BY India Flint | February 23, 2010

 Australian wool bale stencils

Before the advent of the ubiquitous bar-code, each bale of wool that was clipped, classed, pressed and packed in Australia bore a sequence of stencils that identified not only the quality of the contents and the station [that’s property if you’re British or ranch if you're American] whence it emanated but also the name of the wool classer.
 
Nowadays the woolpacks come with a unique bar code already attached on a small plastic panel. A few extra scribbles with a permanent marker add information legible to a human being and then the bale is sent on its way. No where near as romantic as choosing the stencils [both letters and numbers] to make up the information and rubbing on black ink from a solid block with the help of a bristle brush. Larger stations had name-plates made up to make the stencilling a little more efficient. Here at Hope Springs we would laboriously lay out the letters, but then we never cut more than twenty bales of wool, even in our best years. The big names of the wool industry can be seen at the National Wool Museum in Geelong [Victoria, Australia] where the walls in some of the galleries are festooned with lovely old hessian wool packs.
 
These items have great collectible value. Many were mechanically produced but occasionally one finds a gem such as the one pictured here. This stencil was carefully hand cut by Mr Ron Anderson of South Australia. If you look carefully you’ll spot some quite charming features such as the little row of connecting dots allowing the ink to indicate the letter without having it fall out of the stencil.  Decoding the stencils is entertaining, too. AAA means that it’s the best quality wool of that particular clip and XB means it’s from a crossbred. The funny thing about the Australian sheep industry is, however, that any sheep that isn’t a Merino is regarded as a cross-bred, even if it’s a purebred sheep with a three hundred year pedigree [which some of the British breeds boast]. The Australian merino on the other hand has been bred to big British breeds to improve the bone structure and cutting capacity of the sheep and bears very little resemblance to its little Spanish ancestor. So really, if the truth were being told, that XB should have quite another meaning!