Overview
Shorn fleece is light but very bulky, so it needs to be compressed into a bale in order to be transported to a factory for processing. This is done with a wool press.
This particular wool press is one of the earliest to arrive in New Zealand. It was made in Australia in the 1860s. Its framework is jarrah (Eucalyptus marginata – a type of Western Australian gum tree), and the panels over the top are another kind of hardwood. It was brought to New Zealand in separate pieces, then carried overland and reassembled at Terawhiti station in Makara, Wellington. Around 1880, it was shifted to the Monaghan property in South Makara.
The press is made up of two separate ‘bins’ of equal size. While shearing was going on, both bins sat side by side on the woolshed floor, usually near the skirting table. One section was lined with a four-sided wool pack, while, at the bottom of the other, lay the ‘cap’, a flat piece of sacking which would become the top of the wool bale.
After the shorn fleeces were skirted, they were rolled and stacked into the bins. To make room for more fleeces, shed-hands often climbed into the bins to tread the wool down with their boots.
Each bin held about twenty fleeces. When they were both full, the one containing the ‘cap’ had to be turned upside down over the other. But first, two metal bars were pushed through the top of it, to hold the wool in place when it was upturned.
The turning itself was a strenuous task: a block and tackle pulley suspended from the roof was sometimes used, or else a metal ratchet system, operated with a crank handle.
Once the bin containing the ‘cap’ was inverted directly over the top of the bin lined with the wool pack, the metal bars holding the wool in the top bin were removed. The wool in the top was then ‘pressed’ to combine with the wool in the bottom. To do this, two strong workers stood on either side of the press. With a long metal bar hooked onto the ‘cap’, they used a ratchet wheel to compress the contents of the bins together. This process took about three minutes. The ‘cap’ was then stitched to the top of the wool pack using a large, curved needle and twine.
A door on one side of the bottom bin of the wool press was opened, and the bale was hauled out – a big, hard, heavy block. Finally it needed to be branded, which meant having the name of the farm and the bale number stencilled onto its side.
Today’s wool presses operate on similar principles to this one, but operating them involves little more than pulling a lever or pressing a button.
Text originally published in Tai Awatea, Te Papa's onfloor multimedia database (1998).