the Good _ The BAAAAHD of Working With Sheep _ RAMS

I think very early on there was some kind of hope, particularly on the part of the producers, that we might be able to just get four local sheep and sort of stick them in a house and wing it. Thankfully sense prevailed and we got the professionals to come and do it because we had some merinos even yesterday on set as sort of dressing and you know they're crazy mad things. Kirsten's managed to get her sheep to come to her. She calls their names, they come to her. Sam and everyone have been able to work with them. It's still wacky to see a sheep in a house you know that's just bottom line seeing a sheep in a house is a weird thing. I've been a sheep farmer in real life. When I was a young boy my family came from central Queensland and there the sheep stations are on a huge scale, a huge scale and so when I was about 14 was the first time I got on a horse and mustered sheep from one paddock to another and there's the running joke in this about merinos because we don't breed merino and I was always impressed by how stupid the merinos were. They've been bred for wool and little else and so every time one would would lay down you would have to get off your horse and pick it up and put it on its feet and send it on its way again otherwise it would lay there until the crows picked its eyes up so I did know a little about it. I'm an owner of sheep and I've always wanted to work with sheep obviously but this is the first time I've actively I think worked with sheep on a professional acting sort of basis they're acting so I don't have these sort of sheep I have South Suffolk's black faces and black socks you know a very attractive breed. It's not always a good thing to be named have your name used for one of my rams one of my rams Brian Brown was the first ram that I you know that I named followed by George Greig and various others but Hugo Weaving actually died doing what rams do best he actually fell off the back of a ewe one day and we found him with his feet in the air four four feet you know he was dead died on the job heroic actually he's much mourned you might think it's a good way to go but it's a busy business being around a good ram can cover 80 ewes in the days of a prodigious male animal. Our sheepdog we've got two dogs yeah one's the dog that'll do all that stuff for you and the other is an actual sheepdog and it is so into the sheep that it takes no notice of me on the quad bike the number of times I had to jam on the brake to avoid running over the dog which I would have been probably banned from Mount Barker and sent back to Sydney because as much as I've I've had dogs and I've had trained dogs I've never actually worked with dogs and sheep it's usually we do everything we used to do everything on horseback and we didn't use dogs at Central Queensland where some some properties as a young fella I didn't.