Podcasts, hoodies and building an archive
(Continued from home page)
They started out uploading the content they filmed onto Shedtalk’s Facebook page from Telecom telephone booths before graduating into live-streaming, covering every show and speed-shear in the central North Island. It’s taken an enormous investment of time – and not a little money too – but today Shedtalk is the go-to website for shearing sports coverage with 35,000 Facebook followers, and 2100 more on the #shedtalk Podcast on Spotify that Paerata launched just two years ago.
This coverage will now include the 2025 Heartland Bank New Zealand Corriedales Championship on November 15.
They started out uploading the content they filmed onto Shedtalk’s Facebook page from Telecom telephone booths before graduating into live-streaming, covering every show and speed-shear in the central North Island. It’s taken an enormous investment of time – and not a little money too – but today Shedtalk is the go-to website for shearing sports coverage with 35,000 Facebook followers, and 2100 more on the #shedtalk Podcast on Spotify that Paerata launched just two years ago.
This coverage will now include the 2025 Heartland Bank New Zealand Corriedales Championship on November 15.
Shedtalk’s live-streaming has attracted up to 300,000 visits at times, and it has lately taken on the ability to live-stream Australian speed-shear competitions where the prize money can be astronomical by New Zealand standards. Just as importantly, Shedtalk has 300 subscribers paying $5 a month for direct feeds from special podcasts, as well as coverage of competition events.
“It’s pretty hard to get people to pay for a subscription for special broadcasts and updates, as well as the free live-streaming, but we think it’s a small price to pay compared to our costs in providing the coverage,” Cushla says. “Most events have a $10 entry fee, and that means it costs us each $40 just to get in the gate to four events a month, to say nothing of travel and accommodation costs.”
The special podcasts that Spotify podcast subscribers get access to are interviews by Paerata of well-known shearers, wool-handlers and industry personalities, discussing shearing sports, the wool industry and the way they’ve evolved over the years. Paerata has completed more than 20 of these, and they’re part of a growing historical archive of shearing-related material.
Seeking paying subscribers isn’t the only way Cushla and Paerata have tried to make the Facebook website pay its way: they’ve lately begun marketing a range of shearing-applicable sports gear like hoodies and T-shirts imprinted with Cushla’s designs and shearing/woolhandling themes.
“I buy the garments from AS Colour, a New Zealand-owned blank products clothing manufacturer, then have DTF (direct-to-fabric) stencils of my designs made in Auckland, and press them onto the garments at home. We started it only last year and we’ve been pretty pleased with the response, and though there’s not a great margin in it we can see it building steadily along with the followers on the Facebook site,” Cushla says.
The Abrahams were both all but born in the shearing sheds and have spent most of their lives in the industry, making their individual marks as top-line competitors in both wool-handling and shearing.
Cushla started out shearing as a teenager, and won herself a New Zealand junior lamb shearing title at Raglan in 2009, before switching to wool-handling and going on to win four major open titles. Paerata has twice, in 2019 and 2025, won the prestigious National PGG Wrightson Vetmed mixed-breed multi-event shearing series, along with a clutch of open finals, and made his name particularly in speed-shears where he’s won the New Zealand Open title three times, in 2015, 2016 and 2025.
Both Cushla and Paerata have represented New Zealand in their respective crafts, though not at the same time, in the annual Trans-Tasman teams event series against Australia.
In between live-streaming shearing and woolhandling events, and conducting interviews with prominent shearing personalities as part of their growing Shedtalk archive, the Abrahams run a shearing contracting business out of Masterton. At the peak of the Wairarapa main-shear from October through December, the Abrahams run usually three gangs comprising a total of around 30 staff.
“Most of our staff are relatives – it’s very much a whanau business,” Cushla says, “and it’s of a size that’s comfortable to manage, so we don’t seem to encounter a lot of the stresses that are inherent in shearing contracting.”
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