For a century the Limestone Coast ran on wool. The shearing sheds, grand homesteads and wayside inns it left behind are some of the region's best places to visit.
Sheep first, towns later
Before the vineyards and the pine forests, the South East belonged to sheep. From the 1840s, pastoralists pushed flocks into the grassy country between the dune ranges, and for the next century wool was the engine of everything: the ports, the railways, the towns and some conspicuously grand houses.
The cathedral of shearing
The industry's most evocative survivor is the Glencoe Woolshed, built in 1863 for Edward and Robert Leake of Glencoe Station. Its 36 stands sit beneath hand-adzed blackwood arches, and at its peak around 53,000 sheep were shorn here in a season — every one of them with blade shears, because Glencoe was never converted to machines. The National Trust keeps it today much as the shearers left it, and walking its boards is the quickest way to grasp the sheer scale of the wool decades.
Mansions of the wool kings
The money went somewhere, and much of it went into stone. South of Naracoorte, John Robertson — who took up the Mosquito Creek run in 1843 — built Struan House, a 40-room Italianate pile completed in 1875, with the Robertson clan badge worked into its ceilings. Near Penola, John Riddoch finished Yallum Park in 1880 and papered it with William Morris designs that survive on the walls to this day; the same fortune later planted the vines that became Coonawarra.
Travel between the stations ran on humbler infrastructure: wayside pubs like the Kangaroo Inn, licensed in 1861 on the Robe–Mount Gambier road, whose limestone ruins still stand beside the highway as a reminder that every bale once moved by bullock dray.
The whole story in one museum
To pull the threads together, finish at The Sheep's Back in Naracoorte, where the wool story is told from paddock to port. Then look around the region with new eyes: the heritage the wool boom left behind is everywhere, and our guide to the best heritage sites on the Limestone Coast maps the highlights.
