Mr Stuart is chairing a small committee which is organising the Waitaki Mackenzie Merino Shears in Omarama on September 27. The name was changed from the Omarama Merino Expo to encompass a larger area.
The last Omarama Shears event was held in 2004 and went into recess because of lack of people to organise it.
Mr Stuart, who manages Tara Hills, has always been keen to see it revived to both promote quality in shearing and wool-handling and provide a vehicle for community groups to fund-raise.
His involvement with the New Zealand Merino Shears spanned more than 30 years, starting as a "pen boy" tipping the sheep up for the judges.
He competed for a few years "not very successfully" and joined the committee in the early 1990s. He recently stood down as president.
The Stuart family has a long association with shearing. His father Alistair was a shearing judge and still does time-keeping at the Merino Shears, while brother Tony won the senior New Zealand title at Alexandra in 2003. An uncle in Australia - Ian Kneen - crossed the Tasman and won two titles in Alexandra.
In July this year, Mr Stuart travelled to Victoria, Australia, for an invitational challenge organised between the New Zealand Merino Shears and the Northern Shears in Bendigo.
He was the manager and a shearing judge, while the rest of the team comprised shearers John Emslie and Shaun O'Neill, woolhandlers Jude Kinaston and Waina Peneha, and wool-handling judge Graeme Bell.
The sheep were "big woolly merino wethers" and the New Zealanders emerged with a 20-point victory over the Northern Shears team in the team challenge.
Emslie qualified for the open machines final and finished second behind Jason Wingfield who will represent Australia at the world championships in Norway in October. O'Neill and Kinaston won the senior teams event.
The aim of the invitational challenge was to select a mix of experience and youth and to give competitors the experience of overseas competition.
It was also an experience for Mr Stuart and Mr Bell who had to come to terms with a different judging system.
Mr Stuart, who had been judging for three years, much preferred being a judge to competing, saying he was too nervous to compete successfully.
He hoped there would be good entries for the Waitaki Mackenzie Merino Shears, particularly given it was the week before the Merino Shears in Alexandra on October 3 and 4.
"Because we have 200 shearers and wool-handlers combined at Alexandra, a lot will be keen to compete the weekend before. We should be looking at quite a few," he said.
It would get shearers and woolhandlers up to speed with the quality standard required for the rest of the competition season. Open blade shearers were catered for at Omarama - a class which was not being run at Alexandra.
Special guests at the event will be several All Blacks who will mingle with the crowd and sign autographs for children.
A committee of about six had organised the event, with other volunteers helping on the day. Mr Stuart hoped it would become an annual event again and more people would become involved with running it.
Sponsorship has been obtained from Meridian Energy, PGG Wrightson, Kurow Wools, Tectra, Rural Transport, Meat and Wool New Zealand and the New Zealand Merino Company, plus merino farmers.
For Mr Stuart, the appeal of such competitions was like dog trialling - "you like to see a good dog run".
"With shearing, you like to see your sheep shorn well and your wool prepared well. With the merino wool, we spend 12 months growing it. It only takes a couple of wild shots and it can be worth nothing if its not cut off properly or handled across the table properly," he said.
• Merino Shears- September 27, at Omarama
Classes:
- Open machine shearing
- Open blade shearing
- Senior machine shearing
- Open wool-handling
- Senior wool-handling
- Junior wool-handling
- Wool-handling heats and semi-finals at Omarama Station
- Wool-handling finals and all shearing at Tara Hills
- Entries close September 19
