Marty Cornish. PHOTO: Wanaka App

SUE WARDS

A life in shearing sheds has left Marty Cornish with a gravelly voice, a colourful turn of phrase, a stock of tall tales, and a deep cough, but the semi-retired Lake Hawea shearer has no regrets about his choice of career.

Marty loves the business, and despite being retired still has 300 sheep and works the local lifestyle blocks with his mate Ken McLeod.

Marty can pick up a merino jumper and tell you straight off how many microns the fibre is. He has a passion for fine wool. "It's the combination of the softness and of the fibre. You get a merino and you're clipping that beautiful white wool off the sheep and it opens up like a flower. It's the best natural fibre in the world.”

Marty grew up in Glenorchy to farming parents. (He was in Glenorchy last weekend in time to have a last look at his grandparents’ house in the Rees Valley before it was demolished.) After his father died in a logging accident when Marty was five, the family moved to Dunedin.

Marty said he’s not a town person. "As soon as I did three years high school I was gone. I haven’t been back.”

He joined the three year farm cadet scheme in 1967 with a $200 scholarship from the Otago Savings Bank. The course, which included a year at Telford, was his introduction to shearing, and after a year of farm work in Central Otago, he joined a shearing gang, starting with rousing and pressing.

"I loved it. I shore 300 before I was 21. I loved the lifestyle, constantly being on the move and meeting people.”

It wasn’t unusual for the shearers to work 50 days in a row. "You just kept on going until it rained. That’s why it’s called ‘party drops’.”

Marty had a strict but respected boss, Freddy Peyton. When he turned 21 (on a Saturday), his boss said: "If you’re not here in the morning you won’t have a job.”

"I was too scared not to turn up!”

Back in the 70s shearers had a bad rap, Marty said, but he didn’t let the lifestyle affect his goals: "I had targets: X amount of sheep and X amount of dollars in the bank. We respected our jobs. The money was good. $1.10 an hour rousing or pressing - I thought I was made.” He bought a brand new Mini after his first year of shearing, for $2367.

By the age of 29 Marty had a wife, three children and a small farm (135 acres at Knapdale). "I had to shear harder then.” Australia beckoned.

He has some cracking stories to tell about his experiences within the ‘wide comb dispute’ which tore the Australian shearing industry apart in the early 1980s. Australian shearers used narrower combs than their Kiwi counterparts, meaning shearing took longer (keeping prices up). Their stronger unions also stopped them working weekends. When Marty went to Australia in 1975 it was "man’s last frontier”.

He considered Aussie shearers were holding farmers to ransom. "They were saying the wide gear would blow your wrist up and things like that - pathetic talk.”

He went back to Australia in 1985, the year wide combs became legal. There was still a lot of tension around, and the Aussie shearers didn’t like Kiwi shearers, he said.

He recalls shearing for a station in New South Wales. "I said to the other Kiwi shearers, do a good job boys and just take it easy.” At the end of a two-hour run, he counted out the sheep with Bruce, the station owner. With the introduction of the wide tooth comb, Marty told Bruce he should be pleasantly surprised with the numbers of sheep shorn in the timeframe and the quality of the job.

"There was tension and nervousness with all the propaganda but Bruce's fears were unfounded and he said, ‘You've got a free hand - away you go boys’. The Kiwi boys were nearly doubling shearing numbers by using the wide tooth comb. It took eight days what had taken five weeks the previous year, owing to Australians stopping when it looked like a rain cloud, or if a woman came into the shed, including the farmer's wife. We saved Bruce and his good lady $1.08 cents a sheep. That was a lot of money then.”

He recalls another occasion when he was the only Kiwi in a gang, using a pulled comb (standard New Zealand issue). "They looked at the tally book, looked at my gear, and they stormed down the board. ‘Did you bend this comb Kiwi?’ I said no, you can buy them like that at home.”

Marty apologised and put his comb away. But when he dragged out the next sheep he saw his fleeces still on the board, looked over and saw the shearers and rousies leaning on the board watching him. "I was really backed into the corner. I thought, ‘this is just lovely’.” He knew the Aussie boys wouldn’t have seen the impressive Kiwi trick of winding up their handpiece and letting it swing in a big arc before catching it. "I was hoping I wouldn’t make a fool of myself. But I caught it. Then I walked up to this little stirring Victorian guy with my handpiece in my hand and said, ‘If this is shearing Australian style you can stick it.’”

It was a victory. "None of them could look at me. I was out of there like the bald man.”

Marty went to England for the first time in 1990. Timeframes weren’t important to the English farmers, he said. "It was like that scene in Easy Rider where they throw their watches away.” The first day he went to three jobs in order to shear 70 sheep. He enjoyed the experience but didn’t go back for 16 years.

Marty first visited the USA in 1989. He spent the best part of 10 years touring the Northwest, three months at a time - Oregon, Idaho, Northern California, Nevada, Utah.

"For every sheep we shore we’d drive a mile,” he said. The temperatures were also a shock. "I remember one winter we were shearing sheep with ice dags half the size of your fist on their bellies, it was so cold.”

He loves the country, and went back last year for his former contractor’s 80th, and again this year to Alaska. "It really is the last frontier.”

Kiwi shearers have always been in demand overseas, Marty said. "They’re the best in the world.” It comes from the days when New Zealand was shearing more than 100 million sheep a year: "You had to go fast.”

In his 19 years of shearing overseas Marty has only spent four nights in a city (three in London and one in Los Angeles) - but he has shorn on five different military bombing ranges in the USA, in the desert country.

He gave up full-time professional shearing in 1994, but was still shearing 10,000 sheep a year, including 5000 on his leased property near Bendigo Station, where he and his wife channelled their energy into fine wool. In 1997 they broke the New Zealand fine wool record with a 14.2 micron fleece.

Marty in 2001. PHOTO: Supplied

As an ex-shearer turned fine wool breeder he was an oddity. Marty remembers going to a party with sheep farmers: the snide comments made to him, like "starvation’s finest fluke”, still rankle. In 1999, when wool prices went crazy, Marty produced a bale of 13.9 micron. "We got $362 a kilo for that one. So much for the fluke.”

It’s all in the bloodlines, Marty said. He got all his sheep from Russell Emerson’s Forest Range Station. "I’ve shorn a lot of sheep and I’ve shorn around the world but there’s no sheep like the Forest Range bloodlines.”

Marty’s pace has slowed since he was diagnosed with emphysema about five years ago. He has never smoked, but thinks the cempie wool fibre off the back hocks and top knots of crossbred sheep, when cut off with the handpiece and inhaled, is responsible for his lung disease. "I’m as good as a man short.”

Despite that, he doesn’t want to sit at home. "I’m meeting interesting people with the lifestyle shearing trailer. It just keeps me involved in the industry. I’ve got to do something.”

"I have had a very fortunate life really, and if I pass away tomorrow it’s without any regrets,” Marty said. "I’ll be here for a day or two yet I hope.”