Late Update

The past week has been long and awesome! I participated in activities ranging from boomerang throwing to sheep shoving to watching sheep being sheared. This all was part of an excursion organised by Newington and PLC for all exchanges, including Tim, Josephine, Jasmijn and me from The Netherlands, Jake and Alfie from England and two shy boarding girls from Japan. We assembled in the morning at 8:25 at PLC together with the other exchanges and Mr. Bennet. We then endured what would be a long and warm bus ride that took 1,5 hours. By the end of the ride we had only just left Sydney and already the Blue Mountains were in clear sight in the background. We had arrived at a real Australian sheep-shearing station, which was more of a farm than an actual shearing holdfast. A man landed Nick was assigned the tedious job of handling the tourists and he started off by explaining to us just how huge Australian sheep farms can get. It turns out, they're pretty humongous. Apparently there are farms the size of the UK, The Philippines and Indonesia combined! This is mostly because deep into the Australian desert, the rule of 1 sheep per 10 acres of land (but mostly even more) is taken into account when establishing a sheep farm. However, because this farm, the Tobruk Sheep Station, was so close in to Sydney and had fertile and grassy fields, the rule of thumb that was taken into consideration was 5 sheep per 1 acre! Now you can imagine the amount of money they made on selling wool, selling meat and selling bio fuel. So we were then demonstrated how sheep are sheared, tried throwing a couple of boomerangs and were taught how to use real whips. After a tiring day at the farm, we had some sausages and made our way back into Sydney.