Tattersall follows wool across Bass Strait

And it all started on his family farm and the neighbouring property at Woodsdale, in southern Tasmania, where he spent weekends and holidays drenching sheep, driving machinery, and doing general farm labour.

This hands-on experience left Mr Tattersall wanting more and inspired a move into the shearing shed.

But pressure from his parents to have a “back-up career” kept him busy, as he decided to complete a business management course while kick starting his career as a roustabout.

“I finished school and wanted to get straight into shearing, but got told I needed a backup, so started studies at college via correspondence, which allowed me to continue working in sheds during the day,” he said.

“Being in the shearing shed was all I wanted to do, and the more I did it, the more I wanted to learn about the wool industry.”

He obtained his classing certificate in 2009 and began classing in small sheds before taking over a shearing run in 2013 from a retiring wool classer.

This led him to be nominated for the AWEX Master Classer professional development course in 2017, a course he said was life-changing.

It was his first taste of a wool auction, and he said walking into the wool selling centre at Melbourne for the first time took his breath away.

He said his biggest take out of the four-day course was that opportunities in the sheep and wool industry were limitless.

Upon returning to Tasmania, he started exploring these opportunities.

“After the course I realised I wanted to be more involved in the selling side of the industry, so I started hunting for jobs around Tasmania, and couldn’t find any, until a job at Elders in Melbourne came up,” he said.

He applied, and was successful, so moved to Melbourne late last year to be a wool technical officer.

Mr Tattersall said the job was diverse, and involved lotting wool, preparing it for auction, administrating and settling forward contracts, and putting together market reports.

But he still gets out on the road, satisfying his desire to be in shearing sheds.

His next adventure will see him head to Western Australia to represent Tasmania as a wool handling judge at the National Shearing and Wool Handling Championships.

But he said he was happy to stay in Melbourne for the next few years, expanding and developing his technical role and learning more about the fibre he loves.

He also plans to give auctioneering a go.