A cut above

In the second of a series on artefacts that tell the story of Aotearoa's past, historian JOCK PHILLIPS explains the relevance of these killing knives.

- Jock Phillips

Cutting the throat of a sheep with a knife was once a coming of age for Kiwi blokes, and it was certainly for almost a century an essential first step in one of the country's most important sources of wealth - the export of refrigerated lamb and mutton to the United Kingdom. This trade began on December 6, 1881, when six butchers at Tötara Estate, near Ōamaru in North Otago, began slaughtering sheep. Some of these knives, imported from Sheffield, the great British home of knife-making, were used to kill the sheep, skin them, disembowel them, behead them, and finally cut away the surplus fat.

It was a highly skilled job and the butchers prepared about 40 sheep each day, making a daily total of 240. The carcasses were then taken by a farm cart to the local station, loaded on to a train with a central block of ice, and transported to Port Chalmers. There they were cooled, sewn into a calico bag and taken to the lower hold of the sailing ship Dunedin, where they were frozen and eventually transported to London. Thus began one of the most important economic revolutions in the nation's history.