I confess I was a bit out of nappies when I first heard (in South Gippsland) the old "Count their legs and divide by four" line, but it was always told in the context of party tricks like my grandfather's ability to make a penny (the Oz version was the same size as the British) disappear through a solid timber table and then reappear. While there were some sheep, the area was mostly dairy farming. When I later had more to do with sheep, in the Riverina and later the Northern Tablelands, the sheep were numbered in their scores of thousands and I never heard 'strange' numbering systems. When tallies were required during shearing, they were chalked up because each shearer was paid according to his performance. During drafting, the tallies were usually marked in a pocketbook. No folklore there.

As an aside, when I was in SC, some kind friends took us for a drive along the Blue Ridge. As we rounded the bend in a re-entrant, the driver got excited about the fact there was a dozen sheep in a little paddock (not much bigger than a shearer's pen) and pointed them out to us. I hadn't the heart to tell her that, when we'd left Oz we had been living on a property with some 3000 sheep; she had wanted to show us some American culture, and she did.

Cheers, Rowan