Show-week excitement builds in Hastings

Hawke's Bay A & P show manager Kahlia Fryer (left), general manager Elisha Milmine, administration manager Pam Thompson, and trade manager Samantha Greene. Photo / Doug Laing

Show week excitement is building at Hastings' Tomoana Showgrounds where even amusements operators were getting rides.

Following one of the wettest winters in living memory in Hawke's Bay, tractors were needed to haul trucks, machinery, and essentials such as the portable latrines, on to the fairground to help prevent any catastrophes.

Where the trucks, trailers and caravans would normally have been in place by mid-Sunday, many were parked on the road outside on Monday afternoon as amusements operator John Mahon helped direct the unique traffic within, but reflecting the sometimes dreaded show-week wind was for once serving a useful purpose, combined with the bright sunshine of the Monday afternoon.

"It's drying out pretty quickly," he said, a point welcomed also by new showgrounds general manager Elisha Milmine, hoping the big weather break towards a traditional sunny show week has arrived.

However, minimal occasional showers are forecast in the region during the week, with the show starting on Wednesday and ending on Friday, the Hawke's Bay Anniversary public holiday.

Mahon said about 20 trucks and their trailers, and caravans, had arrived after delays getting out of the opening North Island A and P Show of the season in Gisborne – a quagmire which needed tractors to haul the vehicles out on Saturday and Sunday.

While the show opens on Wednesday, the amusements carnival, now based in the corner paddock fronting Kennilworth and Karamu Rds runs mainly Thursday and Friday, culminating in a late-night on Friday after most of the rest of the show activity has ended.

This week's show marks 159 years since the founding Hawke's Bay Show in 1863, and also celebrates the bounce-back to a full show after the restrictions and trauma caused by the global pandemic, which partly led to the sale of the showgrounds to Hastings District Council to ensure it is retained as a venue.

It will have its tradition of country-to-town activity, virtual beef cattle, carriage-driving, dairy goats, sheep dog trials, donkeys, dressage, fencing, pigs, poultry, sheep and fleece, equestrian events (including the World Cup class, Best of the Bay Beef and Export Lamb, and the Great Raihania Shears, which marks 120 years since the first machine-shearing competition in the world, at the Hawke's Bay Show, in 1902.

Milmine says The Farmyard area allows people to get up close and personal with lambs, calves, bunnies, ducklings, chickens, goats, pigs, and alpaca, expected to be popular when hundreds of children visit on Wednesday.

There will be more than 100 trade sites, and the popular Waikoko Gardens vintage machinery site, which also offers rides.

Specific events include a Women's Agri-Business lunch and an Agri-Business Breakfast, linking the environment and food production.

As often is the case leading into election year, politicians will be there, including Act proclaiming most of its team will be at their stand, the Labour Party fronting with at least three of its MPs, and National Party leader Christopher Luxon expected.