Sheep sales are an ageless Kiwi ceremony and a much-anticipated fixture on any rural heartland’s calendar. Herald journalist Kurt Bayer visited Hawarden on a sweltering North Canterbury day for a slice of New Zealand life.
The throat-clearing chorus of baas – New Zealand’s unofficial national anthem – fills the still morning air.
They stand, panting, throbbing, packed together tight in wooden pens, after being urged down races from stock agents and drivers in rugby shorts, woollen socks, and Aertex shirts with upturned collars.
“Come on, ‘round ya go!” the herders clap and holler. “Whoot!”
Numbers are down on last year’s annual Hawarden Ewe Fair, which was split over two days to cater for 20,000 ewes. Today there are about 12,000, despite it being the 125th anniversary of the Hawarden Saleyards Company Ltd – a big day for the area.
“The market has been quite depressed over the last six months or so,” Hazlett stock agent Alby Orchard says. There’s a lot of feed around so some farmers may hold off selling stock until autumn, he reckons, hoping things will pick up.
The breeds are traditionally a mix of fine wools and cross breeds, Corriedales and Romneys.
They come from all over North Canterbury – a farming powerhouse from the Alps to the Pacific, fertile breeding ground for beef, lamb, pork, dairy, wine, pinus radiata, and rangy All Blacks forwards – but also from further across wider Canterbury, and Marlborough, for one of the region’s larger, feature sales.
The sales have a rich history. Some families around Hawarden – 80 kilometres north of Christchurch, population 240, most likely named after historic Hawarden Castle, the Welsh estate of former British prime minister William Gladstone - have been coming for generations: O’Carroll, Little, Cowie, Mason, Wright, Carr, Booker, McMillan, and Sidey.
Winton Dalley, a former Hurunui district mayor who has farmed in the area for 40-odd years, has researched the sales’ history.
The Presbyterian Church won the fair’s catering tender to offer breakfast and lunch spreads back in 1930.
Today, they’re still doing it, up with the sparrows to prepare the day, now teaming up with their Anglican brethren to serve up tea, cold meats, potatoes and salad in the community war memorial hall.
Stock agents from the three main farm companies are here - Hazlett, PGG Wrightson, and Rural Livestock - and they huddle over mounds of paper, tallying up who’s got what. There’s not a laptop or tablet in sight.
There are murmurs of reserved approval for Ardern’s successor and a general sense of confidence that 2023 will be a better year than the past few Covid-scarred seasons.
The first livestock sale was held in January 1899 in “excessively hot” weather, according to a Christchurch Star newspaper report.
Not much has changed. Today, the temperature is pushing 30C. Kicked-up dust clings to sweaty parts.
Over at the tin shed, rugby club volunteers are setting up refreshments for later on.
The whiff of sheep poo is naturally scented by the camphoraceous offering from bordering gum trees.
At a pre-sale gathering in the shade by the toilet block, Dalley calls the day a “significant milestone”, before calling forward Laurie O’Carroll and legendary stock agent Fred Fowler to cut the celebratory 125th-anniversary cake.
O’Carroll’s a direct descendant of an original Hawarden Saleyards Company shareholder. His family has been farming for about 140 years, “a fair stint”.
As a schoolboy in the 1950s, he recalls sheep being driven down High Street. That doesn’t seem all that long ago, and in the ‘80s a young, upstart O’Carroll created a sheep traffic jam by inadvertently ignoring a long-standing drover’s right-of-way agreement with another cocky.
They all reckon the last droving to the yards was the Wright family of Lauriston in 2007. And today, the animals arrive on high-sized transport trucks: Amuri transport, Ellesmere, Frew’s, Heagney Bros., CPT.
Yarns and recollections abound.
The bar licence used to end one hour after the last animal was sold. So, just before close, one of the stockmen, with a cheeky glow on, would sell his dog and earn them another hour. As that final hour came to an end, he would buy his dog back. And so it would go on.
With the demise of many similar rural sale yards over recent decades, O’Carroll feels fortunate the Hawarden yards have remained in the ownership of local shareholders. Many other small sales yards are now gone, favoured for big, centralised outfits in the big smoke.
The locals are fiercely loyal to these ones. Founded on land purchased off G.H. Moore’s old Glenmark Run, they nestle soundly in the town’s centre, physically and spiritually. They are a rural cathedral, watering hole, meeting place; a beating heart.
This is Fred Fowler’s 60th consecutive Hawarden sales.
With faded poppy pinned to his floppy hat, the legendary stock agent seems to know everybody here.
After thanking “the ladies... and the men” for the succulent spread, he ambled by the stalls, slapping backs, poking bellies, saying, “G’day Marty, how’s the missus.”
He’s a hard man to pin down.
“Just a tick, I want to check out some ewes over here,” he fobs me off, chuckling. “Grab you down under the shade, two shakes.”
As the first auction starts, flock replacement seekers are reminded: “Be clear with your instructions when you buy so you get the sheep you bought delivered to your property.”
The first pen – 127 Corriedale ewes - belongs to David and Sue Dillon from ‘The Throne’, a farmstead overlooking the Waihopa spy base in Marlborough wine country.
“Big, heavy, wide head,” the auctioneer says, drumming up the crowd. “They look like they’ll have good production,” he says, opening the bidding at $170 a head.
It gets off to a slow start. Canny buyers lean on railings, side-eyeing one another, reluctant to be the first with their hand up, like wallflowers at a barn dance.
The sheep seem nervy too, skittishly launching into one another like rockers in a moshpit. Later, others start Sufi whirling around the pen.
Eventually, the bids start flying in, going up in increments of $5 and $10.
The hammer (auctioneer’s meaty fist on paper) comes down at $192.
“Done, all done!” the auctioneer proclaims. “Over the fence everybody, here we go.” And the sale moves to the next lot.
The artful agents alternate turns. Cajoling, coaxing, educating, they generally wheedle the congregation into engaging.
Orchard appears pained, sorrowful when his casual offering of opening bids is met with boot-scuffing and shush.
“You’ll go home,” he apprises them with an air of a universally-beloved schoolteacher, “and you’ll say, ‘I wish, I wish, I wish’ for the rest of the year.”
Orchard loves his job. Earlier in the day, while the mercury was still rising and he had a quiet moment, he called it a “unique industry”.
“It’s a great industry to be involved in. Shit, I’ve been doing it... um... I’ve done 36 years,” he says, kind of amazed.
He looks around the yards. “These young fellas,” he nods at other reps herding incoming sheep down wooden races into pens. “They probably think I’m an old bastard.”
Orchard, who lives with his family in, funnily enough, the old orchard heartland of Loburn, gets around the place. And in most towns he passes through, he knows someone to stop and have a natter with.
“It becomes part of your life, for better or worse.”
The crowd follows the sale pen by pen.
One lot fetches an eye-popping $280. One woman asks what us townies are all thinking: “Why are those ones worth so much?”
They come to a cuddled throng of Romneys.
“You may not want to buy a pen of Romneys,” Orchard tells them, “But I’ll tell you what, why not come down and take a look anyway?”
Stepping over the wooden fence, he merges among them, gently palming them off like an adult playing rugby with nippers.
“They’re absolute rippers, aren’t they?”