Wooback woos the crowd

“Everyone’s happy and that makes me happy,” an exhausted but delighted organiser, Chris Broers told the Tribune on Tuesday.

“It was a great crowd, a fantastic event, a great venue, and the trade stand people were busy. There were lots of big teams, traffic flowed smoothly and the RFS and Canassist did a great job [with the parking and entry].

“A team of four horses came from West Australia and six came from Melbourne. We had over 100 horses there, but not all of them could plough.”

The new venue seemed to suit the crowd, as it was more convenient than the previous venue, Willowvale.

The feature event saw a new Australian record of 58 heavy horses ploughing in one paddock at the same time - a number which smashed the previous record of 28 set by the Wooback team in 2014. At that time 28 was also the world record. In 2015 an Irish team set a new world record of 84. Wooback organisers were hopeful of beating that mark, given they had 90 entries, but unfortunately some of those entries were unable to attend on the weekend, meaning the Yass team have to be content to set the new Australian record.

Cooma Cottage ran their annual Hume’s HeyDay in conjunction with Wooback 2. Organiser Rick Williams was pleased to have a ready-made crowd on his doorstep.

“Wooback 2 gave us an audience. We figured that would happen. We were very pleased with the number of people who came through. 

The family fun day had it’s usual heritage attractions such as flint-lock guns, children’s games, dog-cart rides, music and poetry. Mr Williams particularly mentioned Elizabeth Burness, who dressed as one of Hume’s servants and mingled with the crowd.

“We try to make it as much about Hume as we can.”