It has been nearly 60 years, but Noel Townsend can still see and smell the 1500 sheep as they waited on the Griffith railway platform bound for Israel.
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The 16-year-old boy from Hillston had never been outside of the area, but would be part of a seven man Riverina stockmen crew ferrying the first big load of sheep out of Australia into the never before used Israeli port of Eliat.
As Tuesday marks 59 years since the crew left town Mr Townsend is now the only man left standing, with a treasured photo album his only reminder of his part in the adventure.
“It feels just like yesterday,” he said, as he looked through the snaps.
Alongside local men Col Woodbridge, Harold Anderson, Claude Anderson, Fred Gascoigne and Jeff Smith Mr Townsend boarded the sheep first onto a train for Sydney, and then onto a boat, the Thala Dan, bound for the other side of the world.
Down in the hold while at sea the stockmen shovelled manure into the ocean, fighting not only heat but chronic seasickness as well.
But there they weren’t alone.
“The sheep were just as crook as we were,” Mr Townsend said.
The task was the mission of Israeli born Dr Samuel Goldberg, who at the time ran a sheep farm in Griffith.
After revisiting his homeland in 1950 Dr Goldberg had been so thoroughly unimpressed by the sheep he had offered some of his own flock to improve the breed.
And so seven small town men found themselves sailing into a hazardous hot spot in international politics, the centre of a Middle East in unrest, where shepherds armed themselves with rifles.
“It was very dangerous, there were two blokes killed on Goldberg’s farm before we arrived there,” Mr Townsend said.
The danger didn’t stop with marauding sheep poachers though, with Mr Townsend and Mr Woodbridge also arrested on the suspicion of being spies from Yemen one night.
“A policeman pulls up on a pushbike and he couldn’t talk to us, we didn’t have our passports because we had to send them to Haifa for immigration,” he said.
“Well along comes another big policeman, all with big guns on their backs, and we were arrested as Yemen spies, we were in jail for six hours.”
Looking back at a picture of himself celebrating his 17th birthday in Tel Aviv Mr Townsend said he could have hardly fathomed the magnitude of what he and the other men were doing at the time.
“We were too young and too naive,” he said.
“I remember talking to Mr Brown one day and he said to me ‘you blokes made history and you all didn’t even know it’.”
