The Big Sheep

What the town has behind it is genuinely remarkable. Blackall is where Jackie Howe set the hand-shearing record in 1892 – 321 sheep in seven hours and forty minutes with blade shears, a figure that stood for decades and was not beaten by machine shearers for a very long time. It is one of the few Australian sporting or working records that has entered folklore, and the sleeveless flannel singlet is still called a Jackie Howe.

So a sheep in Blackall is not a generic wool monument. It is standing in the town that produced the most famous shearer in Australian history.

Blackall sits in central-western Queensland's Barcoo country on the Landsborough Highway, in serious sheep and cattle country, and the town also has the Blackall Woolscour – the last steam-powered wool-washing plant in Australia, preserved intact.

The naming ambiguity is worth keeping visible rather than tidying away. Two names for one object, both in current use, is exactly the sort of thing a catalogue should record instead of resolving by preference.

No source located gives a named maker and the decade it belongs to.