by Te Radar
The sheep are now secured in the back of the truck where they stand looking confused, their eyes hanging out nearly as far as their tongues. I clamber in, hoping they won’t decide to leap over the back seat into the front to join me on the short drive to Shawn’s.
I’ve only ever shorn one sheep prior to this, and that had been under the tutelage of the man who almost single-handedly revolutionised the shearing industry.
Ivan Bowen was a sprightly 91 when I had the great pleasure of interviewing him for the documentary series Homegrown at the Agrodome, which was founded by his brother Godfrey with George Harford, a local farmer.
Together, Godfrey and Ivan developed a shearing style that was based on keeping the sheep as relaxed as possible, and which streamlined the movements required in removing the fleece, eliminating any unnecessary actions. It became known as the Bowen technique.
Despite the fact that humans have been harvesting wool from sheep for millennia, this breakthrough was revolutionary. When Ivan and Godfrey went to the United Kingdom, they raced the local shearers, who claimed the New Zealanders must have been cheating, as they believed it was impossible to shear so fast.
Such was the impact of it that Godfrey, a born showman, became an international celebrity, jet-setting around the world to demonstrate his shearing prowess in front of royalty and heads of state. He even appeared on Johnny Carson’s The Tonight Show, where he sheared a sheep in front of tens of millions of no doubt astounded Americans.
The Soviet Union was so impressed with him that in 1963 he was honoured with their highest awards, the Hero of Labour and the Star of Lenin.
Competitions sprang up around the country as shearers vied to better one another; they became recognised as sportsmen rather than simple labourers. The most famous competition of them all was the Golden Shears. In its inaugural year in 1961, the crowds were so overwhelming that the army had to be summoned to maintain some semblance of order.
The Golden Shears and the shearers who competed in it soon became household names, and tickets had to be booked a year in advance. The shearers themselves became heroes, chasing ever-larger prize money, and were much sought after by sponsors and companies wishing to use them to promote their goods. Some shearers even began adopting training regimes, much to the horror of the traditionalists.
It may be hard to believe now, but sheep shearing was at the time New Zealand’s equivalent of rock’n’roll. Quite what this frenzy says about the state of entertainment in New Zealand in the 1960s I do not know, but it’s little wonder that, to this day, people think of us as a nation that is obsessed with sheep.
Shearing had come out of the woolshed and onto the stage, and there was never a better time to open the Agrodome.
Ivan became the senior showman there in 1972, and so committed was he to his task of extolling the virtues of the sheep that even after a fire destroyed the original Agrodome building in 1980, he performed the show on a nearby hill in front of 100 visitors, while the building smouldered in the background.
Though Ivan finally retired at the age of 73, like so many of his generation it seemed that ‘retired’ wasn’t a word he really understood. New showmen were said to quiver in their little shearing moccasins whenever he cast a stern eye over the sheep they were shearing to make sure his rigorous standards were being maintained.
When I met him, he still had a twinkle in his eye, and the manner of a showman about him as he extolled the virtues of his beloved sheep. ‘The sheep is the greatest animal in the world! Do you know why? Because they provide us with food and with clothes. No other animal is as useful as the sheep, busy twenty-four hours a day growing the king of fibres—wool!’
The patter flowed off his tongue with the smoothness of the fleeces he’d removed from countless numbers of sheep. It was hard not to be captivated by him.
This was a man who had shorn more sheep than many of us will ever see in our lives. At his peak he was a world-record holder and five times the New Zealand champion, and could shear a sheep in under a minute while blindfolded.
The year before I met him, Ivan had shorn a sheep on his 90th birthday in a mere 2 minutes 41 seconds. It took me that long to get one out of the pen so that he could instruct me in the subtleties of the Bowen technique.
He was a patient but demanding teacher, guiding me through the series of sweeping movements he and his brother had devised to separate the sheep from its fleece.
The sheep proved fairly cooperative once I had it flipped over, and seemed quite happy to lean up against the ball of my knee. Some psychological or physiological impulse renders them virtually stupefied in this position—even the wildest sheep will simply go limp and sit there, looking around. It’s really quite strange.
As I followed Ivan’s directions, my main concern wasn’t that I would leave too much on the sheep, but rather that I would take too much off. I wanted the sheep to leave with all of the nipples, ears and pizzles it came in with.
The razor-sharp blades, or combs, the shearers use are positively lethal. That they are attached to a vibrating headpiece that threatens to leap from your hand at any second only makes it more complex. It’s an ungainly instrument for a newcomer, and it’s made worse by being joined by a small pivot at the end of the handle to a long straight tube down which the drive mechanism runs. I spent most of my time untangling myself from where I had somehow managed to wrap myself around it.
Several minutes after I began, a confused but mostly shorn sheep clattered down the exit chute and out the pen, and Ivan offered me a warm and sincere congratulations on my effort. It was one of the proudest moments of my life to accept the compliments of this living legend.
For the rest of the morning he regaled me with his tales before wandering off to spend the afternoon training a sheep dog, a hobby that was his passion until he passed away a few months later.
As I struggle to remove the wool from my sheep in Shawn’s dilapidated shearing shed, it is clear that I haven’t retained too much of the technique that Ivan had taught me.
Luckily, Shawn is a bit of a dab hand at shearing and he manages to guide me through the process.
It is an hour of unmitigated chaos.
By the time I finish, I have a pile containing most of the wool on one side of the shed, and four denuded sheep on the other. I say most of the wool because I have missed several large tufts that still cling to various areas of them.
‘I reckon that’ll be fine,’ I say.
‘If you think so,’ says Shawn. ‘They’re your sheep.’
‘Probably need to practise a bit more if I want to go to the Golden Shears, eh Charlotte?’
‘A lot more,’ she says.
10
A giggle of girls
A few years back I bought a live-in lady friend a bread-maker. Yes, I’m quite romantic. I knew at the time that I would soon be eating the most expensive bread I would ever have the pleasure of buttering. I based this on the eventual-cost-per-loaf ratio, factoring in both the cost of the machine and the ingredients, as I suspected that, given the number of loaves that would be produced before the novelty wore off and the hassle began, this cost would be high.
For a few glorious days the smell of hot bread filled the house. Then it was just on weekends. Then we would occasionally think about pulling it out when friends came over for irregular lunches, but there wasn’t really time and we never had the right ingredients, and besides, we needed two loaves, and it was easier just to buy it.
Now it is that I find myself beside a fire with a contingent of Scouts, all kitted out in their Scout outfits, complete with scarves and woggles, making damper. It’s about as far away from a state-of-the-art bread-making experience as you can get, because damper is the most basic bread there is. It’s made from little more than flour and water, and occasionally baking soda and milk.
As they troop in, I notice one alarming difference between these Scouts and my time as a Scout. They are all girls. There’s nary a boy to be seen, other than
the bearded leader.
‘Where are the boys?’ I ask.
‘They didn’t want to come,’ one of the young women Scouts says.
I hadn’t expected that the Scouts would all be girls. In my day, Scouts were boys who built rafts, and girls joined the Guides and sold biscuits. They didn’t don a scarf and a woggle and associate with the boys.
Times have surely changed.
I haven’t had a lot of experience with young girls. When I was that age, I was firmly ensconced at boarding school, and never encountered them at all.
I have no idea what to say to them that won’t make me look like a silly—or worse, creepy—old man.
The Scouting movement is considered to be a proto-environmentalist movement due to Scouting founder Lord Baden-Powell’s urgings for people to get close to, and enjoy, nature, so it is fitting that they should join me in my sustainability experiment.
So sustainable are we that today our bread-maker is to be a stick.
I don’t recall having made damper as a Scout. We went caving, built rafts, did confidence courses, and learnt how to tie reef knots and bowlines, sometimes while rafting through caves to increase our confidence.
Sitting with the Girl Scouts, with a wodge of flour and water jammed onto the ends of our sticks, and the ends of the sticks propped over the fire, then tearing steaming hunks of the stodgy bread off the sticks and eating it, I realise that I am probably having more bread-based fun with my stick than I ever did with the expensive bread-maker.
I wish I could share with them my favourite recipe for non-store-bought bread: beer bread. The yeast in the beer helps the bread to rise.
Beer bread satisfies three of the main things that are great about food: it is easy to make, it results in hot bread, and it has beer in it. Simply by mixing three cups of flour, three teaspoons of baking powder, and 300 ml of beer, then baking until done, you can have a thick, doughy loaf of bread, best eaten when fresh, but marvellous toasted.
I toy with the idea of selling a few loaves of it at the forthcoming Spring Fling, but by the time I make a decision I have drunk the last of the beer.
As spring arrives, the good folk at Frech Orchards Estate, an organic avocado farm at Shelly Beach near the South Kaipara Head, host their annual Spring Fling, where people gather to see their wares and enjoy bands and a day in the sun.
Jane has arranged that I will have a stall from which I will peddle my produce. The problem is, I don’t really have any produce to peddle.
Surely, I think, there must be something that I can utilise.
Then someone mentions dandelions, which are considered by some to be a useful culinary and medicinal herb. If this is true, then it is possible that I am living upon a veritable golden-flowered gold mine.
Some frantic research indicates that the leaves can be used as a mustard-flavoured salad green; the roots, when cooked, can be ground up to make a sort of dandelion coffee; and the flowers can be eaten or used for wine.
Further research determines that the French call the dandelion the ‘pissenlit’—which means ‘to urinate in bed’—in reference to its diuretic properties.
How is it, I wonder, that I have never known this?
Boiling the leaves into a tea is said to be a good treatment for nervousness. I wish I had known this before the Girl Scouts had turned up.
The problem with selling dandelions as produce is that the plants wilt the moment I dig them up and pop them into pots. Hopefully they will perk up again.
The only other things I have in abundance are grapefruit. I could simply bag some up and sell them, but if there is one thing that reading the business pages of the newspaper has taught me, it’s that those involved in primary produce need to add value to their products.
What better way to add value to the grapefruit than by juicing them? As I cannot say for sure how organic it is, I shall sell the resulting juice as ‘free-range grapefruit juice’.
But I feel that I need something more. I need A Point of Difference. Something that sums up my new life on the farm—something organic and sustainable. What I come up with is the decision to introduce to the world my new green initiative—the bonsai lawn.
I have realised that many people don’t have the same access to grass that the rural person does—people such as the apartment dweller, or people who live on the second floor. This cannot be good for their souls.
I decide that what they need is access to a lawn, and who better to bring the lawn to them than me?
I need sods of the best grass I can find.
It is more difficult than you can imagine to find a good piece of grass when you are looking for a small but perfectly formed portion. In each small square I examine there is a weed, or a blemish, or an area that it isn’t growing properly.
I spend a long time on my hands and knees, looking for the ideal square foot of turf. Then, using the spade, I cut the sod from the ground, trim it to fit with a knife, slide it into an ice cream container, and water it.
Soon I have quite a few bonsai lawns. Each contains quite different types of grass. There is something for everyone—from clover to rye to paspalum. There are short-grassed bonsai lawns, longer-grassed variants, and even pastoral grass.
Amongst the trees at Frech Orchards, people mill around the market stalls, plying their wares, strolling in the sunshine, and listening to the ubiquitous South American pan pipers.
I set myself up under a little gazebo with a mounting sense of excitement. I have never sold anything before, and here I am with my own produce stall. Will today be the day that I revolutionise the concept of the lawn? Will the world be reminded of the wonderful properties of the dandelion? Will I make my fortune peddling free-range grapefruit juice?
The answers are no, no, and not really.
The bonsai lawns do become a talking point, and a useful lure to get people to buy the juice.
People are intrigued.
‘Do they come with little lawn mowers?’ one potential buyer asks.
‘Not yet,’ I say. ‘I could arrange some scissors.’
The multitudes that flock past the stall agree that they are a good idea, especially as I pitch them as a gift either for someone you love, or alternatively for someone you don’t really like.
Many agree that they are a great idea for someone in an apartment. But in the end it is a little like trying to sell…well…grass to farmers.
The dandelions are also a talking point, but sales of them are non-existent.
Both, however, help to shift nearly all the litres of juice I have juiced.
I’ve heard that some other chaps are doing well on the juice front too, only their juice has a little kick to it. The men from the Helensville Home-brew Club are snug in the garage, offering samples of their wares for a small donation.
This is convenient, as I have made a little profit from my juice, and purely in the interests of research, I think I should see what kind of brew it is possible to make at home. The answer is quite a lot of good-tasting booze.
Graham, a red-faced barrel of a man, and Rudolph, an effusive Austrian in what could be his sixties, are only too happy to share the collective produce of their fellow club members. They have a selection of wines, beer, liquors and spirits.
‘Try the mead, it’s the oldest wine in the world, made out of water, honey and yeast,’ they insist, offering a small glass of the yellowy liquid.
In my mind, mead has always conjured up images of Vikings drinking it from cow horns, before stripping off their furs to run nude into battle. I am hoping this state of affairs won’t arise this afternoon, but there are worse ways to spend a Sunday.
The home-brew club celebrates the indomitable human spirit of creating spirits. If there is anything that has not at one stage or another been turned into alcohol by humans, I would be very much surprised.
I have always considered home-brewing a little like home bread-making. It is a lot of hard work for something that can be bought in the store for a fairly reas
onable price.
After sampling the club members’ liquors and a few pleasantly rough spirits, they insist I sample the manuka beer. There is little as authentically Kiwi as manuka beer, which has been brewed in New Zealand since the arrival of Captain James Cook, who was no doubt a little shocked to discover that, prior to his arrival, the country was booze free.
Historians assert that prior to the Europeans landing on our shores, the only things getting drunk in New Zealand were wood pigeons gorging on fermented berries. Some claim that the Maori—especially the older women—would occasionally drink fermented tutu berry juice, but other than that there was no liquor to be had in our shaky isles.
Clearly something needed to be done about this, and in 1773 on his arrival in Dusky Sound after a journey of 11,000 miles and 117 days without sighting land, Cook stood on the poop deck of his converted collier on the morning of 27 March and addressed his crew.
‘Men,’ he said, ‘good work with all the sailing and being cooped up. I believe that you all deserve a beer,’ and before you could say ‘this’ll put hairs on your chest’, he grabbed some yeast and assorted rimu and manuka twigs, biffed them in a pot with a little molasses, and brewed his shipmates a beer. And so began a great tradition of rank amateurs brewing beer in this fair land.
His crew praised the results, one writing that ‘after a small amount of rum or arrack has been added, with some brown sugar, and stirred into this really pleasant, refreshing and healthy drink, it bubbled and tasted rather like champagne’.
Not only did they praise the taste, but it was also rather healthy. Cook reportedly had no idea that Maori were already using manuka for its health-giving properties, but by using it he inadvertently administered to his crew a great preventative of the disease that struck fear into the mariner—scurvy.
The Wigram Brewing Company in Christchurch produces a version of Cook’s beer that is as accurate as they could make it. I bought two bottles. I still have one.