For those who care to know about such things, Richard Clark is perfectly willing to discuss the finer points of wool growing. Guests willing to rise in the cool hour before sunup are also welcome to join him as he musters a paddock. A single paddock at Portee is 5,000 acres, and it takes two hours to find all the sheep and get them moving in the same direction. The Clarks used to muster on horseback, but that took three times as long. Now, the horses have been put out to pasture and the mustering is done by truck, with the help of an energetic Border collie named Chloe. The reward for early risers: sharing the spectacle of 500 Merinos pouring down the gentle slopes that lead to the homestead's stockyards, their fleeces incandescent in the rosy dawn light.
A few hours later, the skilled yard dogs, Tom and Maggie, will have helped Richard sort the flock into breedable ewes and late-drop lambs that missed the previous spring's shearing. By then, the yards will be as hot as an oven and anyone in them will be streaked with sweat and dust.
For those who wish to avoid the realities of the working sheep station, there are leisurely boat trips to be taken. The Portee billabong—an Aboriginal word for a permanent water hole—opens into a wide lagoon from which a web of waterways weaves to and from the Murray River. In most of the quieter eddies, the Clarks have set pots to catch yabbies, blue-gray crustaceans whose sweet meat and firm texture make delicious eating. Along the banks, occasional "canoe trees"—hollowed out more than a century and a half ago—are evidence of the Aboriginal clans that lived here prior to white settlement. There is a sandy riverbank for cooling swims, and there are sunset safaris to get a better look at wombats, kangaroos, or an old man emu fussing over his chicks.
The station is also an ideal base from which to explore the Barossa Valley, Australia's most renowned wine region. The vineyards and their German-influenced townships begin an easy 45-minute drive away. Ian Clark sometimes takes guests on tours of the region that offer much more than hit-or-miss sorties to commercial tasting rooms. They might include a visit to the vineyards of his friend Noel Heidenreich, who will discuss viticulture while offering samples of the current vintage from the shade of his grape harvester. Later, there might be a simple lunch such as freshly baked bread dipped first into Barossa olive oil and then into dukkah—a mix of roasted, ground nuts, seeds, herbs, and sea salt—at the pleasant café of the St Hallett winery.
Not that it's necessary to leave Portee to get a good meal. The Clarks' daughter Susan and her sister-in-law Rachel are skilled and imaginative cooks. Portee's brochure and Web site promise "Australian outback flavor"—a term that until recently made food lovers despair. Outside the city, an "Australian meal" used to mean a vast gray slab of meat smothered in floury gravy, a dollop of watery mashed potato, frozen peas boiled beyond recognition, and a cold slice of canned beetroot bleeding into the mush. "With this cuisine, the appetite dies quickly," wrote Oscar Commettant, a Frenchman who toured the outback in 1888. "You swallow while reminding yourself that you must eat to live, not live to eat."
Luckily, things have changed since then. Susan's signature dish is a marinated butterflied leg of Portee-raised lamb grilled over mallee coals and served with her capsicum relish and an imaginative ensemble of salads composed from whatever is best and ripe for the picking in the garden that day. Rachel produces succulent fresh yabbies, tossing them in a light caper vinaigrette and serving them on a bed of baby spinach. In the summer, dinner is often eaten at a large table in the garden as the sunset streaks the sky with an infinite palette of changing colors. Since Portee draws guests from all over the world, conversation around the long table can range from Aussie bush folklore to Austrian politics or Danish preschool practices.
At shearing time, guests can take their lunch with the contract shearers down in the woolshed's spartan "smoko room." There, they get a taste of an outback tradition that has changed little since the days when Tom Roberts painted his famous picture. The main man in the woolshed is still the "gun shearer" or "ringer," who shears more sheep per day than anyone else. At Portee, the gun shearer might shear 300 sheep, about three times as many as the average shearer can do.
"It takes him about a minute and a half a sheep, and there's never a mark on them," observes Richard Clark archly as I let my young ram go after laboring for almost half an hour just to shear the easy bits.
It's hard to say who looks worse, me or the ram, though both of us, fortunately, are more or less in one piece. He has a nick or two, and I have a back that feels like a rhino stepped on it, but he'll be a lot cooler grazing in the baking paddock, and I will never forget the soft, greasy give of a fine Merino fleece sliding away under my hand.
Portee Station
P.O. Box 320
Blanchetown, South Australia 5357
011-61-8-85-40-52-11
portee.com.au
Eight guest rooms with private baths, from $120.
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