Edited sentence: As the skin was worth as much as a live sheep, the owner did not suffer much of a loss.During the Great Depression, a notices were often attached to a property fences stating something like " If you must kill a sheep, please drape the skin neatly on the fence".Like many ballets and other artistic works the plot is ridiculous, as except for the very earliest years of settlement when Governor Arthur Philip told the convicts that the livestock was precious, and that the life of a sheep was worth the life of a convict, no swagman would have been punished for killing a sheep to eat