Show Tails

Holding on to a 1000kg bucking bull for dear life is not everyone’s cup of tea. But for these young cowboys and cowgirls who competed at the Sydney Royal Easter Show in the Young Guns Series, it’s their favourite sport and pastime. The series involved male and female competitors ranging from 14 to 21 years of age, across events including the steer ride, bull ride, saddle-bronc bareback riding, breakaway roping challenge and ladies barrel racing. It was a city vs. country rivalry, with country coming out on top in yellow, taking out the Series.

Check out these shots…

With 800 exhibitors staying each night, and with many more coming onto the site each day to work with their animals or compete in Show events, feeding the humans is as big a job as feeding the animals.  If you are from the bush, chip on a stick, a turkey leg or a dagwood dog is just as tempting as for any city slicker.  But after a 14 day Show, and add in a few days to bump in and pack up, the joy of eating Show food is replaced with a yearning for the tucker they cook back home. 

The exhibitors and competitors on site form into little communities within the big Show community.  The blokes who look after the woodchop competition, who spend all day wrestling with logs, and cleaning up the stumps afterwards, bring their own cook with them.  So every morning, not long after dawn, the smell of fresh sizzling bacon and eggs wafts out of the woodchop pavilion. 

Then there is one family of pig breeders, who bring down a side of home cured bacon, supplemented with fresh eggs from the poultry display at the Show.  Instant, fresh, bacon and eggs for breakast. 

The hearty and home cooked is a recurring theme.  Where it is practical, people prepare their own food in communal kitchens in the pavilions, or put something together in the walkways between the animal stalls. 

A popular place to chow down is the Cattleman’s Cafe in the Munro Pavilion.  Its not open to the public, but it’s very popular among exhibitors.   The cafe does 500 meals a day in a mess hall style.  It’s traditional home style cooking.  Roast of the day, lamb cutlets, shepherds pie, heaps of vegetables and salads.  While it has its temptations of chips and hash browns, it is a healthy, wholesome place to eat.   John Collins, the cafe’s manager (and part time Elvis impersonator) says the country kids are very polite. 

“When they grab their meal they come past and tip their hat to the kitchen ladies,” he says.  The cafe operates on a voucher system, so parents can make sure their teenagers on site are well fed, without the temptation to spend their meal money on something else. 

 The District Exhibits, the massive displays of fruit and vegetables in the Woolworths Fresh Food Dome, require the people who plan and put them together, to be on site for three weeks.  Each district (SE Qld, Northern, Central, Western and Southern) brings in its own cooking gear and one of the team is nominated as chief cook.  Most of the produce is brought in from the home district, giving the menu for each district team (or court as they are known) a unique flavour. Lesley Dabelstein from the South East Queensland district owns an avocado farm in the Glass House Mountains.  For her crew, it’s wholesome porridge for breakfast every morning. 

Lorette Walmsley, from Grenfell and the Western district exhibit, says it’s the men’s job to cook breakfast.  And the breakfast menu includes tomatoes cooked in balsamic vinegar and sugar.  Yum.

Margaret Crowell from Tamworth (Central District) says she never co0ks the same thing twice.  She gives her stove a work out; if there is a main meal in the oven, there is a pudding on the stove. There are scones, pikelets, raisin bread, all home made.  Margaret makes home made chocolate custard and meringue pie.

Marie Johns from Richmond Hill in the  Northern District says she regularly cooks for 24 people, but this often swells to 40 people. Like all the district exhibit cooks, the focus is on traditional baked dinners and plenty of vegetables.  Marie has a chest freezer at the back of the exhibit so she can keep plenty of produce from home on hand.  

Marie Lindley from Gundagai says the cooking duties at the Southern exhibit are shared around.  It’s always hot meals: “I feed these people to keep them working”. 

When you talk to the people in the horse pavilions, the sheep and goat pavilions, the woodchop arena or anywhere around the grounds, it is the same story.  The Show becomes a series of communities where people come together, cook a meal and enjoy each other’s company.  And being able to cook on site, or use the cattleman’s cafe, helps keep the cost down for people travelling a long way from home to entertain and educate the rest of us.

If you want to see more about life around the Show, check out this video narrated by Goliath, the world’s smallest strong man.  Goliath picks up some nutrition tips from Fonzy, Australia’s tallest steer.  Got any food secrets from the Show ?  Comment and lets us know.

Rodeo is a big part in the Sydney Royal Easter Show, this year it kicked off with the Australia vs New Zealand international series, then came the best young riders in the Young Guns series and from Friday night (April 22), it’s state of origin rivalry between Queensland and NSW. 

Watching all this bull riding, bronc busting and steer wrestling got us to thinking, just how tough are these cowboys and girls? 

So we wandered down to Schmdit Arena where the cowboys chill-out before an event. We got talking to some bull riders (the toughest of them all) and some bull fighters (the craziest of them all). Bull fighters are the blokes who jump in front of 900 kilograms of enraged bull if the beast turns on the rider after he hits the turf.  They distract the bull, get chased by the bull, side-step the bull and work to keep the riders safe. They used to be called Rodeo Clowns and wore silly wigs, red noses and often hid in empty 44 gallon drums at country rodeos.  These days they have re-positioned their profession.  No more red noses, they now wear at least some protective gear and call themselves bull fighters. 

We asked the bull riders and fighters about their injuries, and what scared them most; riding a beast, or taking on one of the carnival rides at the Show.  This short video, Machine Vs. Beast, shows the guys being pretty laconic about their injuries, pretty laid back about the dangers of bull riding and bull distracting, but downright scaredy cats when it came to carnival rides.

You can see rodeo every night of the Show at 6:40pm through to April 27.  What would you rather do? Ride a wild bull or the Zipper ?

A few days ago we promised to get back to you with some more information on rabbit agility, or show jumping for rabbits.  Rabbit show jumping is eerily similar to horse showjumping as our exclusive pictures reveal.  In show jumping, if a horse and rider can complete the course within the prescribed time, without incurring any faults (knocking down a jump) it is a clean round. 

Same goes for rabbit jumping, as demonstrated by Rusty. The official world record in high jump for rabbits is a gigantic 995 millimetres, yes, almost a metre. The highest jump recorded for a horse is 2.47 metres set by a thoroughbred stallion ridden by Captain Alberto Larraguibel in Chile in 1947.

In show jumping a series of obstacles is known as a combination.  In rabbit jumping, a series of obstacles is insurmountable. When a horse refuses a jump in show jumping, it is known as disobedience. In rabbit jumping it is called, well, I’m not sure, but it seems hard to accuse a rabbit of disobedience.

Rabbits are smarter than you think. There might be more than one way to skin a cat, and there is more than one way to get past an obstacle in rabbit show jumping. Rabbits, used to living underground (people from the bush still refer to them as underground mutton, a throughback to the depression era when rabbits were rations, not pets) like to go under, rather than over, most obstacles. This creates obvious problems for the competitive rabbit.  Instinct takes over, and under they go.

Since 1997, the Rabbit competition has increased and currently attracts around 250 entries, with over four types of breeds – Fur, Rex, Lop and Fancy.   

Rabbits made their first appearance during the Sydney Royal Easter Show in the mid 1800s.  The 1858 prize schedule featured two classes for rabbits, which were ‘Best couple of Lop-eared Rabbits’ and ‘Best couple of rabbits of any breed’.  They also appeared in 1869-1877 and 1881-1882. Rabbits in this period were in the poultry section, sometimes alongside ferrets, cage birds, cavies and kangaroos!

If you like small furry animals, the rat and mouse show is held one day only on April 26.  Cat display days are on April 20 and 21 and the Open Championship Cat Show is on April 22 and April 25.  Dog events continue through to April 25. And nothing is cuter than the new born piglets in the Pig and Goat pavilion. You can see them tucked up in their straw bed with their protective mum anytime.