The Good Life
The competition to find the person best at taking wool off a sheep’s back is shear entertainment.
Last Friday night in Masterton was no place for a sheep. Come dark, the War Memorial Stadium on Dixon St was a febrile cauldron, a seething coliseum where, under lights and in front of cameras and close to 2000 people, men with huge shoulders and black singlets made sure every sheep in town was fleeced alive.
The Golden Shears really is like no other event in New Zealand. On “the board”, half a dozen shearers put their backs into their work, sweating like bastards as they cut fleeces from sheep after sheep after sheep with the pace and intensity of boxers at the speed ball. Around each competitor hovers a frowning judge, inspecting the shear, watching for errors, the meanest cops in town. Below the board, the wool handlers, calm mistresses of their trade, speedily scoop up the clip and flick it into wool packs. Helpless bit players, the sheep for the most part take the excitement lying down – on their backs, then on their side, then on their other side – before disappearing down a chute.
The stadium, even on the secondto-last night of competition, was a blur of white noise from an overexcited crowd and, above that, the voice of an even more overexcited joker on a microphone calling
Friday night’s open shearing heats like it was Joe Frazier versus Muhammad Ali: “They’re absolutely shearing like a house on fire! … Are you not entertained, ladies and gentlemen, are you not entertained?!”
We certainly were, Pru, Charlotte the shepherdess, Michele and I. After the exertions of the first three heats, we bought ourselves a drink. It’s thirsty work, watching other people work.
This year, the Golden Shears marked 60 years of celebrating rural trades that, for much of our postcolonial history, have been crucial to this country making its way in the world. As the cliché long had it, New Zealand lived off the sheep’s back. And since the first Golden Shears, Masterton’s been the place to see that back get shorn.
This is a town that keeps its history close to its heart or, at least, the heart of town. The Wairarapa Archive, a publicly funded repository curated and cared for for more than 20 years by local hero Gareth Winter, has premises on Queen St, the town’s main drag. You can walk right in and fill your gumboots with the Shears’ and other local history five days a week.
Winter, a regular writer for the local daily paper, the Wairarapa Times-Age, contributed a lively wrap-up of the first Golden Shears in the run-up to the 60th. But for the complete and utter history of the Shears, the fantastically titled Shear History is the bible.
Inside its covers is another New Zealand. There are beer-bellied blokes watching bare-bellied ewes get fleeced, parades of sheep down Queen St, swimsuit-clad women at the Miss Golden Shears and, God help us, wearable “art” in the shortlived Shearable Art Awards. But there are also pride and passion and stories of a strong and proud rural community honouring its heroes. There is Just a Yard of Purple Ribbon by Australian Bernie Walker, shearing’s “poet laureate”. It’s an ode to the Golden Shears’ grandest prize, the open’s winner’s purple ribbon. Here’s the final stanza:
Yes, this year the shearers will be trying, each tuned to the finest pitch,/ They shear for naught but the ribbon, the one that makes them feel rich,/Just to win that Golden Shear Open, and to know that on that day,/They were the best, and to hell with the rest, no matter what they say.
Last Friday night made history for another reason. It was the young shepherdess’ last night in the country. A city girl, she returned to Auckland after a summer making cheese and milking Miles the sheep farmer’s ewes. We sent her home with love, but only after she’d completed the Masterton double: a nosh-up at Betty’s and a night at the Golden Shears.
She leaves behind her dear heart Jimmy River, her much-loved pet lamb, who is buried under the bay tree in our garden.
“They’re absolutely shearing like a house on fire! … Are you not entertained, ladies and gentlemen?”