problematic and so that's the problem they sought to fix by crossing it with the Lincoln," Wendy's son Tom said.
"So it's three-quarter merino, one quarter Lincoln, bred to a fixed type called a Polwarth, originally [named] a Dennis Comeback, later called a Polwarth," Wendy added.
The Lincoln's long greasy wool gave the Polwarth the ability to cope with wetter, colder climates.
By the early 1900s the breed was rapidly spreading throughout southern Australia and being exported to high rainfall countries, especially in South America, even to the Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic Ocean.
Polwarths peaked in Australia at about 8 million in the 1960s.
By then they accounted for more than half the sheep in Tasmania.
At the recent Australian Sheep and Wool Show in Bendigo, Tasmanian producer Wayne Walker shipped his prized Polwarths across Bass Strait and took out the major prizes in their class.
But the number of entries was well down.
"It's a a bit tough for a lot of people to get here and the costs are getting dearer and nothing is getting easier," Wayne said.
In recent decades Polwarth numbers have rapidly declined because of advances in the merino breed.
But breeders such as Greg Potter and his daughter Samantha believe the breed's distinctive wool has a unique and important role in the natural fibres' market.
"People love the single source Polwarth," Samantha Potter said.
"Being a longer, straighter, more aligned fibre it makes the wool easier to peel out and spin," Greg added.
Their wool is sold directly to the wool craft market, including to the Dennis family, and processed and spun locally into yarn.
Isabel Renters, who with her husband Nick operates a carding and spinning mill near Ballarat, says there is growing consumer demand for natural, sustainable fibre products.
"All looking for natural products where they know it's sustainable, it's ethical, traceable," Isabel said.
Natural coloured wool, free from chemical dye is also gaining favour, especially among wool crafters.
"It's just a dream come true because it's got a good crimp, which makes it a little more elastic and it's got a demi-lustre from the Lincoln which makes it shine a tiny bit and it's so soft from the merinos," Wendy Dennis said.
Tom Dennis is the fifth generation of his family to grow Polwarths and continue a sheep bloodline that stretches back to the family's merinos, shipped from Tasmania to Victoria in 1840.
Drawing on the family's large archives, Tom is setting up a mini museum on the property to better tell the Polwarth story.
It will showcase the passion, foresight and innovation that created the breed in 1880.
But more importantly, it will cater for the present.
"We need to make sure we've got woollen yarn in front of people that appreciate, Australian-grown, Australian processed, good ethical standards," Tom said.
"And those sorts of values that people want to buy into when they're purchasing yarn."
