Samson Te Whata heads First Nations Australia team at NZ Merino Champs

Samson Te Whata in action at the Golden Shears. Photo / Pete Nikolaison

Australia-based Kiwi shearing legend Samson Te Whata returns to the New Zealand Merino Shears in Alexandra later this month, on a journey of both nostalgia and future hope.

A four-time 1980s winner of the New Zealand fine wool shearing championship, the veteran will come back for the Shears, heading an Australian Aboriginal contingent.

The indigenous team includes two young shearers and two young woolhandlers, who've been in the industry just a few months.

They'll be joined by more experienced shearers including Australian national shearing champion Daniel McIntyre, a trainer with Australian Wool Innovation (AWI).

The team will compete against Kiwis chosen during the Shears, which are based around New Zealand's only fine wool titles – in the open and senior shearing grades, and open, senior, junior and novice woolhandling.

Said to be the first Indigenous Australian shearing team abroad, it is part of the "REDI footprint", under the auspices of the Regional Enterprise Development Institute, based in Dubbo, NSW, and serving the hopes and ambitions of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait peoples of Murdi Paaki across Western New South Wales.

It has been 50 years since Te Whata first hit the headlines, becoming the youngest champion at the time at the Golden Shears in Masterton, by winning the 1972 junior final, aged just 16.

In 1974, after winning that year's Golden Shears senior title, he set out on the path that would make him one of New Zealand's greatest shearers of fine wool.

A 19-year-old longer-haired Samson Te Whata with the more senior fellow NZ team members in Australia for the first transtasman series match at Euroa, Victoria in 1974. Photo / Supplied

The title won him a development-type role as the travelling reserve with the first New Zealand transtasman series team to Euroa, Victoria.

This team included Golden Shears open champion Norm Blackwell, and second McSkimming Memorial Triple Crown multi breeds championship winner Eddie Reidy.

But, while he wasn't in the test, Te Whata, by then 19, was fourth in Australia's top merino shearers in the supporting event - the Forlonge Invitation.

Becoming a world record shearer on crossbred lambs along the way, Te Whata won the New Zealand Merino Shearing Championship four times (1980-1982 and 1985) and in 1982 also won the McSkimming Memorial Triple Crown national shearing circuit final in Masterton, effectively making him the champion all-breeds shearer in New Zealand.

While merino is the staple of the south's shearing industry it was a very different fibre to the crossbred wool Te Whata had grown-up with in a shearing family around Kaikohe, in the Far North.

He was a crowd favourite at the Golden Shears well into the 1980s, but while he never did win the supreme title of Golden Shears open champion, he made the final six times, once finishing runner-up to left-hander Colin King in 1988.

Te Whata is honoured to be working with the REDI programme and the groundbreaking team at what he regards as the world's only international fine wool shearing competition.

His brother Vic, a fellow former record-breaking shearer, will travel from Kaikohe to take the role of kaumātua with the team to liaise with local iwi.

The Merino Shears has had a long-standing reciprocal arrangement with the Royal Perth A and P Show in West Australia, including international shearing matches, and West Australian shearer Damien Boyle's winning of Alexandra's open title eight times between 2010 and 2019.

However, this year the Royal Perth team isn't travelling due to the continued effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

The New Zealand Merino Shears is the first show of the Shearing Sports New Zealand 2022-2023 season calendar. It takes place from September 30 to October 1.

About 60 competitions will be held throughout the country with the last at Easter 2023.