The Great Indoors
Kingsley Field takes a look at what’s happening down at Mystery Creek Events Centre a week from the biggest annual agricultural event in the Southern Hemisphere.
By the middle of last week – a week before the event was due to open – the massive National Fieldays’ site was awash with the nuts and bolts of yet another immense agricultural show.
Not for nothing is it regarded as the biggest annual event of its kind in the Southern Hemisphere, and somehow it just keeps on expanding.
Truckloads or bark, wood-chips, sawdust, fine metal and sand had been spread neatly into squares and oblongs ready for marquees or temporary buildings to be erected over them, and already scores of multi-sectioned marquee-tents had been put up. Gangs of tent-hire workers were busy pounding in long iron stakes, fitting sections of aluminium framing together and expertly hauling the heavy plastic shells up and over the skeletons to provide yet another instant sales booth.
Around them, millions of dollars worth of machinery, all gleaming in new red, green, yellow, blue, orange or silver paint, had been strategically placed to catch the eyes of passersby. The tractors are bigger, the mowers are wider, the seed-sowers and fertiliser spreaders and hay-rakes cover an ever bigger swath than those displayed at previous shows of bygone years.
Smart slabs of paving, carefully raked pathways, matting and strips of timber flooring have been neatly laid inside the big tents, and trailer-loads of potted plants, ponga, palms, shrubs and tussocks were, last week and as late as yesterday, being added decoratively. Great treated pine poles were being rammed in to serve as stand-out signage carriers in the hope of drawing in those extra prospective buyers. And teams of employees or volunteer family members from the hundreds of different large businesses and tiny enterprises were ripping open boxes and cartons containing every possible item that might be of interest to the tens of thousands of potential customers due to begin pouring into the 40ha site.
Clothing alone will probably utilise 250,000 coat-hangers and occupy hundreds of meters of shelving. Footwear – from steel-capped boots to ladies’ and children’s fancy plastic multi-coloured wellingtons, and from waterproof socks to thigh-high fine merino-wool leggings, will also be invitingly spread out by the thousand. Hats, rain-wear, camouflage-hunting gear, equine accoutrements, chainsaws, tools, fast-food and perhaps half a million cups of coffee will all be on the market. There will be takers for much of it, too.
More than 800 exhibitors, offering everything from small pottles of beeswax or vegetable peelers for just a few dollars to those selling whitebait fritter sandwiches, and also those doing deals on $250,000 and more tractors, have crammed the 1200 sites.
And with the weather forecast prediction from the Mystery Creek Events Centre’s own on-site weather station showing “no major rain-bearing systems on the horizon at this stage”, the prospect for the 45th annual National Fieldays is that it will be a cracker.
