Living in New Zealand - Agricultural and Pastoral Shows

The first thing you notice about walking into the A&P show ground is the ground itself: there's been rain and the paddock is not much above sea level, so it's like walking on a grassy marshmallow and you feel like you're about to plunge a foot through the surface in to sucking mire.   You don't, but it explains why all the locals wear gumboots to something like this; the Blueskin Bay A&P show on Otago Peninsula.   

A&P Shows are big thing here, and the biggest in the country is the Canterbury A&P Show, run in Christchurch, covering a 145 Ha (around 350 acre) site.   It's a big deal and big Agri-business - New Zealand's biggest export earner.

No real danger of that at Blueskin Bay, as it's a lot more down home, is run on the shared Rugby/Football field at Bland Park and features a lot more local participation; some of which works better than others but all in good fun.   

The City Council are there because Dunedin's physical boundaries are immense and include small communities like this within it's 3300 sq. kM.   They are looking for submissions, actual participation from citizens, in the formation of the  annual plan, and I saw the Mayor about, in jeans and boots, saying hi to the locals.

The longest queues are at the food stalls and the sausage-in-piece-of-bread (you want sauce and onions with that?), Bahjee, clam chowder and the coffee lines are about equal length.   What pervades it all is the smell of deep-fried and caffeinated goodness and on a cool day they're doing good business.

 
 
 









There are dogs of all shapes, sizes and colours and, being country dogs, there's no fighting, no barking and they range from tiny cheerful tufts of fur on the end of a lead that looks like a battleship's hawser; to a very popular, very tactile Adopt a Greyhound stall; to what I think may be the world's most patient animal.




And being a country show, the entertainments are largely home-grown, like the "Death of a land crab" competition, which probably takes some explaining for anyone not from the Commonwealth or under 40.

This Morris 1800 and it's ilk were front wheel drive cars, hence "land crabs", and were the cars that helped make Britain's motor industry the giant it is today.   They started in the late 1950s with the Mini (which was a good idea) and then the impulse to grow the cars in size, power and complexity took over (less of a good idea).   The cars featured things like better drag coefficients if driven in reverse (the Austin Allegro) and pre-installed rust (the Austin Maxi).   The big ones, in the 1970s, were six cylinder beasts (actually quite a bad idea) that were known to do things like shoot you into the scenery, or strip front wheel nuts, if you applied too much power when cornering hard.   

The competition was that you could, for two dollars, guess how long it would take the car's engine to quit after a brick was placed on the accelerator.   Given they'd drained out the engine oil and coolant, I was in for 4 minutes.   Putting a pound of butter in the top of the engine seemed odd as a protest against deep sea oil mining, but what do I know.   

A friendly local contractor towed (with a U.S. built skid-loader) the Morrie into the centre of the ring and people started to gather for the execution.   It wouldn't start.   A demonstration from a local martial arts club held centre stage to keep the mob pacified for half an hour while things were tried and a jump start from a Toyota Hilux (not missing the irony in that one) got it going.  The brick was dropped, people retired to a safe distance and the timer was started after nearly 30 minutes of fiddling.   How long until there was a bang and a cloud of terminal smoke?   Four seconds.   The young woman with the timer was laughing so hard she had problems standing and when I left them to it there was, I think, the equivalent of a steward's enquiry going on.



The kid's entertainment was home-made as well.   We've all seen things like ring-toss, ball games, Wheel-of-Fortune arrangements and such, so how about a Trebuchet that has been knocked up out of 4x2, concrete blocks and optimism.   It was, thank god, only launching windfall apples at a straw bale target.   The Ballista is just behind  - cell phone cameras have their limitations - and the only people who seemed game to use it were the bods from the Volunteer Fire Brigade.

This cheerful young fellow was running the kids train around.   He is authorised to do so as he's wearing a white dust jacket, a staple of the officials at country shows, but they could be doing anything from gate security to judging produce: it pays to ask.   And yes, that is a ride-on lawnmower and those are plastic barrels, daisy-chained together on tiny little wheels.










Sadly, the days when kids could clamber  all over giant agricultural machinery are over: I spent many happy youthful times scrambling up things like combine harvesters, where a misplaced step would have resulted in a fall in to the static but still quite spiky headers: we had to make our own entertainments, then...





And thinking of machinery, A&P shows take power tools to a whole new level.  This is a small hedge cutter.   The blades are about a metre long and spin fast enough to sound like a helicopter.   The big trimmers look like a Giraffe crossed with a tank and can rip an arm-thickness branch out of a hedge like this without noticing it.   I've always thought a safe distance to watch hedge trimming is about half a kilometre.   Like I said: making one's own entertainments.

Once a month there is a market on the first Sunday of the month at Blueskin Bay - Community Market at Blueskin Bay, and you can get a little of the flavour of the show, there.