Nose to the grindstone

She’s perhaps the only specialist criminal lawyer in the country who drives around in designer fashion, carrying a box of axes in the boot of her car. But Emma Riddell says hard work and a sharp axe are her keys to success.

Emma even has the perfect argument prepared, should she ever be stopped by the police – the sharp, glinting axes are not so much weapons but essential tools for her newfound love of competitive woodchopping.

Some nights after work and each weekend the Nelson barrister heads out to a nearby farm to train in perfecting the art of swinging an axe or slicing a timber block with a huge saw. The interest is perhaps not so unusual when considering she has roots deep in a Southland farm, and the competitive sport she’s always played.

Emma recently returned home to Nelson bearing trophies from the Stihl Timbersports at the Rural Games in Palmerston North, where she finished second overall from points gained in three events. It was quite the challenge getting the axes on the ‘plane, Emma says.

She was also recently triumphant in one of woodchopping’s biggest competitions of the year – the South Island championships in Waimate, in which Emma won both the women’s individual events.

Axe throwing is also where the former netball goal shoot excels. The farthest Emma has thrown a twinheaded axe is 16 feet (the contests are still assessed using imperial measurements) in the novelty event usually held at the end of serious competition. “It’s usually a fun event at the end of the main competition but I tend to take it quite seriously.”

The focus needed is the same as that in court; Emma knows that even after almost 14 years in the job; which started as a junior at Invercargill’s Crown Law office, a dull axe requires more strength than a sharp blade for winning any argument.

“I try to be assertive in court in terms of my position. It’s about being confident in knowing what you’re doing, and about 10 years in you get to know what you’re doing."

She agrees there are parallels between the law and woodchopping, which is a heritage sport in New Zealand dating back to the 1870s. “I think it’s just if you work hard you’re going to get results, and it’s the same with law. If you’re doing a trial you have to know the case better than anyone in the courtroom, and like woodchopping, the more you put into it the better the result.”

Emma also applies that to her love of clothes and fashion, and a style she describes as “very black”, as evident by the chique black dress she wore by New Zealand designer Jimmy D for this interview. “It’s very Dunedin isn’t it? I don’t think I’ve ever gotten past that. I just got a new wardrobe put in my house which I desperately needed because there was no storage, and when I stood back and looked I realised more than a good quarter of the wardrobe was black.” Tucked away in the closet is the protective chain mesh worn on her legs and feet during woodchopping.

Emma grew up on an 800-acre sheep farm in Hokonui, cradled in the rolling green Southland hills north of Invercargill and west of Gore. “I had a great childhood and I helped lots on the farm… although my parents might well have disagreed. I helped with stock work, fencing, and tractor work – a bit of everything.”

Emma’s father is still on the farm, but her mother died last year. “I miss the farm, and I spent a lot of time going back there last year to see my mother. It was a difficult year, a crap year actually. It’s been awful.”

Emma credits her parents, both farmers and academics – especially her mother who was a strong advocate for the environment - with her interest in law, even though economics took precedence when she began study at Otago University. Criminal law studies in her second year was the turning point.

“I had great lecturers and a great tutorial class. It was a really little one on a Friday afternoon that hardly anyone went to.”

She graduated in 2009 with a law degree and an honours degree in economics and was admitted to the bar the following year. She went out on her own as a self-employed barrister in 2016 after moving from Invercargill to the Crown Law office in Nelson in 2012.

“It’s good to be self-employed – it was always a goal.”

Emma credits her mother also for the inherited administrative skills, which she’s applied in her career, and the various sporting codes Emma has been part of. “Mum was very supportive of environmental causes and did a lot of work in the community and was on various committees at national level.”

Emma knew little about woodchopping, except from watching it at various A&P Shows and rural sports days, before she became hooked after winning her first competition in 2020. The interest was triggered by a friend’s partner at the time who mentioned she might be good at it.

“So, they took me out to meet the person who's now my coach near Motueka and here I am."

Emma is coached by the head of the sport’s governing body, New Zealand Axemen’s Association president, Dave McEwen. She says success requires a combination of fitness, technique and strength which are “really hard to master”, but she loves the challenge.

“A beautiful technique is a nice big swing with your axe out in a big arc, using your legs at the right time; getting your timing right and using all the power you have in your whole body. “I think I’m slow with my swing, but I’ve got the power in it.”

Success also relies on finding enough wood for the multiple training blocks needed. “Dave does have a knack for finding wood for training. For example, last season he was just driving around and saw trees down on a farm near Tapawera, so he called the farmer and asked if we could get some blocks out.

“I spent a weekend with Dave and his wife getting them out, for my training blocks.”

Emma says chopping and sawing wood also requires knowledge of how to read wood. “It’s very technical and that’s something my coach is big on, in terms of how you set up the block, it’s what you learn from the start.”

She says it’s also a good way to learn more about how to respect trees and timber.
“You can tell from a block how old the tree was, and where it grew, maybe with heaps of wind battering it. Every tree tells a story.”

A combination of hard and soft wood is used in chopping. In forest-clad Nelson, it tends to be pine, helped by forestry company sponsors which donate timber. Then there’s poplar, because it’s easy to get from excess trees felled on farms. West Coast gum “chips out nicely” and Emma says she was once really spoiled when she got to cut two cedar blocks on the West Coast.

“That’s a very pretty wood, and very soft. A few women were cutting it and all the men crowded around to look at the cedar.”

Emma says there’s a core of Kiwi women competing in the sport, mostly professionals who’ve found chopping and sawing a great antidote to the stresses of work. She has always turned to sport and fitness as a way of coping with the stress of work, especially the trials involving sex offences.

“Any sex trial is particularly difficult. The subject matter is difficult, and it’s difficult cross-examining the complainants – that’s never a fun job but you’re there to do the best for your client.

“They have the presumption of innocence and they need someone to advocate for them – what if they didn’t do what they were accused of? That’s what we’re trying to avoid, wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice.”

Emma has further ambitions for woodchopping, which she says is a relatively hard sport to break into. “A lot who chop have family in the sport and it’s expensive to get into. An axe is $900 and a saw is close to $4000.”

Emma says these are specialised tools made especially for sport and says the racing axes made in Masterton are known to be the best in the world. She’d like to see woodchopping become an Olympic sport. It’s big in Europe and in the US, from where some of the sport’s best women athletes come from, and the Australians are also highly competitive.

A more immediate goal is competing as part of the New Zealand women’s team in Australia. “I just love the sport, the people – they're an awesome group and they’re completely different from the law, which is good.”