Golden Moment For Young Hopes As Golden Shears Start In Masterton

The 63rd Golden Shears has started with record numbers of entries in lower grades for the three-day championships in Masterton’s War Memorial Stadium, despite a sheep-population decline of about 70 per cent over the last 40 years.

By late Wednesday, the Novice and Junior shearing and woolhandling events had had a combined total of 217 entries, which compares with 190 in the same four events last year.

The biggest entries are in the shearing with 74 in the Novice grade and 72 Juniors, while in the Novice grade 25 have been listed in the Novice event and 47 in the Junior grade, among them Gisborne teenager Jodiesha Kirkpatrick having two goes at a “Goldies”, title, having had seven wins in shearing this season, and four in woolhandling.

They comprise about 44 per cent of the 496 entries in the nine Golden Shears shearing and woolhandling championships among the 23 events to be decided by Saturday night.

Other events, including Golden Shears wool pressing titles, transtasmqn shearing and woolhandling test matches, the PGG Wrightson Vetmed National Shearing Championship, the North Island Open woolhandling circuit final, the traditional Maori-Pakeha teams event, speed shears and a Teddy Bear Shear, where children use wood handpiece models put into practice what they’ve learnt watching mum and dad in the woolsheds, take entries to about 600.

In 1991 book “Last Side to Glory”, focused on the 18 shearers who had won the Open title in the first 30 years, author Des Williams records shearing entries across all grades peaked at 586 shearers in 1980, the staging of the second World Championships.

The biggest without the World Championships was 540 two years later, without woolhandling or novice grades, at a time when the sheep population was over 70 million, which compares with a 23.6 million estimate in June last year, down 4.3 per cent in just 12 months.

Woolhandling was not introduced to the Golden Shears schedule until 1985, and the Novice shearing grade was first held in 1998.

Former World champion Tom Wilson, managing director of “user-pays, self-funded” South-Island-based Elite Wool Industry Training Ltd, which was established in 2016, has seen the numbers grow at the wool-face, with courses now put to 350-500 people each year.

The company also has working relationships with Australian wool industry agencies and has spread its cover to the UK, a big factor in the statistics that show more than 50 competitors in the Intermediate shearing and Novice and Junior grades on the opening day are from overseas - Australia, Scotland, England, Ireland, Wales, the US and South Africa all represented.

Wilson says most of those will have been on the courses, which are tailored for all grades, including Open class competitors wanting to touch-up their skills before hitting the Golden Shears Stage, but the growth is in the teenagers at or emerging from high school.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the enthusiasm of the younger ones these days,” he says. “They can see the numbers of shearers coming over here and enjoying themselves, having a good time, and getting some good training, and they can see the opportunities to travel.”

The Golden Shears has an event for farm-based agricultural training programmes, at least three schools have had their own shearing competitions, and the Hawke’s Bay A and P Show’s Great Raihania Shears has a high schools students event that started in 2013.

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