The Great Indoors 2
Kingsley Field takes a look at what visitors are wearing to the Fieldays at Mystery Creek this year.
There were hundreds of them, and they stood at the high wire gates peering through with the patient resignation of a mob of sheep – waiting until the clock agonisingly ticked round to exactly 8am.
Then the gates to the 45th annual National Fieldays at Mystery Creek were heaved open and a great surge of humanity poured into the 40ha event, already crammed with more than 1200 sites and thousands of expectant sales reps. Happily, as they did, a solid Waikato fog, which had settled over the grounds an hour earlier, rapidly began to dissipate. It was gone within 45 minutes, leaving the air crisp and cold, but with a fine clear day overhead.
In most instances visitors were clad to cope with the weather and the outdoor conditions. Children especially were heavily shrouded in thick beanies and multiple layers of brightly-coloured fleeces, perhaps not just to combat the cold but also to make for rapid and easy identification should a little one wander away while parents were preoccupied with some particularly interesting display. The youngsters also had heavy leggings, and seemed happy to plod stoically along in clumpy little gumboots.
Other, tougher, older visitors wore considerably less – I saw one young man clad in a pair of skimpy synthetic shorts, a meagre T-shirt and a pair of flimsy jandals. He seemed totally unaware of the chill around him, laughing and chatting to a couple of friends as they powered down the nearest avenue of interest.
But most people had come prepared: quilted jackets, a vast range of hats, scarves, gloves sometimes, long trousers tucked into heavy wool socks and the socks themselves disappearing into solid leather boots or short gumboots.
The footwear at Fieldays is always worthy of close scrutiny – more than any other item of apparel it is the most diverse. Many people, obviously farmers or at least land-based in some way, have stepped straight into the footwear they wear every day in their work – worn, battered, grubby gumboots or pull-on steel-cap leather boots. Then there’s the almost limitless array of sneakers, some of them almost falling to pieces and held together largely by long-time association with those particular feet, and others almost brand new and with owners loath to step anywhere near a possible mud-puddle.
Maybe one in 50 wore a pair of properly polished street shoes, although many women chose to wear calf- or knee-length boots – great for a day like yesterday when the sun shone and murky footpaths were non-existent.
In earlier days, Fieldays’ roadways were not always easy to negotiate when the weather was manky, and avenues of sodden sludge saw the destruction of many a pair of beautiful shoes. Now, though, most of the main thoroughfares are sealed streets with narry a puddle in sight.
After 45 years the site, the event and its visitors have all grown hugely, and rightly the National Fieldays can lay claim to being the best such show of its type south of the equator.
