People: Kent and Weinholt Partnership - Obtaining the Gold from the Fleece

Over the first seventeen years of its occupation, Jondaryan station changed ownership seven times. It was not until it came under the control in 1858, and eventual ownership in 1863, of the Kent and Wienholt partnership that it became a stable and prosperous business entity. There were a number of reasons for the station changing hands so many times during its early formative years, including climate, isolation, recession, financial, labour and personal difficulties.

The Kent and Wienholt partnership was a perfect business partnership. The two men although quite different were complementary to one another. William Kent the older of the two men came from a reasonably well-off middle-class English farming family. While Edward Wienholt came from the English landed gentry.

William Kent was a capable and practical business man, but more than that he was an extremely good manager of people. He carried out a number of social policies that were very advanced for his time. He instilled in his family and successors his ideals and policies which proved very successful.

Edward Wienholt was a man with a buoyant carefree nature causing him to take on big ventures with total self-reliance. This was tempered with a shrewdness that caused him to rarely make a mistake in his business dealings.

William Kent was happy for Wienholt to look for the opportunities to improve their investments. While Wienholt was glad to let William Kent have total control over the management and operation of their joint ventures.

There has been a lot of criticism levelled at the early pioneering pastoralists for being men of substance and tying up huge tracts of land for their grazing enterprises. While some of this may be justified, much of it wasn't. What must be kept in mind is the fact that this is a country with an erratic and unreliable climate. Those early graziers were totally reliant on surface water for their stock. They had to run large numbers of stock to make their enterprise viable. To do that they had to have large areas of land, made larger by the fact that it had to be watered. In those early times there were huge tracts of land that were unusable for grazing purposes because of the absence of reliable surface water.

The early pioneering pastoralists had to be men of substance. They were dealing with a virgin landscape that had to be developed from scratch, requiring large amounts of capital to enable them to do that. Most of the failures were due to men not having sufficient capital to carry out the necessary developments and tide them over the period until they had income coming in. They were also very isolated from their source of supplies and market. As such they had to have a high degree of self-reliance, which greatly added to the cost of the operation.

In the time of the Kent and Wienholt era which began in 1858 and lasted for 88 years these condition still applied. This continued for the first 25 years of the operation, before there was a gradual improvement in conditions and circumstances. Very few pastoral enterprises were self-sufficient financially. Most had financial backers on whom they were reliant and in many cases were at the mercy of. The Kent and Wienholt partnership on Jondaryan was no exception to this. Both men were already established pastoralists with years of practical experience and behind them when they came together in the Jondaryan enterprise. Both had considerable amounts of capital to invest in the purchase and development of the station. Their resources however were not sufficient to cover its operation and the shortfall in income had to be covered by borrowing from financial backers at exorbitant rates of interest.

Few growers could afford to wait for years to get their money from the sale of wool and were forced to borrow against their clip for running and development expenses, being charged high rates of interest.

The agents made use of the grower's funds, while at the same time making excessive profits out of the grower. There was no good reason for it to take so long for a grower to receive his money from the sale of his wool. At times Kent and Wienholt were in debt to Gilchrist, Watt and Co for many thousands of pounds.

Many pastoralists got caught up in a viscous circle with their agents. One that they were unable to break out of unless they were able to establish another source of income other than wool production. William Kent established a sheep stud and made a good thing out of selling sheep, which enabled them to eventually get out of the clutches of their agent.

As late as the 1860s, the delay from when their clip was shipped until pastoralists received payment for their wool was four years. Kent and Wienholt dealt with a firm of Sydney merchant financiers and shippers, Gilchrist, Watt and Co, carrying a considerable debt with them for many years.

Having gone into debt with the firm, they were forced to deal with them until the debt was cleared, even though they felt they were being ripped off at every turn. Gilchrist, Watt and Co ran a vertically-integrated operation. They had offices in London that looked after the marketing of the wool, so they were at the mercy of the firm at every step.

To try to overcome this monopoly Kent and Wienholt used AB Cobb and Co as their agents in London to sell part of their clip. In the early 1860s, they even tried selling part of their clip on the Paris market in an attempt to get a better price. Their agent in Paris was a man or a firm by the name of Jason.

To gain an insight into the processes the wool went through and the costs involved we will look at the Jondaryan wool clip of 1863, from its pre-shearing preparation to its sale.

The station was then running around 100,000 sheep, which were looked after by shepherds, each of whom was responsible for around 5000 head of sheep. Shepherds were paid 40 pounds per year.

Up until the early 1880s, most sheep had the wool washed on their back before they were shorn. There was a man in charge of the sheep-washing operation. He was paid eight pounds per week.

A man was in charge of the horses operating the gear that drove the pump. He was paid 20 shillings per week.

There were two men working the sheep in the yards and four men throwing the sheep down the chutes to the washers. They were paid 20 shillings per week.

There were 14 sheep washers. They were paid one shilling per score of sheep washed. This was done to remove the dirt and grease from the fleece, which weighed almost as much as the fleece itself. With the high cost of transport to the markets in Europe, this represented a considerable saving in transport costs. The sheep were dried in stone cobbled yards so the fleece did not become contaminated with dirt again.

A drover took the sheep to and from the shearing shed. He was paid 20 shillings per week.

Shearing took place over a 16-week period, from the beginning of September to the end of December. The boss of the board was in charge of the shearing operation. He was paid 10 pounds per week.

There was 52 shearers, who were paid three shillings and sixpence per score of sheep shorn. There were many other men and boys both inside and outside the shearing shed to back up the shearers and keep the sheep and wool moving. Three men worked the sheep in the yards. Each was paid 20 shillings per week.

Inside the shed, two shed hands kept the catching pens full for the shearers. They were paid 20 shillings per week. There were ten boys employed in the shed, with pick-up boys to take the shorn fleece from the shearing boards to the wool-rolling tables, sweep-up boys to keep the boards swept clean of wool and a tar boy to apply the tar to injured sheep. There were pony boys who carried the wool from the wool-rolling tables to the classer's table and from the classer's table to the wool bins. Each of these boys was paid on average 10 shillings per week.

There were three wool-rolling tables with two men at each table. They were each paid 20 shillings per week.

Up to the beginning of the 1860s, the wool was classed on the sheep's back. From 1862 on it was classed when the fleece had been shorn from the sheep, as it is today. The wool classer was paid 25 shillings per 1000 fleeces classed.

Fleeces were sorted according to their grade and placed in bins for each grade of wool. The station made up its own wool bales, at a cost of 30 shillings per 100 bales. All fleeces of a particular grade were put together in a bale and pressed.

There were two wool presses, with a presser who was paid two pounds and sixpence per bale, pressing 300 bales weighing 500 pounds each. He had two assistants who were paid 20 shillings per week, to operate the presses.

Because the pastoralists were charged by volume as well as weight in shipping costs, the wool was dumped. The presser, who was paid one shilling per dumped bale, carried out this operation. Dumping was a process where two bales were compressed into the space of one in a special hydraulically operated dump press and bound up with iron straps. These dumped bales each weighed around 1000 pounds. Bales were still being dumped as late as 1907.

Jondaryan had up to 28 teams of bullocks and horses pulling wagons carrying goods on the station and between stations and carrying wool down to the port at Moreton Bay. The cost of getting the wool to the port was two pounds per dumped bale.

At Moreton Bay, it was loaded on to a coastal steamer and taken to Sydney, at a cost of five pounds per dumped bale.

At Sydney, it was unloaded into the agents' store. The agent checked it. If he deemed it necessary, the wool was reclassed. Any dirty wool was scoured, the cost of which was deducted from the grower's returns. In Sydney the grower had the choice of selling to an agent there at a much-reduced price and getting his money much quicker, or shipping it off to be sold in Europe and waiting for years to get his money.

The shipping agent acted as insurer of the wool where it was going overseas, charging two and a half percent on the value of the wool's sale price. The average cost of shipping wool to England was 20 pounds and 10 shillings per dumped bale.

In England the dumped bales were released into the individual bales ready for selling. The grower was entirely at the mercy of the selling agent. He had no way of checking what he got for his wool and had to take his agents word for it.

That year Jondaryan received 21 pence per pound for their wool. The agent charged three per cent on of the value of the wool as handling and selling charges. The proceeds from the sale of the growers wool was paid into the agents account in London. The agent in Sydney eventually paid the grower