Mateship NZ’s true golden fleece
NEWZealand’s relationship with sheep has been a long and fluffy one since Captain James Cook landed the first sheep here in 1773.
It was only 109 years later in 1882 that we sent our first shipment of frozen lamb and mutton to London.
We are still considered the farm of the world and account for a third of the world’s dairy trade.
Sheep can now fairly be considered an iconic New Zealand animal and even feature on the national coat of arms.
According to our country’s statistics department, New Zealand’s sheep numbers peaked in 1982 with a total of 70.3 million sheep. Our population then was 3.18 million, which works out at about 22 per person.
This gave weight to the myriad of sheep jokes – mostly stemming from across the Tasman. Trust the Aussies from the 1980s to find smut where there isn’t any.
Due to things like falling wool prices, droughts in the 1990s, the rise of forestry and different uses for land farming, our sheep numbers gradually declined since the 1980s.
While sheep numbers stabilised and even grew slightly in the 2000s, the numbers are decreasing again and as at 2011 there were only 31 million sheep. Today it’s thought that number is about 29 million.
Still the ratio of sheep to humans is high. That’s enough for each of us to have six each, and you can still buy New Zealand postcards that feature nothing but sheep on a road or sheep on a paddock.
Last week – according to Chinese astrology – we’ve passed from the year of the horse and are Woolly wonder: One of New Zealand’s most famous sheep, Shrek, at Taieri Airfield, Dunedin, in 2006, for a helicopter trip to an iceberg off the East Coast for an appointment with a shearer. now in the year of the sheep. China, the world’s second biggest economy, has pretty much shut down while this is celebrated.
It’s a bit schizophrenic in that it could also be called year of the goat or ram, but we’re a sheep country and they look cute so we’ll go with sheep.
With our close association with sheep, one would hope that would auger well for us but a scan of the interweb shows a mix of fortunes being predicted.
Chinese astrologers reckon this year would bring a volatile economy, more transport accidents and windy natural disasters.
Apparently in June, when it’s getting hot in China, the Western economy will fluctuate a lot and be unstable, but August and September would mark a stable period. But it was still a year to ‘‘be on guard and not get fleeced,’’ as one Chinese brokerage firm predicted.
The start of the sheep year has been an interesting one already in Aotearoa.
There was a rumour about Team New Zealand replacing Dean Barker for the next America’s Cup, our cricketers at the world cup are so far looking deadly, and now even fruit flies have been attracted to the property market in central Auckland.
And behind all that is still the spectre of New Zealand troops being sent to join the war effort in Iraq.
All that while today, the city of Christchurch marks the anniversary of the 2011 earthquake which killed 185 people.
It was an epic reminder of not only that life can change in an instant, but of what is truly important – each other.
Something we should remind ourselves of, whatever this year of the sheep brings.