Sheep handlers' prank: Farmers tricked into eating lamb testicles

Warning: What follows is a story for readers with strong stomachs.

The author takes no responsibility for the authenticity of its contents but only suggests it's too good a story not to re-tell, true or not.

This is a bush yarn told to me by my father, a wheat/sheep farmer in the southern Mallee of Victoria.

He swore it was true but both he and others who could verify it today are no longer with us.

The setting was the front bar of one of the two hotels in Wycheproof, I don't know which.

It is a small country town most famous for having the world's smallest registered mountain and also for having a train line running up the middle of its main street.

With a population of about 600 folk and one cop, it is a fairly peaceful place but it can get fairly raucous on the odd occasion.

Home games in the footy could be loud if the Demons won, well that's true for most weekends really.

The pubs which bookend the main street are generally thumping.

And Friday nights after sheep sales, more so than usual.

As someone forced to wait outside in Dad's ute on many Friday evenings waiting for the celebrations to wind down, I was a witness to that.

I well remember the chorus of horns being honked by other kids in my predicament.

This particular Friday night, so the story goes, a veteran crew of sheep handlers had been camping at one of the pubs and returned home with a special treat.

When I say sheep handlers, these were hard men sometimes contracted by farmers with big sheep flocks to help after lambing.

Docking of tails, a little sorting of sale sheep, future killers (home meat supplies) and future breeders.

But by far the biggest job was castration,

Back in the day, the methods for castrating a ram lamb were up to the individual.

These days such things are much more civilised.

The most famous of the lamb markers in those days were fearsome men who would use their teeth, that's right, a slash of the scrotum and then two testicles removed in one bite.

I only saw it once, they were incredibly quick, but I never wanted to try it myself.

The rubber rings or Elastrators did the job quite nicely thank you, just not so immediate.

Well this particular night at Wycheproof, the lamb marking crew apparently cooked up a scheme to fool the local farmers.

As a one-night-only treat, dishes of steaming oysters or some such delicacy were spread across the bar.

They were fairly certain these farmers far from the ocean were not familiar with oysters or whatever they said they were.

You've likely already guessed the rest.

The piles of food hardly touched the sides and were consumed with loud praise and gallons of beer.

It was only then the farmers were informed they had just eaten hundreds of lamb testicles.

These farmers were also fairly tough, mind you.

They ran their farm operations solo for the most part and could pretty much have a go at anything.

But many of them were "green about the gills", as my father told me laughing, after eating their special bar treats.

As I said, it's too good a story not to be true.

Just a pity it was generation too early for mobile phone cameras is all.