Moonie's great hope

The Moonie resident said with good sales at the weekly Warwick yards and while the sheep market was "good" at present, there was room for change.

"A lot of people in the area are going out of sheep because of the drought, but this year we've seen prices go up and we want to see it stay that way," Mrs White said.

"We used to sell our ewes and lambs at Dalby every week and then it closed down, so now we'll load up about 34 head each time and send them along to Warwick.

"It's unfortunate that you can't pick the markets, but we got $133 per head about nine weeks ago which was excellent, and then they went down in price to around $98 per head."

Mrs White made the change from wool-growing Merino sheep to meat-trade Dorpers about six years ago, and said she hadn't looked back, now running 400 ewes and a handful of rams.

"It's a lot of work at the minute because they've been lambing, so we'll go out twice a day, and you might see one trying to lamb and you catch it and lamb it.

"I've got four orphans in the backyard to take care of with another 200 out in the paddock and heifers calving at the same time, so there's always something to do."

Mrs White has placed the half-grown lambs on the oat crop after the property received what she is hailing a "life-saving" rainfall of 46mm. "They're doing very well at the moment - we were just lucky that it rained and it replenished the crop."

The life of the once London-based nurse changed dramatically when she and a friend caught the travel bug, moving to Australia on a two-year visa.

"My husband Raymond was a carpenter who moved from Sydney to Cunnamulla during the wool boom, and I ended up meeting him and stayed.

"Ray fell in love with life on the land and enjoyed working with sheep - working on many different properties before drawing this block at Moonie."

The Whites were lucky enough to be part of a ballot system that involved a large chunk of land being subdivided and placed on the market.

"He won 4500 acres (1821 hectares) and decided to make the move here."

Mrs White's husband worked sheep and cattle at Toongabbie before passing away in 2001, leaving the property in good hands.

"Our second boy Andrew has come back to the property with his family and we work it together. It was actually his idea to invest in Dorpers because, originally, we were all Merino.

"They would put them on the land to dig out the brigalow suckers, and back in the 1980s we went into Merino British rams for fat lamb and did that for a long time and it was good. My husband and I would work hard, and when Andrew came home we bought Merino/Dorper-cross.

"Now we buy Dorper rams and a couple of the older sheep still have a bit of Merino in them, but they're a majority Dorper. You can't compare Dorpers to the British-cross sheep at all - we'll stay with them now."

Battling wild dogs and drought is se­­c­­ond nature to Mrs White, who was forced to make an investment in five donkeys to protect the Dorper herd after her neigh­­bours exterminated 15 wild dogs last year.

"They're really moving into the area and causing a lot of damage, so we ended up getting some donkeys from a truckload which came down from Alice Springs.

"They bond and run with the herd and protect the sheep very well."

Mrs White said she would continue working with Dorpers, a breed that she had found to be both drought hardy and maternal.