Canterbury A&P's Wood Chopping Competition is full of passion.
"When the whistle blows and the call is made to
‘step to your logs’ they lay the edge of the axe to the wood so tenderly."
At Hamilton's Field Days it's more about fencing and sculpting with a chain saw.
Peter Verstappen writes for the Ashburton Guardian. I stumbled across this post and thought you might be interested. Especially read the end; well worded.
Referring to Gordon McLauchlan's A Passionless People which was written 30 years ago, Verstappen writes:
In his mind the passion we lack as a people is not the passion of individual pursuits but of engaging with others at a level that transforms relationships and, eventually, society. According to McLauchlan we need to become ‘people-orientated’ and ‘express our emotions.’McLauchlan is not the first or most recent person to chide kiwis for lacking strong emotions. But while we are not usually comfortable with those among us who lay their feelings bare, as Tame Iti would vouch, I find it hard to accept that we do not possess strong emotions nor find ways to express these to the common good.Here’s a case in point. I visited the Christchurch A&P Show on Thursday and found myself, as usual, absorbed by the wood-chopping. As a spectator sport wood-chopping has remained unchanged since my youth, except that the singlets are now blue where once they were black. It is everything McLauchlan complained about: pragmatic, physical and monosyllabic – an emotion-free zone. The focus is firmly on log and axe, human interaction is minimal, victory is largely unremarked.
But for me wood-chopping oozes passion; you just have to look carefully for the signs. There is passion in the total focus on the task and the close camaraderie of a common purpose. Above all, there is passion in the relationship between man, axe and log. These large, rough men handle their axes with gentleness and reverence. They treat the logs with the respect accorded to a worthy adversary. When the whistle blows and the call is made to ‘step to your logs’ they lay the edge of the axe to the wood so tenderly. Then the count, heft and swing; the arc of the blade through the air and the first bite into the grain.
In a different culture these axemen would be bullfighters. They would wear tight, sequinned bolero jackets and small pointy shoes. They would pirouette and twirl their red capes, every movement perfectly balanced and crackling with emotion.
Gordon McLauchlan yearned for immigrants from rich and self-confident cultures whose influence would presumably arouse some passion in us and make us better than we are. Thirty years later his solution seems naïve. We look out at a world where even the oldest and most self-assured cultures are just as capable as ourselves at messing things up. Often those societies that seem most passionate are also the most destructive.
As a society we may continually struggle to express ourselves. We may seem dull compared to more flamboyant communities. But to say we are passionless is to confuse decoration with substance. ~ Peter Verstappen
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