Family Court rules on sheep custody case

A man’s home is his castle, and his dog is his best friend, but what happens when your ex-wife wants half the sheep?

A man’s home is his castle, and his dog is his best friend, but what happens when your ex-wife wants half the sheep?

In what may be the first case of its type, a farming couple with ­assets totalling more than $13 million has asked the full court of the Family Court for assistance in dividing their flock, after the wife complained she was left with all the decrepit sheep while he got the good ones.

The couple, who cannot be named for legal reasons, but are known as Mr and Mrs Calder in the court papers, were married for 34 years. He is 68; she is 62; they have adult children; and they have raised sheep all their married life.

They separated in 2012, and split their land, so that each could keep farming.

When time came to split the other assets, however, the wife ­argued that her husband had taken all the “top quality sheep”, leaving her with a poor-quality flock.

The husband didn’t deny it, and offered to give her money, but she didn’t want it. She wanted the court to give her some of the good sheep, instead. When a lower court refused, she argued for a hearing in front of three of the ­nation’s most senior family court judges: Chief Justice Diana Bryant, judge Stephen Thackray and judge Kirsty Macmillan.

Over the course of a day-long hearing in Melbourne, the wife’s counsel, Bruce Geddes QC, asked the wife to “please tell His Honour why it is that you would prefer livestock rather than the mone­tary value of livestock”.

Mrs Calder replied: “Well, currently on my farm I only have old culled, rejected sheep or crossbreeds, bred for fat. They are not bred for wool. I wish to have purebred flock (of the type) I have been breeding for the last 35 years. You can’t buy these sort of sheep. They’re top quality and I have none of them.”

The sheep she had received, she said, were “old. They can’t last much longer. They’re already dying”.

The husband didn’t disagree that he had given the wife fewer of the lovely woolly lambs, but ­argued she could take the money he was offering — about $700,000 — and build up her own flock, saying: “If she wants to build them, she can build them up. (She) has got ewes there, and you can put whatever ram you want over them.”

He also argued that he had given the wife a good selection of other sheep, saying: “All these sheep are good sheep.”

The wife’s counsel said the wife was “at a stage in life where she doesn’t have time to build up her own flock”.

Asked why she couldn’t just take her money to the auctions and buy more good sheep, she said: “No. No. Not of the quality we had. We bred them up for 30 years.”

In arguing for more of the good sheep, the court was reminded of “the difficulty that a woman experiences when she leaves a marriage in an inferior position because of the role she has been assigned in the ­marriage”.

However, the court noted that “the husband has historically been the farmer” and while this “should not be taken to minimise the ­involvement of the wife in the farming enterprise” he nevertheless needed to keep the sheep he’d taken when the couple first broke up since they were essential to the business he now ran.

In a judgment delivered in Perth on March 16, the court ruled that the “the appropriate outcome is for the husband to retain the livestock and for the wife to ­receive monetary compensation. In doing so, we recognise that the wife is being deprived of the opportunity to have a share of a flock which has been bred up over many years.”

Legal costs have so far topped $2.4m or $1.2m each.