On a farm north west of Canberra, these men grew the world's finest wool.
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About 800 millimetres of rain falls annually on Legderton in the Brindabella Ranges foothills, where Barry and Gavin Walker, and Gavin's son, Steven, fine-tuned 150 years of genetics in the ultimate ultra-fine sheep.
"We all loved so very much what we did, and we say between ourselves ultra-fine is a farm production, but actually it is a disease," Barry Walker says. "Once you have got it, you can't get rid of it."
But they did. Two years ago the Walkers sold all their ultra-fine merinos, letting go what their predecessors had started on Ledgerton's granite and porphyry soils in the 1840s.
Each generation improved the genetics and bought more land. During World War II Barry and Gavin's father, John, received the highest prices of any wool clip in the country for five years.
The brothers and Steven continued improving their flock's genetics. They added land, and shelter to paddocks, nurtured pastures and won multiple awards in Italy, Germany, England, Korea and Japan.
Over 11 years pursuing Italian wool merchant Loro Piana's challenge cup for the finest wool produced anywhere in the world, they won nine times. In doing so their finest wool became finer, from 13 microns down to 11.1 microns.
World events rattled the high-end wool market, but the Walkers were not for turning. Technology and long droughts didn't shake them from their trusty ultra-fine merinos, the smallest of sheep with the least meat, that cut the least wool per head. Because of its fineness, the wool fetched the most money per kilo of all cuts.
Yet when they did change to broader wool sheep, sentiment was put aside.
"It was mind-mending," Mr Walker says. "It was not financially difficult, but extraordinarily difficult in terms of family commitment. This had been my family's living for six generations continuously," he says.
"They were very hard days to see the big semi-trailers go down the road with the old sheep on them which we had spent 160 years genetically breeding to that level," he said.
Extra fine wool's profit margins kept sliding, forcing many farmers to move into cattle, or walk off their land, or meet a different fibre market.
"The technology has allowed really good garments – not perhaps the top end – to be made out of wool which is not quite as fine as the wool that used to be required to make those garments," Mr Walker said.
They had to face reality: change or go broke. "The first thing we did, the least profitable farms, we sold off and returned the money to the business," he said.
They sold their rams to an abattoir and began looking at sheep that produced fine wool, rather than ultra-fine wool, and that had heavier bodies and produced more wool. Their broker, Australian Wool Network in Goulburn, recommended five clips.
They looked at ewes from Bathurst to Bombala, acquiring older sheep which had been proven producers.
"We went from an average micron clip of 15.1 to 17.1 microns. By moving to 17.1, we doubled the cut of kilos of wool per sheep," Mr Walker said. "At the same time we only received a small reduction in the price per kilo, so the income from the farm had not doubled, it had gone up by 70 per cent," he said.
Ledgerton's wool is no longer the finest, but the family property with its lake-sized dam, stone fences and mountains backdrop has a future.
