Christine Chirgwin’s recent cake-decorating course has proved unexpectedly useful.
Squeezing icing sugar onto cakes isn’t so different, she says, to squeezing silicon between iron roofing sheets.
Except this energetic grandmother has been clambering over the uneven gable roof of one of Australia’s largest woolsheds, to try to make it weatherproof.
Toganmain, near Darlington Point in the New South Wales Riverina, is regarded as one of Australia’s most significant woolsheds.
“Such a spectacular shed. It’s huge, 240 feet [73 metres] long, 80 feet [24 metres] wide, it’s enormous,” Ms Chirgwin says.
“I’ve been inside a lot of shearing sheds, this place just takes the cake.”
And for sheer ambition, Ms Chirgwin and her team of volunteers may also claim their own cake.
Their quest to preserve and restore the massive shed and numerous outbuildings is one of Australia’s biggest rural restoration programs.
Preservation work has all been done by volunteers, who’ve donated their time, money and materials to the cause.
Preserving record-holding history
The historic woolshed is enshrined in folklore.
“It holds the record for shearing over 202,000 sheep with 92 blade shearers, which has never been beaten,” Ms Chirgwin says.
“There’s so much attached to this place. ‘Banjo’ Paterson wrote about it in Flash Jack from Gundagai.”
From the outside it’s a mass of corrugated iron.
Inside it resembles an inverted wooden ship because it’s said a shipwright built the shed.
“It really is astounding and the mind boggles,” retired Adelaide school teacher Ralph Greenham says.
“What sort of place was it when they had 90 shearers at work? The place would have been a hive of activity, there would have been people everywhere.”
Mr Greenham’s fascination with Toganmain began decades ago when he drove by.
When he learnt of the efforts to preserve it, the 82-year old home handyman unhesitatingly lent a hand.
He and other working-bee volunteers camp in the shearers’ huts but had to first make them slightly more habitable.
One of the most important woolshed buildings
The volunteers are from all over southern Australia. They are a disparate group of farmers, retirees, ex-shearers and more, all united in a common cause, to save this priceless heritage building.
“We’ve got people from different parts of the world and livelihoods,” local volunteer Mat Lacey says.
“We’ve got the young, we’ve got the old. None of us are overly qualified in certain things, but we’re all willing to get in and have a go.”
Until recently the 6-hectare site where the shed and outbuildings stand was owned by Paraway Pastoral, which was a division of Macquarie Bank.
It has now handed over the title deeds to the Friends of Toganmain group, which will act as trustee for the site.
The new ownership means plans to make the precinct a public museum can proceed at a faster pace.
In further good news, the Heritage Council of New South Wales has notified the committee it’s considering listing the site on the state’s heritage register.
That has delighted heritage architect Peter Freeman who began the campaign for the shed’s preservation in 2004.
“Overall it must be seen as one of the most important woolshed buildings in Australia,” says Mr Freeman, who has worked to save similar historic woolsheds for more than 50 years.
The last time sheep wore shorn at Toganmain was in 2002. After that Paraway moved its shearing to a more modern shed on a neighbouring property.
Since then, the elements have taken their toll on the buildings.
Several wet years have weakened the buildings’ foundations, and caused the giant redgum beams to sag and already frail timber to rot.
The common goal to save Toganmain has forged a camaraderie among volunteers.
“We have a great time and the connections we make and the friends we’ve made through this have been wonderful,” Ms Chirgwin says.
Snake in the bed
One-hundred-year-old Jim Maher is especially delighted to see the shed’s restoration underway.
The former shearers’ cook once toiled in the primitive kitchen, single-handedly cooking over an open fire and using a massive colonial oven to feed more than 40 men.
His working day began at five in the morning and ended at nine at night when he flopped into bed.
Mr Maher recalls how shearers and shed hands arrived at a new shed and stuffed fresh straw into mattresses in the huts before shearing began.
Once a rough and tough shearer called “Tarzan” McKee decided he’d make do with the existing straw.
Over successive days he complained mice moving about in his mattress at night were disrupting his sleep.
At shearing’s end he emptied the straw from his mattress to be burnt.
“And tipped a brown snake out and he’d slept on it for a week or 10 days,” Mr Maher says.
‘Till it’s done’
What it will cost to restore Toganmain woolshed and its outbuildings is anyone’s guess.
But in recent months the roof has been put back on and made weatherproof with the help of Christine Chirgwin’s caulking gun.
Jim Maher’s memorabilia will be among the items on display when the shed is eventually open to the public.
For these passionate and committed volunteers failure is not an option.
They’re now hoping to secure some generous funding to see the job through.
“We’ll just keep going and going and going till it’s done,” Mr Lacey says.
