Ploughing matches
Ploughing matches, features of nineteenth century life in rural Australia, are now largely forgotten. In their day in Maitland and elsewhere they were important in several contexts.
Entertainment, training and opportunities
Ploughing matches were sporting entertainments, but they also provided training along with opportunities for farm labourers to demonstrate and improve their skills via competition. A New Zealand study by Peter Holland and Sherry Olson recently had it that ploughing matches were intended ‘to train a superior class of ploughman and to encourage them to put mind into their work’. Matches were also about maintaining and transmitting a rural tradition and evaluating new ploughing technologies and machinery.
No doubt those who had a keen eye for a straight furrow and an ability to handle horses or bullocks sensitively did well in matches and earned some money ‘on the side’. Probably they improved their chances of bargaining with their employers for better wages as a result.
Matches, as the word implies, were competitive encounters. In the Maitland area they were conducted periodically at least as early as 1844 by the Hunter River Agricultural Society, later the Hunter River Agricultural and Horticultural Association (HRA&HA). The first known match was conducted near Hannan St not far from The Falls, with seven horse teams and six bullock teams entered. Soon the matches were being staged annually in association with the Maitland Show which had been inaugurated in 1844 at the Albion Inn, High St, West Maitland.
Rules evolved and became standardised: ploughmen (and they were always men) had to plough a set area (usually half an acre) in a specified time, and they were judged on the straightness and evenness of depth of their furrows. The ploughmen’s handling of their farm animals, requiring sensitivity to best harness their strength, was on display as well. Their performance was a test of skills.
Advances in plough design were also on show, and farmers could compare what they were using with what was becoming available. New designs could be evaluated against known and familiar ones and the process of comparison stimulated progress in ploughing technology. Ploughing matches had an important economic purpose as well as a sporting one.
Organisation
Competition at the Maitland Show occurred in classes: Class A was the elite ‘all-comers’ class, often attracting a dozen or more ploughmen, and there was usually a class for those aged under 18. This was about developing the skills of new generations of ploughmen. Competitors learned from watching their peers and competence was stimulated.
In the Maitland area the matches were held on various farms in Bolwarra, Oakhampton, East Maitland, West Maitland, Louth Park, Ravensfield and elsewhere. Sometimes, host sites were sought by advertising in the Maitland Mercury. For many years, the winners of Class A matches received £4, and there were sometimes silver cups and medals as well. Skilled ploughmen were clearly celebrated; some might even to a degree have been treated as folk heroes at least on the day of their triumphs.
The prizes were donated by leading citizens, usually large land holders seeking to associate themselves with the events by offering sponsorship. In one competition, at Ravensfield in 1845, first prize was a male calf and the second place-getter won a female pig.
Photograph of a ploughing match, Kerry and Co, c 1884-1917
Note the crowds in the background. The location of the event is not known.
The social role
At their peak, ploughing matches attracted hundreds of spectators including most of the large landholders of the Maitland area. There was betting on the results, ale was provided to the ploughmen as they worked, and afterwards there were sumptuous lunches and dinners in nearby inns. The dinners were accompanied by dancing, toasts, speech-making and the awarding of prizes. In the manner of the times, ‘three cheers’ were called for the Association, its chairman and the judges.
Matches were reported in the Mercury, usually with quotes from the judges. Their praise for the quality of the ploughing witnessed was often fulsome.
Ploughing matches were held in many locations across NSW, and in some years there was a kind of ‘state championship’ held at the Agricultural and Horticultural Association’s grounds in Parramatta. In 1869 this event attracted ploughmen from a wide area including the Hills District, the Hawkesbury, the Hunter, Bathurst, the Southern Highlands and the Shoalhaven, and at noon on the day of competition there were 1500 people in attendance. The prize for winning Class A was £10.
There is no record of George Mead, a skilled ploughman who arrived from England in 1848 and settled near what is now Lorn, ever having participated in ploughing matches either as a competitor or a judge. But one of his sons, William, aged 26, won Class A at the Maitland Show in 1888. He beat another local man, Robert Vickery, in a ‘plough-off’ for first place.
William Mead and (right) the certificate recording his first prize in the Class A ploughing match at the 1888 Maitland Show.
Three years later the last Hunter River Agricultural and Horticultural Association’s ploughing match was held. Presumably, such matches were no longer useful to the farming economy of the Hunter Valley. For half a century they had been part of that economy and part of the region’s sporting and entertainment scene.
References
Bowrey, Ian, The Ploughman: the story of George and Rachel Mead and the family, NJ Mead, Cardiff, 1985.
Brien, Keith (ed.), Hunter River Agricultural and Horticultural Association 150th Maitland Show, 1861-2011, Bookmen Publishers, Brisbane, 2011.
Holland, Peter and Olson, Sherry, ‘The farmer’s cutting edge in southern New Zealand, 1864-1914’, International Review of Environmental History, 6/2, 2020, pp 29-56.
Keys, Chas ‘Our past: red hot competition to be the district’s best ploughman’, Maitland Mercury, 26 April 2021.
Maitland Mercury.
