The Herds Shot Round the World by Rebecca J. H. Woods

Author:Rebecca J. H. Woods
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press

Tons of frozen sheep meat imported to Great Britain, 1885–1910.

Adapted from Critchell and Raymond, History of the Frozen Meat Trade, 422. 1890 and 1895 totals both include imports from the Falkland Islands (331 tons and 632 tons, respectively).

As the trade itself was established, freezing works—factories for the slaughter, partial butchery (carcasses were skinned, bled, and beheaded before shipment), and freezing of sheep and lambs—sprang up throughout the antipodes, while refrigerated warehouses, or cold stores, began to populate the docks of Liverpool, London, Bristol, and other major ports in Britain.95 Despite, or perhaps because of, its rapid growth, the trade in frozen meat between Great Britain and its antipodean colonies was not without hindrances. “Hurried and consequently careless stowing” of frozen cargo in preparation for its journey constituted a “chief danger.”96 The nature of the voyage between the antipodes and the North Atlantic itself posed a hazard. Ships from Australia and New Zealand spent between one and three months at sea, depending on means of motive power, much of which was “under an equatorial sun.”97 Equipment could (and did) fail, and obstacles were encountered during the journey. For instance, not only was the SS Dunedin, whose motive power was supplied the old-fashioned way—by wind—becalmed in the tropics, the ship’s ventilation system became blocked by frost, threatening to compromise the cargo: “the cold air was not sufficiently ‘tumbled about’ amongst the carcasses.” Only when the captain risked life and limb to fix it was the cargo secured.98

The risk of spoliation was significant at all points along this novel cold chain. The cargo of the SS Protos reportedly necessitated speedy cooking “because of the tendency to rapid decomposition.”99 But even before reaching London, frozen cargo was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of colonial climates. The perceived insalubrity of Australia’s climate was thus in danger of being magnified by the technology of the trade. More problematic than the occasional failure of equipment, such as New Zealand’s early shipments experienced, was the fact that any point of transfer for frozen carcasses—say, from railway car to ship, or from ship to storehouse—was an opportunity for thawing to occur, and thereby to do injury to the meat.100 The Australian industry was especially prone to this vulnerability. Unlike New Zealand, where nearly all pastures were “far more favorably situated,”101 located within easy distance of the colony’s many ports, the bulk of Australia’s flocks were grazed hundreds of dry, scorching miles from its ports. Many producers had to “drive their sheep perhaps 100 or 200 miles, and some of them even 300 miles, on foot,” Bruce explained, “and then send them 200 miles by rail” to coastal freezing works. As a newspaper account of the Dunedin Chamber of Commerce meeting of 26 February 1881 proclaimed, “no reasonable man could suppose that meat slaughtered beyond the Blue Mountains”—the range dividing coastal New South Wales from its outback interior—“and sent to Sydney would, on arrival, be of a good color.”102 Such arduous journeys “deteriorat[ed] and wast[ed] the mutton,”103 and consequently prevented “the

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