Country butcher: Hay’s Macker’s Meats

Nominated for every category in last year’s local business awards, Hay butcher Garry McRae soon became a bit embarrassed repeatedly going up onto the stage.

He needn’t have been … the evening concluded with his business, Mackers Meats, awarded  the top title as the shire’s business of the year.

It joins the multiple of medals and awards that this family-run retail butcher business has earned in its 35 years of ownership by Garry and his wife Sandra.

“And they won the NSW/ACT Sausage King award for best Italian Sausage,” adds customer Mel, who has dropped in from her farm to pick up her meat order and share a chat about some locals. Apprentice Nadin Gleeson offers to carry her order out to her car.

“You don’t get that service in the city,” said Mel.

The store’s reputation is wide. Hay is on the Sydney to Adelaide route and travellers often make Mackers their meat stop, Garry said.  A customer from Deniliquin – 125km away – is also a regular.

The business is a dyed-in-the-wool country-stye butchery and a heavy commitment to community. The front window is plastered with entries from the local school’s history competition – together with a QR code for passers-by to vote. There wouldn’t be a sports club in town that hasn’t had a meat voucher donated by Mackers.

The store is busy not only with meat. Dangling high about the front counter is a display of knives, steels and BBQ gear worthy of a chef’s equipment store – even a hardware.

The store has served as a butcher shop for more than 100 years, including four years of ownership by Garry’s dad.

As a kid Garry worked in the local market gardens – now all gone. The son of a butcher, he has come to recognise first-hand the importance of locally grown food. The family farms at Ivanhoe and Maude provide the sheep and goats processed at Hardwicks in Kyneton – a 400km one-way commitment to locally sourced meat.

The store handles about 20 lambs a week along with five bodies and a couple of goats. Only the pork comes in broken. Garry is proud to be one of the few last butchers doing a complete carcase break up.

“You’re not a real butcher unless you’re breaking up bodies”, he said, adding that handling a whole beast allows him to offer old-fashioned favourites such as home-corned beef, rolled roast and all the offals. Honeycomb tripe is up there on the specials board.

In the back, the team is busy doing pre-pack for the local supermarket.

Hard at work are Garry’s brother Peter, a qualified butcher, and sister-in-law Vicky. It’s a chilly late-winter morning and only 7.30am, so the two counter girls aren’t in yet. Apprentice Nadin 17, who used to drop in after school, is now there full-time. Sandra is usually around the place and soon to arrive will be Garry and Sandra’s kids Zoe and Ben, both qualified butchers.

Finding staff anywhere in the butchery business is tough; often more so in country areas. But Garry and Sandra and their family-centric work team look set to turn this popular second-generation business into a third-generation one.