Quick Jump: First Impressions | Kitties | Woodsmen | Food & Showbags | Main Arena
We'd seen the banners on George Street for weeks. We'd read the pullout section of the Sydney Morning Herald detailing where every last booth would be at Olympic Park. We'd browsed the newly digital guide to the mystery they called "showbags." Now it was time to go.
Walk to Central Station, pay the AUS$27 per person that included both entrance and the train ride there. It was the cat show that coaxed us there on Easter Monday, the eleventh day of the two-week event and the first of a week without school or uni. (More exactly, it was the final round of the cat show, the one in which some furball would be crowned "Supreme Cat In Show.") Still, we were not quite prepared for the crowds!
Commuter trains were running on a special line direct to Olympic Park for the show, and the ride there gave us our first taste of how crowded it would be. Everyone attending the show paid the same entry fee, which included free travel on the trains and busses. Rather ingenious, actually, as an attempt to keep parking demands under control. Once we navigated into the show itself, the sea of people was simply stunning. Though there wasn't much in the way of human athletics around, it wasn't hard to imagine what the place must have looked like during the 2000 Olympics!
While we were still trying to get oriented and plan a route for the day, our attention was caught by a crowd watching a man with a fishing rod on top of a big blue trailer (left). He seemed to be giving fishing lessons, and gradually we realized that his trailer was full not just of water but also of fish. Standing above the crowd, he demonstrated casting techniques (of the fishing variety, not D's variety) and described how they worked. But the cool thing was, we could watch them work while he described them-- we could see the fishes respond or not right through the glass trailer!
From there, we made our way by a bunch of the animal sections towards the cat pavilion. (Although the Supreme Cat in Show would not be named until later that afternoon, we wanted to scope the place out.) The "Royal" in the Royal Easter Show comes from its primary sponsor, the Royal Agricultural Society. Imagine a county fair with all of the livestock on show combined with more snooty domestic animal competitions... combined with a food tasting fair and a carnival midway and a rodeo and other equestrian events and some human competitions and ceremonial parades and pseudo-theatrical stunt work... and you start to get a sense of the Easter Show.
So, on the way to the Cat Pavilion, we saw goats and bulls and horses, even some of breeds we had never seen before. (The pigs and sheep were showing on other days of the show.) There was not much opportunity to see the animals up close, except for the ones in the front pens, because the public could only walk along one side of the huge barns that housed the animals and their pens. We were a little disappointed, but we figured the domestic animals would be better. We were wrong. The Cat Pavilion was a tiny (though air-conditioned) building crowds in a queue spilling far out into the sidewalks. The cats were penned far back from the viewing line and only one or two was taken out, with the predictable crowding.
The crowd management at the "show" that afternoon was even worse. We arrived half an hour early to ensure that we got a seat, but they had roped off the seating area until less than five minutes before the scheduled time. Reserving seats for owners and handlers was entirely reasonable, but as we waited for them to open public seating, a few dozen others cut in front of us and started filling up the seats. By the time they opened the ropes, the crowd was standing-room only. Then, fifteen minutes later, the whole thing was over and the gray Persian mop reigned supreme (pictured above right)-- no commentary by the judges, no explanation of why the winner was an examplary model of the breed, just a quick lift up in front of the room and that was that. The award was presented (but not judged) by an MP from Sydney, who also got to give a few awards of her own. She named a red Burmese (pictured left) her all-around "favorite" cat-- basically the Miss Congeniality award.
Doesn't he look a little like Rai-Rai? Maybe not as much hair...
Aside from the cat show, our other "don't miss" stop for the day was the woodchop events. The Wayne County Fair (in Pennsylvania) has been a regular family event for the Ohlandts as long as they've had UpCountry (Chad's parents' country house), and Chad regularly wears T-shirts from the Wayne County Woodsmen Competition, though he's never competed in it.
The woodchop events ran back to back most of the day, so we weren't entirely sure whether they were on schedule when we entered the stadium. At least one of the events we watched was deemed a "senior" competition (for older woodsmen), and all were men's contests. If you've never seen woodchop events, they go by pretty fast-- lots of prep time, then thirty to forty seconds of yelling and screaming, and by then there a winner.
(Actually, if you've never seen woodchop events, you should definitely make sure that Quicktime is installed and then watch this video.)
The folks at the Royal Easter Show had at least tried to minimize some of that down time between events by using funky above-ground stands to hold the trees that would be chopped down shortly. In Wayne County, evidently, they still sink the telephone-pole "trees" into holes in the ground and fill them, which takes a lot longer. No matter how you cut it, though, seeing a telephone-pole tree coming out upright on a forklift is a funny image.
We also got to watch one of the more dangerous-looking events, the "standing block" event. Though you might expect that the name suggests that the blocks of wood being chopped are "standing," a quick look at the photo to the left will illustrate that in fact, the name refers to the fact that the blocks of wood being chopped are being "stood on." By the person doing the chopping. Which makes for a tricky moment when they chop through the block and suddenly have nothing to stand on anymore. But don't worry, these guys are professionals. I think.
The contestants seemed (in theory) to be representing their home states, or, in the case of New Zealand residents, countries. One of the events we watched actually had two guys with "USA" shirts on. The announcer seemed very excited that their presence made it a "truly international" competition. Just when we were thinking how nice it was to have fellow Americans welcomed, the announcer added: "but of course, we have hardwood here, not like what they're used to back in the US, so we wish them the best of luck!" Sigh...
By late afternoon we had covered both the cat show and the woodchop events, and we had gotten a feel for the rest of the show's offerings. Consulting the schedule, we realized that the Australia vs. Canada rodeo, the tribute to the "Drover's Life," and the closing fireworks were all in the Main Arena, so we planned to head there, get good seats, and then stay until we were ready to leave.
Before doing that, though, we decided to get some food to eat and stop by the infamous showbag pavilion to take care of the request one of our housemates made to buy a few showbags for her. The food hall was as elaborate as any other section of the Easter Show, not an addition to everything else but a festival in its own right. We bought a sample bag of five different kinds of honey from an apiarists' booth, and a jar of delectable Muscat Butter from another booth of jam-makers. Many places offered free tasting (that was how we got suckered into the Muscat Butter), and at the front there was even a small cooking studio where we could watch professional cooks work right in front of us.
Finally, we couldn't delay any longer, and we braved the adjoining "showbag pavilion." If we thought the rest of the grounds had been crowded, the showbag pavilion was twice as intense. We foreigners have decided that "showbags" are a peculiarly Australian thing-- sometimes free, often sold, always packaged as a "deal" or a "bargain," a showbag is a bag (plastic or calico or even backpacks) containing various items (worthless or not) collected around a theme. At the Easter Show, many of the showbags for sale were themed around types of candy, snack food, or magazines. Many were costume kits: movie characters, princesses, devils. You can just imagine how the kids gravitated to the showbag pavilion, how easy it would have been to lose one there!
Basically, we got in, found Leslie's requested bags, and got out as smoothly and as quickly as we could, which was not all that smoothly or quickly. We deemed this crowded, over-commercialized type of showbag unnecessary and settled ourselves with the honey purchase.
After dinner we made our way to the Main Arena and prepared to sit in our fourth row center seats until the closing fireworks or until we didn't want to stay anymore. As we sat in the Main Arena watching the tail end of a polo match (Victoria vs. ACT), we scanned the schedule for the rest of the day. As it turned out, it did us little good, since there were four or five unlisted events that happened while we sat there.
One of the more amusing of these unlisted events was a horse-drawn relay evidently called a "Pairs Scurry." Two teams of three carts each compete in a curving course, with a baton passed at the finish from one cart to the next on their team. The three carts are drawn by a pair of equines: one cart by shetland ponies (almost half the size of horses) (left and center above), one cart by full-size ponies (not pictured above), and the third by horses (right above). All three carts do the course twice, and each cart carries a driver and the baton guy, who also has to lean into and against the sharp curves so that the cart doesn't spill over. It sounds pretty funny, and it looks even funnier, but those animals can really move!
The rodeo competition we had been waiting to see was set up clear on the other side of the huge arena, so we couldn't see it very well. There were some other riding events in addition to the traditional bucking bronco, and somehow these led into a kind of theatrical tribute to the "Drover's Life."
Loosely based on the poems of 19th century Australian A.B. "Banjo" Patterson, who wrote "The Man From Snowy River," the tribute tried to show what would have happened if Patterson's characters were working today. They would round up the cattle on their 4-wheelers, for example, as you can see in the photo to the left. What happens, though, when the 4-wheelers run out of petrol? Hmm, call in the real drovers-- and we got to see a demonstration of an old-fashioned cattle round-up, as done by riders on horseback and real working sheepdogs. We have to admit it was pretty cool to see it work!
After that, a group of thirty or forty riders did some impressive formation riding, and before we knew it, that had led into the "Holden Stormriders" doing some formation driving in their low-slung utility vehicles ("utes," or, pick-up trucks, to the Americans among us). The most surreal moment of the day came in the transition from one to the other, when four of the riders on horseback "herded" the trucks into formation, wheels spinning, gears whining, tires sliding, and horses standing rock-solid in the midst of it all.
Eventually, the motorbike stunt jumpers gave way to the long-awaited fireworks and the third singing of the Australian National Anthem since we had sat down. Tired but satisfied, we made our way back to the train station and followed the crowds back to Central. We felt like we'd packed a year's worth of festivals into a day... and we kind of had! Maybe we should take them one at a time in the future...