Two death-defying champions, muscular and stripped to the waist, in 1911 stepped onto the boards in the Austral Hall in Toowoomba to contest the first ever sheep-shearing world championship. I told a version of this story on radio 4WK.

The Austral Hall was the largest building of its type in Queensland. It has since been relocated and today it’s the John Reid Pavilion (pictured above) at the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds. It has accommodated events such as the Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival, and yet today there’s no hint that 114 years ago the building actually hosted the very first world sheep-shearing championship.

The contest came with purse of £500 with a £100 side wager which totals around half-a-million dollars today.

None of the noted shed champions of the time took part in it because it was very different. It wasn’t all about speed like in a normal shed, because points were also awarded for quality and style. The competition was for two and a-half hours’ shearing which was about the equivalent of normal run.

The contestants were Fred Zimmerle of Toowoomba and Charlie Maurer of Glen Innes. Zimmerle was very well known and had been the benchmark for a long time, while Maurer came with a big reputation. It was the first such contest to crown a world champion, and the whole countryside was talking about it.

It happened on Wednesday the 15th of February 1911 when 2,000 spectators packed the Austral Hall to witness the unique indoor event. The men came forward, stripped to the waist, they were both described as browned, lithe and muscular. Media reports said that Zimmerle dashed in with a long swinging stroke, full of confidence, but Maurer was rather nervous and jerky, and his work was said to lack the clean efficiency of his opponent.

The sprint was won by Zimmerle who shore thirty-two sheep to Maurer’s twenty-eight. These are small numbers compared to shed shearing because the shearers were paying greater attention to the technical detail. The judges allotted only 150 points for speed, whereas there were also 300 points for quality of work, and 100 points for style. The judges’ decision was unanimous, and that was that Zimmerle had scored the most points which gave him, and his home town of Toowoomba, the very first world sheep-shearing championship.

Maurer may have been beaten on this occassion, but he maintained an undeniable reputation for coming back. You see years before when he was just twenty-years-old, and living in Bingara near Glen Innes, New South Wales, he contracted typhoid. He was in hospital for fourteen weeks. For three of those weeks he lived on brandy alone and went from weighing twelve stone to just six and a half.

Maurer was pronounced dead and the undertakers measured him for his coffin. As he was being moved off the bed for the last time, one of the undertakers dropped him, and Maurer stirred. Six hospital staff were said to have lost their jobs because of his resurrection.

As for the champion Zimmerle, he also cheated death.

In 1925, Zimmerle survived with a broken collar bone the Traviston train disaster when the Rockhampton mail train derailed from on top of a high timber trestle bridge near Traveston on the North Coast line. Ten people were killed and forty injured which up to that time was the worst railway accident in Queensland history. Today it’s still second behind only the Camp Mountain disaster of 1947.

Zimmerle was a passenger on his way to Barcaldine for a shearing job. He was in the carriage which went off the bridge and crashed into the creek below. He noticed nothing unusual until after he dozed-off five minutes before the accident, when he was awakened by a bump, and immediately knew that they were falling. He went unconscious and the next thing he heard was the sound of an axe used by a rescuer to cut open the carriage.

Fred Zimmerle, the world’s first world champion sheep shearer, died in Toowoomba in 1942. Today he’s buried in the Drayton and Toowoomba cemetery with nothing to indicate his great shearing triumph.

Meanwhile, Charlie Maurer may finally have got the better of his rival because he outlived Zimmerle by fifteen years and was given the responsible job of night watchman at the Supreme Court of Queensland.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD ON RADIO 4WK.

Photo credits:
The Mercedes-Benz Fashion Festival Brisbane’s new home, the historic John Reid Pavilion at the Brisbane Showgrounds – Brisbane Times 2015.
Music competition, Austral Hall, Toowoomba, 1908 – State Library of Queensland.
Fred Zimmerle – Sydney Mail and New South Wales Advertiser, 1st March 1911, page 24.
Charles Maurer – Sun, Sydney, 17th February 1911, page 6.
Rocky Mail disaster at Traveston, 9 June 1925 – Gympie Regional Libraries.
Frederick Zimmerle, Drayton and Toowoomba Cemetery – Find a Grave by Margaret 2022.