The Wool that Built the High Country

A story of Merino, the windswept Monaro, and the town that rode on the sheep’s back.

Published June 2026, words and photos Mandy Lamont

Long before Cooma became the bustling gateway to the Snowy Mountains, the Monaro plains were shaping a legend. The land here is ancient and uncompromising. Broad shoulders of tussock grass, bleached granite boulders, and a sky so wide you feel small beneath it. But it was on these harsh, open plains that something extraordinary took hold. A  sheep whose fleece would help build a nation.

Merino sheep were once so prized by the Spanish Crown that illegal export was punishable by death. But as trade routes opened and European powers competed for agricultural dominance, the flocks gradually spread beyond Spain’s borders. By the late 1700s, visionary colonists in New South Wales recognised the potential and began breeding programs that would transform the continent’s economic future. Within just a few decades, Merinos had spread across the dry, wide Australian landscape where other animals struggled to survive. Australia had found its perfect sheep

By the mid-1800s, the Monaro plains were recognised as some of the finest wool-growing country in the world. Settlers arriving from the coast stepped into a landscape built for Merino. Crisp winters that encouraged dense, fine crimp. Dry summers that deterred disease. Rolling, open grasslands that produced hardy, resilient sheep.

Cooma quickly became more than a stopover—it became the beating heart of a wool empire.

The shearing sheds on stations hummed with life each season. Wool classers, blade shearers, station hands, rouseabouts, cooks, and drovers would arrive from all over the region. Turning lonely paddocks into small but busy worlds of their own.

Wool wasn’t just an industry; it was a culture. At the Cooma railway station, now heritage listed, bales of raw fleece were stacked high. Destined for the mills of Sydney, London, and beyond. The trains would leave heavy with Australia’s golden fleece. Merino wool so fine and bright it set international benchmarks.

For a time, Cooma was one of the most important wool hubs in the country.

Through the early 20th century and into the 1950s, the Merino trade exploded. Prices soared, fortunes were made. And Australia’s identity became tethered to the humble sheep.

The phrase “Australia rode on the sheep’s back” wasn’t just a slogan, it was truth.

On the Monaro, shearers worked dawn to dusk, earning wages that could support entire families. Wool classing became a respected craft. Generations perfected breeding lines that produced fibre so fine it could slip like silk between fingers.

Station owners travelled to Sydney wool auctions with a sense of quiet pride, knowing that the bales stencilled “Monaro” fetched premium prices. More than once, the Cooma region produced national and international award-winning fleeces.

Then came a scheme that promised security and delivered catastrophe.

In 1970, the Australian government introduced the Wool Reserve Price Scheme. A price floor designed to smooth out market volatility. For a while, it worked. Then overconfidence took over. The Wool Council set the reserve at an aggressive 870 cents per kilogram. Producers expanded their flocks, and when Chinese and Soviet demand simultaneously collapsed, the whole thing buckled. By 1991 the stockpile had reached 4.7 million bales. When the scheme was abandoned, wool prices fell overnight from 700 cents to 430 cents per kilogram. Farmers went broke and it took a decade to offload the stockpile at a massive loss.

Families who had built everything around Merino were left holding the wreckage of a policy that promised to protect them. And instead gutted the very industry it was meant to support. A hard lesson in what happens when bureaucrats get involved in something they don’t fully understand.

But Merino has endured. And today, it’s thriving in ways those Monaro graziers of the 1950’s could never have imagined.

Modern Merino is nothing short of a miracle fibre: breathable, biodegradable, naturally thermo-regulating, odour-resistant. Machine washable and easy to care for. From ultralight hiking shirts to luxury Italian suiting, Merino is having a renaissance.

OPTIM^TM, wool engineered to be water resistant.

Merino is a natural fibre, unlike polyester, nylon and acrylic. Which aren’t textiles in any traditional sense, but petroleum-based plastics, spun into fibres. Its what most activewear is made out of. And it turns out, that matters more than we’ve been led to believe.

When you wear synthetic clothing, tiny plastic fragments shed from the fabric with every wash and wear. These microplastics cling to your skin and can act as carriers for toxic chemical additives. Things like flame retardants and plasticizers, which leach out with sweat and friction and can be absorbed through your largest organ, the skin. Research from the University of Birmingham found that as much as 8% of those chemicals could be taken up by the skin. With sweatier skin absorbing even higher levels. Which means the harder you work out in your synthetic activewear, the more exposure you’re getting.

Endocrine-disrupting chemicals mimic or interfere with natural hormones and are linked to cancer, infertility, developmental problems in children, thyroid dysfunction, and metabolic issues.

The idea sounds almost too good to question. Yesterday’s plastic bottle becomes today’s performance jacket. Global giants like Nike and Adidas have built entire sustainability narratives around this transformation. Turning discarded PET into sleek, wearable fibres. On the surface, it feels like progress. Waste diverted. Resources reused. Guilt reduced. But the reality is less circular than it appears. When plastic bottles are spun into clothing, they are effectively removed from a recycling system that could have turned them back into bottles again. Instead, they become part of a textile stream of garments that shed microplastics, are notoriously difficult to recycle and destined for landfill at the end of its life. It’s just petroleum packaged in a new story and we’re asked to feel virtuous about wearing it. The planet isn’t actually winning here. It’s just a slightly different path to the same destination.

For humans it’s worse! Recycled plastic fabrics contain higher levels of harmful chemicals and shed even more microplastics than virgin plastic alternatives. The recycling process doesn’t clean out the chemical load, it concentrates it. So when a brand tells you their jacket is made from recycled plastic and calls it sustainable, what they’re also telling you, without saying it, is that you’re now wearing a garment with a higher toxic burden. In that sense, we haven’t eliminated plastic, we’ve simply moved it closer to our skin and dispersed it more widely into the environment.

This is where natural fibres like merino offer a different perspective. Merino wool sits outside the synthetic loop altogether. It’s renewable. It grows on sheep. It’s biodegradable, and free from microplastic shedding. There’s also a growing conversation around the idea that different materials vibrate at different energetic frequencies, and that what we wear close to our bodies may interact with our own energy field in ways we’re only beginning to understand. Wool and linen are ancient, living materials that have clothed human beings for millennia. Polyester has existed for less than a century.

We’ve somehow convinced ourselves that petroleum-based clothing is normal. Merino has been keeping people warm and comfortable for centuries.

This summer I started making Lamont Merino tees, tanks and long sleeve tops. Turning more and more to natural fibres, I was looking for a branded merino tee and ended up making them myself. Merino breathes with you, warms you without overheating, and stays fresh wear after wear.

I wanted to make a tee that is as comfortable in the cities as it is on a mountain range. Much like my own journey, coming to the Snowy Mountains from Melbourne 17 years ago. The merino wool is sourced from sheep stations across Australia, knitted by ABMT Textiles in Melton, Victoria, and sewn into a t-shirt by me, here in the Snowy Mountains. 100% merino. Pure, natural, premium. Check them out at lamontmerino.com.au