Australia, New Zealand and some islands of the South seas

by Frank G. Carpenter

Most of New Zealand’s butter is sold abroad on the coöperative basis, the farmers and the creameries dividing the profits. None can be exported until it has been graded by a government expert.

The tattooed chieftain has almost entirely disappeared, but in the past the Maori men used to cover most of their faces and bodies with ornamental spirals. The women were tattooed only on lips and chin.

On the larger estates the sheep are kept in enormous fields, and a few hands suffice to care for a flock of thousands. Like most of the workers of New Zealand, the shepherds are unionized and their wages and hours have been established throughout the industry. In some cases their employers add to the regular wages by paying a bonus at the close of the season. I met one man who told me he gave each of his hands fifty dollars when the hardest of the work was done.

The shearing, which usually begins in September and lasts until January, is done by machinery. A gang of shearers will work through a district with their machines, going from farm to farm like wheat harvesters or a threshing crew in the United States. Some of the farms have their own shearing sheds, but often several sheep stations will own one in common, to which all the flocks are driven. Occasionally shearers come over from Australia, where the season is earlier, but they are more often New Zealand men with small farms of their own or some other occupation for the rest of the year. They are organized, of course, and are veritable autocrats, with the power of financial life or death over the wool growers. If the farmers wait until late summer for the clip, the fleeces get full of seeds from the grasses on which the sheep feed, making “seedy wool,” which brings poor prices. It does not pay the farmer to quarrel with the shearers when the summer suns of January are ripening the grass seeds.

The wool clips vary greatly according to the breeds of sheep. The Merino fleeces range all the way from four to seven pounds each, while the Leicesters will average ten pounds and the Lincolns about eleven pounds. There are sheep which produce from twenty to thirty pounds of wool at a clip, but these are exceptional.

Though not so numerous as in Australia, rabbits are among the pests of the New Zealand sheep districts. They were introduced into the islands as pets and with the idea also that they might furnish meat. They increased so rapidly that they threatened to overrun the whole country and eat up all its pasturage. Millions of dollars have been spent in killing them or in fencing them out of the sheep lands and the government distributes poisoned oats from its various agricultural stations to help the farmers destroy them. Trapping rabbits for their skins has become an important industry, in which many men are engaged, and this has tended to make them less of a menace to the sheep runs. Exports of rabbit skins now bring in between two and three million dollars annually. Most of them go to Great Britain and the United States where the fur is manufactured into felt hats. It takes the fur of six rabbits to make a man’s hat. Considerable numbers of frozen rabbits are also shipped from Dunedin to the world’s markets.

But let us go to one of the refrigeration plants and see just how mutton is prepared for London dinner tables. New Zealand has fifty meat-freezing plants, and the largest and oldest of all is here at Christchurch. It is known as the Belfast Freezing Works and is a coöperative institution, the sheep owners being the principal stockholders.

We take a car and ride out to the works, which are within a few miles of Christchurch. The buildings consist of great sheds surrounded by paddocks filled with sheep ready for killing. Near by are drying yards, which at first sight seem covered with snow, but as we get closer we see that they are spotted with great piles of newly washed wool. We are first taken to the sheep yards where we watch the men drive the animals up a runway to the killing station on the second floor. Several old sheep are used day after day and year after year as the advance guard to lead their brothers to slaughter. They start the procession, and the thousands behind, sheep-like, follow them. Often ten thousand sheep pass up that roadway in one day.