Those creative farming folk
Posted 26 November 2008 // Jock Phillips
Whew!! – after months of hard work, The Settled Landscape was launched on Monday in a fitting place: the Massey University Agriculture and Horticulture lecture block in Palmerston North. We decked it out with posters and two continuous slide shows of rural images. We herded guests into the auditorium with sounds of shepherds whistling, dogs barking and mutterings of ‘get in behind’. Like well-trained flocks, the guests obeyed! Afterwards the tables of food were fenced with wooden gates.
Cattle ingenuity
The Settled Landscape has taught us, especially the city slickers, a lot. Some of it – such as the details of animal diseases – we may want to forget. But we have also been struck by the inventiveness of the farming community. The contemporary New Zealand push is that we should leave behind our grass roots and enter a bright new world of ‘creative industries’. However, after a year working on this theme, it is the creativity of the farming community which stands out. I am not just talking about good old-fashioned Kiwi ingenuity, the number 8 wire syndrome. After all, as the fencing entry tells us, the number 8 wire was superseded by the 12.5 gauge wire after research in the 1960s. Take a look at the clever industrial process which produces it today. Earlier – in the late 1930s – two New Zealanders, Bill Gallagher and Herbert Christie, working separately, designed the electric fence.
It is worth considering some other examples of rural creativity to be found in The Settled Landscape’:
- the breeding of sheep – from the Corriedale (which now vies with the Merino as the world’s most common breed) to the Romney and Perendale, breeds now improved by use of a genetic database
- Godfrey Bowen’s development of his distinctive ‘long bow’ style of shearing
- the development of new types of apples beautifully illustrated in this whakapapa
- the domestication and farming of deer, in which New Zealand leads the world
- the use of border-dyke irrigation
- the development of the English and Scottish A & P show into a community event which attracts women as well as men, and townies as well as farming types
- distinctive words – ‘jingling johnnies’ (shears) were used on ‘gummies’ (sheep with sticky wool)
- buildings – such as the ‘futtah’ for storing food, or the herringbone and rotary milking sheds
- rural clothing like the famous black singlet and the swanndri. Fred Dagg immortalised the singlet – and, if you think farming types have no sentiment, just watch how one farmer finds a new use for his swannis!
So take a look at The Settled Landscape, enjoy it, and we won’t be surprised if you treat your country cousins with a new respect.
