SHEAR DETERMINATION
SHEARING 648 SHEEP NETS MORE WOOL THAN THREE BAGS FULL
Why Emily’s no black sheep
Gone are the days of gruff men labouring over freshly shorn sheep while women prance on stage being complimented for their potential to make a good wife.
No, these days in the world of show shearing, you’ll find some trail-blazing women dripping sweat and hands-deep in wool, shearing for the coveted Golden Shears titles. Man, woman, it doesn’t matter – they’re all up on that stage chasing the glory.
And Emily Welch (38) is one of those women turning the shearing stereotype on its head. But she’s not only a legend of the sport – she’s also a mum-offour, the owner of a shearing business with her husband Sam and holds the women’s record for the most lambs shorn.
“What was it?” she says nonchalantly. “Oh, yeah, I’m the current women’s nine-hour lamb record holder, shearing
648 of them in that time.”
Emily features alongside New Zealand women turning the shearing industry upside down in the new documentary She Shears. In the world of shearing, there are no divisions separated by sex, so more women are trying their hand alongside men.
Growing up on a beef and sheep farm in Waikaretu, Emily was surrounded by shearing – it’s just what you did on a farm. But shearing as a career? That never crossed her mind!
“After high school, I went to university and did a Bachelor of Agricultural Science, thinking I would do something down that path, and in my holidays,
I’d ask Dad to teach me how to shear. I just thought it’d be a handy skill to have.
“And then after university,
I did a year overseas, during which I did a bit of shearing. It got me thinking, ‘Maybe I’ll do one main shear in New Zealand when I’m back.’ But that’s the problem with this sport! You just become more and more addicted. It became, ‘I’ll just do another season’, then I realised I’m really stuck in it!”
The next thing Emily knew, shearing had become a full-time gig. There wasn’t any training as such, she explains, just continuous practice.
“Basically the training is years on the hand piece,” she says, describing the electric razor that is the shearer’s tool. “It takes a long time to learn and you really suffer for the first few years because it’s so physically demanding and it takes your muscles a while to really build up to it. So the first few years, I didn’t train – I just survived going to work every day!”
When it comes to competitions, however, the build-up is more intense. In the lead-up to her world record, Emily says as well as working, she took up cycling, running, and weight-lifting to boost her fitness and strength levels.
“Show shearing is also mentally very tough,” she adds. “You go from not doing anything, to shearing five sheep as well as you can, as fast as you can. You probably sweat just as much with those five sheep as you would doing eight hours’ worth of shearing because you’ve got so much mental pressure and intensity to get them perfect.”
Although men and women are competing alongside each other for the same title, Emily admits no-one is under any illusion that the two sexes can approach the competition in the same way.
“As a woman, technically you have to be quite correct. Guys can get away with not being as technically correct basically because they have the strength to overpower the sheep a bit more.”
She adds: “So women need to make sure they are more technically correct so they’re never fighting the sheep. You just can’t try to be a man.”
But, she insists, it doesn’t really matter at the end of the day. “I just look at everyone as competitors,” she states.
Emily has taken a break from competitions lately as the demands of family life and running a business that sees 330,000 sheep shorn per year took over. But with the potential of a women’s competition beginning, she
says that’s enough motivation to get back to her peak.
“I don’t want to be a token entry!” she says, adding she hopes audiences will grasp the work that goes into getting competition ready. “People perceive shearing to be quite a rough job that you do because you can’t do anything else. But we want them to see it’s more than that. Shearers are athletes – they’re so fit and so strong. And you can’t do that job unless you are committed and highly determined to keep going, because it’s not easy.”