Churchill Island heritage farm keeps agricultural history, skills alive
Milking, shearing, whip cracking — it’s all in a day’s work for Chloe Dann at this heritage farm near Phillip Island.
SHEARER, blacksmith, whipcracker, working dog wrangler, Chloe Dann has mastered them all.
The 30-year-old is even a dab hand at wagon-driving Clydesdales and milking cows by hand.
Next up on her list of traditional farm skills to learn is farrier training. It’s all thanks to her job working on the 57ha Churchill Island farm, linked via a bridge to Phillip Island in Western Port bay.
“This is probably the best job in the world,” says Chloe, who five years ago had no farm skills at all.
“Even if you’re having a bad day you come here and all the animals are excited to see you and you look across the paddock to the views of the bay and everything else fades away.”
The farm is the first in Victoria, with wheat planted in 1801 and with one of Australia’s first mobs of Highland cattle in the 1870s.
Today the farm still has a herd of the photogenic cattle, seen at the entrance to the island scratching themselves with their long horns, alongside five dairy cows, three Clydesdales, goats, an assortment of fowl including peacocks, and a friendly cockatoo called George.
Churchill Island and its 1850s homestead and cottages is run by the Phillip Island Nature Parks – which is in charge of the nearby famous penguin parade. It is open to the public all year.
Chloe and her three farm colleagues carry out heritage farming activities for the public, starting with blacksmith demonstrations at 10.30am, then milking, shearing, working dog mustering and whip cracking.
Chloe says it’s shearing that is one of the biggest drawcards to the island and by far her favourite farm skill.
“People know so little about wool,” she says. “There’s a real disconnection with agriculture. People often ask who shears wild sheep and I have to explain they’re a domesticated animal.
“I explain what an amazing product wool is, that it’s biodegradable, renewable, fire-resistant and breathable. We have spinners here who show how it can be transformed.”
With zero shearing experience before starting her job full-time in 2018, that year Chloe was sent to shearing school in Hamilton and Mortlake, taking about a year to get to the speed of shearing 40 sheep a day.
“I underestimated how hard it was going to be. Every muscle in your body aches,” says Chloe, who broke her back when she was 20 falling off a horse, but recuperated after rehab.
“But it’s almost more of a mental challenge because you have to push through the pain and you can’t be angry. If you keep your cool everything goes well.
“It’s also like learning to dance. If you put your foot 1mm in the wrong spot the sheep can be uncomfortable and will run off.
“I also wasn’t prepared how much I’d fall in love with it. What I’ve seen from the industry is so different from the stereotypes. It’s so supportive.”
Chloe shears only one sheep a day at Churchill Island. There are 25 black-faced Suffolks on the farm, with extra sheep sourced from about 30 different farms in a 30km radius, all shorn for free and all non-Merino.
“Even the smallest scratch is hard to comprehend for some visitors so we always have flat skinned sheep, no wrinkles,” Chloe says.
To fully immerse herself in the wool industry, at the end of 2020 Chloe took six weeks off the job to work with a contract shearer around East Gippsland.
“To master it you need to shear hundreds of thousands of sheep,” she says, adding she would like to learn to blade shear.
Last year Chloe learnt blacksmithing in a two-day course, describing the metal work as “like working with playdough”.
She is a self-taught whipcracker, while her working dog skills took about two years to master, no thanks to “naughty” nine-year-old Border Collie Billy.
“He’s stubborn and I’ve had to spend hours working with him to develop a bond,” she says, adding at times she resorts to mustering sheep by riding one of the Clydesdales.
For Chloe, the love of the job is as much about the love of animals.
Her father, Peter, is Phillip Island Nature Parks’ director of research and a renowned ornithologist, in demand around the world, especially for his studies on penguins.
So, tagging along with her family, through her youth she lived for six months each in New Zealand, and Cape Town South Africa, and three months in South America as well as in Cambridge, while Peter worked at the university there.
Her mother is a journalist who — when her parents separated — worked in Indonesia so Chloe has also spent a lot of time there, as well as in a remote Aboriginal community in the Northern Territory “where there was a fantastic group of kids and I’d walk barefoot in the scrub”.
Whenever she was at home, she would ride her horses on the family’s 7ha property at nearby Bass.
She wasn’t academic and after school she had a stint working on a remote Queensland cattle station in the kitchen.
Chloe says in any skill she conquers, she does not let self-doubt stop her.
“Being in your comfort zone isn’t a challenge,” she says.
“Do what makes you scared and you’re probably going in the right direction.”
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