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InformationWoolgathering
In another life, I would have been a shepherd. I’ve always felt a pull towards the solitary and the earthbound, but there’s something especially poetic about shepherding that draws me in.
Sheep feature strongly in the history of this country, for good and bad. They say that Australia was “built on the sheep's back”. Like so many Australian idioms, it’s hard to trace the origin of that one, but there is undeniable truth to it. Merino sheep were introduced to Australia in 1797, and by the mid-1800s it was our primary export, the fleece-covered backbone of our economy. During the 1950s, the peak of the industry, it accounted for over half of our agricultural activity. It could also be said that sheep farming has had a proportionally negative impact on our ecology, resulting in extensive landclearing, erosion, biodiversity loss, and the replacement of the native with the imported.
Our relationship with wool goes back much farther than Australia’s short history though. It is an ancient material, providing basic survival needs like clothing and shelter to the earliest people. We have a 10,000 year record of its use. Ötzi the Iceman was clothed in it, wool offering enough warmth to protect him on his journeys through in the Italian Alps. For all of its wonderful properties, Ötzi did prove that wool, sadly, won’t provide much protection against an arrow to the back.
Perhaps the deepest cultural connection to wool belongs to the people of Medieval Britain, where the cultivation and trade of wool provided the livelihoods of countless rural communities and would eventually scale up to the global industry we know today. Shepherd itself is derived from an old English word that combines "sceap" (sheep) and "hierde" (herder), into the literal "sheep herder”.
Wool is a potent source of language and storytelling. Of all the many words uniquely related to wool (see: lanolin; crook; gleaning; bellwether; yarn …) the most beguiling is woolgather, originating in the 16th century. As sheep were moved across the land, their wool would become snagged on thorns and fences. To woolgather is to wander the fields, alone in your thoughts, in search of these prized soft fibres. It is a humble, solitary, labour, that in its own way, contains a type of transcendence.
Some considered woolgathering to be a lowly practice, however, and the idea of trawling the fields for scraps of wool became mapped to the idea of mental drift. Dérive. Purposeless wandering and fanciful thinking. “One’s wits gone wool-gathering”.
As the centuries rolled on, the word would come up sparingly but persistently. It can be found in 18th century agricultural texts like the Fragmenta Antiquitatis and popular tracts such as The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. In the Romantic period, the poets began to enlist the woolgatherer as a way to invoke childhood imagination over mere fecklessness, transfering the concept from its marginal practice into emotional prose. A more sympathetic reading of mental wandering. Reverie. Daydreaming. But without the snark.
Modern dictionaries of the 19th and 20th centuries sought to land somewhere in the middle. A concise abstract definition suggests an “indulgence in idle fancies” and the more neutral “to be lost in thought”. Your mileage may vary as to whether that means deep contemplation or a simple lack of focus.
Today, in our age of acceleration, woolgathering operates more as a cultural undertow than an active part of our language. An invsible pull towards meditative slowness and attentive noticing. Wandering as an act of connection. Daydreaming as a creative tool. It is for both reminiscence and discovery. Curiosity and imagination. It is the antidote to hegemony, to automation, and to abandonment - allowing one weave forgotten threads into new stories and possibilities.