From outback to beach in Australia - The Times Online

Bryan Appleyard encounters sheep in the outback, roos at Kangaroo Island, cockatoos in Melbourne, and a big rock in Uluru

Brian Appleyard in Australia

In the outback, sheep can do things to a man. It's hot, and I've been left to drove 23 rams down a dusty road on a quad bike. I'm taking them to an orgy. They're to be split up and put in 700-acre paddocks with several hundred ewes -each will "cover" about 10 a day. That's probably why they're called rams.

I have to keep it slow and quiet. Get them hot and bothered and their fertility plummets. I let the quad roll along on tickover and take some time to watch a flock of galahs -gorgeous pink and grey parrots -gabbling furiously to each other. There are 145 species of bird on this sheep-and-cattle station and almost all of them, to British eyes, used to small brown creatures, are fabulously exotic.

A cloud of dust announces the arrival of another quad, driven by Graham Pickles, the owner of this 12,000-acre station. It's called Burrawang West. It's about an hour's drive from Parkes, the town made famous by the movie The Dish, which is, in turn, about an hour's flight -or a six-hour drive - from Sydney in western New South Wales.

Pickles bought Burrawang in 2000 from a Japanese construction company that had used it as a retreat for its executives. So part of the deal was a fabulously luxurious resort, with a homestead and a collection of dramatic sheds providing accommodation for 24 people, or slightly more if children are put up on camp beds.

Together we guide the rams into a holding pen, where we divide them up and then take them in a trailer to their allowed paddocks. It takes all day and, at the end of it all, I tell Pickles, truthfully, that it's been the most relaxing day of my life. He grins.

He talks about being out on the quads with Bill Royal, manager of this land for 30 years and wearer of some of the biggest hats I have ever seen.

"Sometimes we just look at each other and ask, 'Is there any place you'd rather be?' The answer's no."

Sheep certainly did things to Pickles. He knew nothing about them when he bought Burrawang. The first thing Royal told him to do was get rid of the flock of merinos -wool sheep that, for years, have been the backbone of the Australian economy. But merinos are pesky creatures, bad mothers, difficult to drove, and shearing is expensive, particularly so when wool prices have fallen and the Chinese can do it cheaper.

So after extensive research, Pickles began to replace them with dorpers, a Dorset-Persian cross. They don't produce wool, they're good mothers, they drove like a dream and they produce excellent meat. Now he's gone dorper crazy. He thinks it's the sheep that can save Australia.

Ah, Australia! Now that Baz Luhrmann's epic movie about the country has made us all conscious of its scale, extremity, history and beauty, Australia is riding high in the recessionary imagination. Here is a place, one feels, along with generations of Brits, where one could start again with a clean balance sheet. Here's a country almost the size of America populated by fewer than 22m people. It's just so damned . . . empty.

At one point on this trip a cancelled flight meant we had to take a bus from Alice Springs to Uluru (Ayers Rock). There were only four sites of human habitation -the odd sheep station manned by two or three people -in 300 miles.

The emptiness infects the imagination with dreams and wonder.