| 51 Lift in strongwool price a ray of hope Rangi runs Tararua Shearing along with his partner of 20 years, Leonie Andersen, with Rangi running the gangs and Leonie doing the book work. Hugh De Lacy Smiles are beginning to reappear on the faces of Rangi Manihera’s farmer clients as the returns for the strongwools his shearing contracting company harvests grow encouragingly from the pits they’ve been plumbing for the last few years. “Things looked pretty sad at the start of this season’s mainshear when the strongwool price was scraping the bottom of the barrel, but this season we’ve seen it climb a little bit,” Rangi says. “It’s still pretty low, but for now at least it seems to be heading in the right direction.” Rangi runs Tararua Shearing from shearing quarters half an hour east of Pahiatua, along with his partner of 20 years, Leonie Andersen, with Rangi running the gangs and Leonie doing the book work. It’s a substantial operation that in the season just ended was running up to five shearing gangs each RURAL SERVICES » Tararua Shearing “Things looked pretty sad at the start of this season’s mainshear when the strongwool price was scraping the bottom of the barrel, but this season we’ve seen it climb a little bit.” employing anywhere from three to six shearers, plus double that number of wool-handlers. It means the quarters are accommodating and feeding between 40 and 50 workers during the mainshear which lasts a couple of months on both sides of Christmas. Tararua Shearing has been around for a couple of decades and Rangi has just completed his second mainshear since buying it from Lionel Toheriri. He had previously worked for Lionel for nine years, and before that the business was owned by Motu Tua. With a workforce of that size Rangi doesn’t manage to spend much time on the handpiece himself these days, but he can still jump on the board and poke out 400 fully-woolled ewes in a day. When he was shearing full-time, Rangi racked up some impressive personal best tallies of 600 on full-wool ewes and 760 on lambs. No less impressive is the steady output of his father, also called Rangi, who at 67 years of age is still shearing 300 to 320 ewes a day. The Maniheras are a long-time shearing family, with Rangi junior growing up immersed in the industry which has long been the go-to workplace for Maori whanau round the country. “I’ve been shearing for 22 years, and shearing’s been in my family for generations,” he says. “Nowadays I spend most of my time organising the shearers and visiting the sheds, and I’m lucky in having Leonie take all the bookwork off my hands. “I don’t want to take any work off the boys so I only shear now when we’re short of staff.” Before settling in the Wairarapa, Rangi shore seasonally in various districts around the country, from Middlemarch in Otago to Raetihi in northern Whanganui, but he never joined the globe-trotting shearers who commonly work in countries other than New Zealand over the course of the year. “I always seemed to be able to get plenty of work in New Zealand, so I never bothered going overseas,” Rangi says. And he has some top shearers working for him, including big-tally guns Lawrence Aspinall and Wesley Tohiariki, both of whom are capable of well over 500 ewes on a good day. 063768096 / 0273868789 tararuashearing@xtra.co.nz
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