HE'S A SHEAR THING! - Snow's Golden hands

THIS FARMER SURE HAS ONE GOOD YARN TO TELL!

- Lynley Ward

It’s not a stretch to imagine a million sheep have passed through shearer Ian “Snow” Harrison’s hands in his lifetime, but there are four frisky ewes the Southlander will never forget.

The great-grandfather of eight and New Zealand’s oldest surviving Golden Shears finalist still has a chuckle recalling the crazy episode outside a TV studio in downtown Sydney when a few unruly sheep made a bolt for freedom ahead of a filming session.

“I was in a shearing and wool handling team that went to Australia. Godfrey Bowen was with us and he got two of us to shear on TV in a farming programme one night. It was a show similar to our Country Calendar. There were about three or four sheep on the loose. They’d got out on William Street and the staff had to catch them so we had to give a hand there. They had them sort of half caught by the time we got there but we helped take them inside where the cameras were set up,” tells Snow, who’s been known by his nickname since he was a youngster.

“They just didn’t know how to handle them. You’ve got to work with sheep to know how to handle them.”

It’s something that the experienced Dipton-born man knows a great deal about. Having spent his life on farms, Snow decided to become a shearer early on after realising it could be just the ticket to bankroll his own slice of paradise.

“I was brought up on a farm and wanted one of my own and I could see that you could make money shearing.

“I was working on a farm and the next-door neighbour ran a shearing school and I learnt from him,” he tells.