After 35 years retired from work as a shearer, this 71-year-old has picked up the hand piece.
My good friend Bobby Pepper he was scratching around for a shearer one day
and he came and looked and me and said ‘I really need a man, can you give us a hand Darryl?’
and I just said ‘no Bobby’ – not quite like that but he said ‘you’ll be doing me
a favour if you could help me Darryl’.
So I said 'schucks, righto,' and I went up and I actually enjoyed it.
Just the atmosphere, the freedom to be yourself again, just the freedom to speak and think and say
and have a laugh and a giggle with no one jumping on your head telling you
‘you can’t say that, you can’t do that’ - all the can'ts, there’s a lot of can’ts in society today.
The return has made him reflect on a career in the sheds.
Originally I was shepherding in New Zealand and there wasn’t much money working for the farmers
and the shearers kept coming in and they had nice female roustabouts
and they always seemed to have plenty of money and have plenty of fun
and I thought that makes a lot more sense to me than working for the farmer –
I realised there was more money working off farmers.
Then we started travelling – New Zealand, Australia, America, Norway, Sweden, England,
Scotland, back to America, Canada and we started 12 years of global shearing I guess.
And we opened the way,
It was good fun, it was really good fun and we made really good money.
He was a gun at the time, shearing 200-plus sheep a day.
So how many sheep can he shear these days?
I just plug along mate, just plug along from behind.
There's no numbers to give anymore, I just plug along and smile.
After several decades work as a shearer, Darryl downed tools.
Then it was a progression – I like poking around sheds and I walked into The
University of Western Australia and they were building robots down there
and then I guess I set up a consultancy and had a period
of my life building robots and working in academia which was a really interesting period of my life.
But nothing beat the atmosphere of the woolsheds.
You can come back to the woolshed and you can dish it out and they dish it back
and it’s actually good fun. There’s this freedom of speech that you don’t get in town and it’s good.
And there’s something about hard work – it’s a physical 'defrag' and a rebooting of the brain.
You feel a lot better for it. There’s a breed of us who don’t fit in – we just don’t fit.
We can play golf but we’re extremely competitive, we can do a lot of things
but we just don’t seem to fit into the normal mode and we like to do things a little bit different.
And the other reason I like it is a lot of my old mates can’t, they can't do it anymore
and it's just to piss them off really.
Darryl’s wife is similarly happy about his return to shearing
I think she enjoys the freedom. She knows where I am, she doesn’t have to worry about me.
It puts a bit of entertainment into the conversation.
She complains quite regularly that she’s heard all my stories 25 times – more than 25 times –
she’s heard all my stories 100 times and I think it’s time to go and get a few new stories.