Julie Butler came out to our Open Day on Saturday 12th September, 2026. A month later she sent us a poem she'd written about the shed. Julie has quite a few prizes to her name, so we were very pleased to get it. She's kindly let us share it here.
Julie first saw Toganmain on the ABC's Landline, which ran stories on the shed in 2024 and again in 2025. She loves old woolsheds, especially the timber ones, and that comes from a life on the land. Her family held a property on the lower Horton River, west of Bingara, from 1878 until it was sold at the end of 2018 - 140 years in the one family. They always ran merinos, with a merino stud of their own, alongside horned Herefords. After her father died Julie ran the place herself, and she loved it. She has since retired to Walcha.
The poetry goes back to her university days. In 1996 she won an Australia-wide competition, and the prize was a book of her own poems, Come Share My Silence, published by Silvereve Publications. Since then she's been published in literary magazines and anthologies in Australia, the USA and India, and her poems have been broadcast regularly on ABC and commercial radio.
2026 was a big year for Julie. In January she took second place in the Writer's Digest Chapbook Competition in the USA, where 26 of her poems were judged as a whole. She was longlisted for The Grieve Project and appears in the 2026 Grieve anthology. In September she received an Honourable Mention in The Rod Carlos Rodriguez Prize for Poetry in the USA and was longlisted, and three of her poems appear in its anthology, What We Kept: A Geography, published on 7th September. That month she also received an Honourable Mention in the Writory International Poetry Contest in Ireland. Her poem placed 23rd, which put her among the top 50 poets from entries across 37 countries.
Then on 30th September she won the Yeovil Literary Prize for Poetry in England. Another of her poems was selected for Women in Poetry 2026. And on 19th October, less than a week after she wrote the poem below, she picked up two more in the 70th annual Poets & Patriots Poetry Contest in Chicago: 2nd Honourable Mention for a free verse poem and 3rd Honourable Mention for a miniature poem.
She wrote it on 13th October, 2026, a month after her visit. Julie holds the copyright, and it's reproduced here with her permission.
The Cathedral of the Fleece
A Tribute to Toganmain Woolshed
Upon the timeless flat of the Riverina flood-plain,
where the Murrumbidgee draws a slow, brown vein across the dust,
stands Toganmain.
Not built of stone, nor raised to any distant God,
but hewn from the iron heart of the bush-
red gum and cypress, seasoned by decades of blinding sun
and the ghosts of a million hooves.
Step inside the cavern.
The air is thick with the cathedral dust of centuries,
heavy with the ghost-scent of lanolin and sweat,
of ancient grease and the heavy, sweet decay of time.
Here, the light does not merely enter;
it filters through the high-pitched ribs of timber,
slanting in golden lances down upon the pine-board floors
where the shearers once moved in a rhythmic, violent dance.
This was the backbone of a sprawling continent.
Before the cities glittered with the glass of modern trade,
Australia walked upon the sheep’s back-
every fleece a golden coin,
every shearing board an altar of endurance,
where men bent their backs from dawn to dusk
to pull the heavy winter coats from the baked earth,
shipping the nation’s wealth across the roaring seas.
Toganmain is not merely wood and corrugated iron.
It is a monument to the calloused hand and the unbroken spirit,
a sprawling leviathan of a bygone age
that watched the nation crawl from colonial infancy
into the fierce light of its own identity.
To let it fall to the hungry earth
would be to shear away a piece of our own collective soul.
It must stand-
every warped beam preserved,
every grease-stained pillar held against the wind-
so that those who come from the glass-towered futures
might walk these shadowed aisles and feel the pulse of history.
Let travellers stand in the vast, echoing silence
and hear the phantom rhythm of the blades,
the shouting of the tally-boys,
the heavy thud of bales hitting the press.
From here, beneath this weathered roof of timber and sky,
lies the memory of who we were,
and the bloodline of what we became.
