by Andrew Rule
‘I’m too wide awake,’ she says, then tells me that her boyfriend and father are asleep in the chapel. I ask her: ‘Would you like to say hello to a scarlet robin?’
She doesn’t think there are robins in Australia. ‘I thought they were English,’ she says and I tell her about robins in folklore being friends of Jesus. One was said to have plucked a thorn from his head. Others were said to have wiped the tears from his eyes with their wings. There is also the story that robins are blessed because they keep company with the newly dead, and they won’t abandon them until the bodies are committed to the earth. It’s a good story, but awkward and intimate in this place. Instead I press play and six breathy whistles travel into the trees. It’s the whistling sound a child makes or perhaps a person missing half their teeth. I feel a very cold hand on my arm. Six little pensive whistles have returned to us from the dark, out of the trees. Her cold fingers are tapping my arm. And I look into a face I haven’t seen before.
Rein Lover
Jonathan Green
The rain is hard, cold and near horizontal. We’re riding straight into it, flat chat at a fast canter drumming insistently at the verge of a gallop. We spread over the high-country snow plain, breaking with a leap from a low, scrubby tangle of winter white gum and lifting the pace. The horses—fit, certain, little mountain types—toss their heads at the chance to stretch their legs, hitting out in suddenly open country. We lean forward out of the saddle, poised on the balls of our feet, flexing to the swoop of the horse, hands low and tight on the withers and moving to the regular, reaching rhythm. Fingers are numb with cold and tangled with soggy strands of flying mane, the coat flaps behind, mud and clods fly from the steely flash of hooves.
The ground is flat, running on in a long, sweeping curve 200 metres broad between two enclosing kerbs of snow gum. Flat, open country, but still a precarious mystery. Whatever rocks, logs, streams or dips there may be are hidden until the last moment by tussocks of calf-high alpine grass. From the middle distance, you get the impression of a long, uninterrupted meadow. It’s not, maybe, but that’s the fun of it: the uncertain plunge at windrush speed, eyes blinded by rain, charging into a great throttling hand of cold air with the constant shadowing possibility of an instant neck-snapping death. Or at least a bloody and bone-breaking stumble, a quick, irretrievable chaos of legs and hot, heavy careening flesh diving, rolling, tumbling to the ground.
We pull up at the far edge of the plain, horses and riders breathing hard, walking off the run. And then you stand and sit, wind and rain suddenly stilled, and drink in the slow-gathering mauve mist of early evening, the horse snorting plumes of steam that mix with the cry of birds shrieking for dusk as you amble towards the tree line and camp. And it fills your heart.
But not for the horse, who simply moves on to the next entirely captivating moment with slow, gentle grace, a moment sufficient to occupy its entire slim intellect, a moment linked to a lifetime of others by a thick stream of undilutable but simple memory of what brought comfort and what brought fear. And what brought food. Now the job of riding’s done, he won’t want to curl up with you like a dog or yap at your heels. He has no mind for it, no need of you. He’ll just want to eat and quietly go, passing the evening happy in the familiar, secure comfort of the herd, chewing whatever it is in the herbivore world that passes for the fat. The horse will not romanticise the setting, the sense or the situation. It can’t. No mind for that either.
And there it is, the nub of this complex, compelling thing between horses and the people who ride and admire them: a vast gulf in the perception of experience.
The horse had modest beginnings. Hyracotherium first appeared 50 million years ago, a timid leaf-eating mammal the size of a beagle, picking its way through the boggy, humid forests of north-western America and Europe on multi-toed feet. This was the Eocene period. From here the line that would one day bring us Phar Lap, Black Beauty and Mister Ed would go through a series of evolutionary conjugations, from mesohippus in the Oligocene, to merychippus and pliohippus in the late Miocene. Finally, 2 million years ago in the Pleistocene, came equus, a creature that combined four toes into a single, fleeter, hoof and adapted its teeth to the slow spread of grassland. It was faster, taller, recognisable to the modern eye and had the run of plains across Asia, Europe, the Americas and Africa.
It would not interact with man until it appeared on the menus of European Cro-Magnons some 50 000 years ago. Which was the beginning of a sometimes strange, sometimes cruel, sometimes wonderful association, one that would, through fortuitous twists of long-forgotten circumstance, put man on a horse’s back somewhere on the Ukrainian steppe at about 4000 BC. From there on, the evolution of the horse, its breeding for strength, speed, endurance or beauty, would be dominated less by the dictates of the wild and more by human need and desire.
They might have been out there somewhere in the service of humans for six millennia, but I never met one face-to-face until my late twenties. It was a winter Sunday in a Gippsland stable fragrant with grass and gum, the first sniffs of wattle and a thick fug of horse. About twenty of them poked out from their stalls, breasting the confining chains, casting a curious sideways glance and a half-dilated nostril at the intruder, calculating his level of threat at somewhere close enough to zero and resuming breakfast.
They were instantly captivating. Big. Warm. Breathy. Strange. Slightly dangerous and, to the novice, utterly unpredictable. Doeeyed and gentle but with an undercurrent of the white-eyed and wild. Strong but graceful. From here I entered a slowly unfolding mystery, one filled with the quiet tension that naturally falls between a tentative human initiate and a tense quadruped whose primary instincts are fuelled by fear and a consequent desire for flight. The riding was awkward—and still can be, twenty years on—but it was the first canter that put the hook in, breaking from the jaunty one-two impossibility of the trot into a gently rocking three-beat—wow!—that had us coasting smoothly up a slight incline, me bouncing hideously in the saddle as the placidly suffering trail horse shuffled through his paces according to well-worn routine.
To ride a horse well is to interact with another species in a remarkably sophisticated way, one that requires the opening of communications between two minds and sets of instincts that run in awkward and unfamiliar parallel. It’s an enduring, unresolved enigma.
Enthralled by it, I had lessons and bought strange clothes: moleskins, jodhpurs, oilskins, boots and an utterly unconvincing rabbit-felt Akubra. I’d been inner urban, rock’n’roll, late nights and cigarettes, and slowly I was turning into Adam Lindsay Gordon.
Dark-brown with tan muzzle, just stripped for the tussle,
Stood Iseult, arching her neck to the curb,
A lean head and fiery, strong quarters and wiry,
A loin rather light, but a shoulder superb.
And, like Gordon, there came a day when I took it all a step too far, a day when, overwhelmed by a vision of equine grace and beauty, I committed the rashest act possible in the thoroughbred dispersal saleyard and bought one. The first of many. A wild-eyed, hyped-up reject from the same line as Rain Lover but with a fraction of the racing talent. It ended in tears, the first, again, of many.
But that’s the thing about Australia, there’s no shortage of horses ready to be squandered on the ill-informed and over-ambitious, and by international standards they’re going cheap.
They arrived on the First Fleet, two stallions and five mares that were part of an extraordinary complement that also included kittens, puppies, five rabbits, thirty-five geese, eighteen turkeys, eighty-seven chickens, 40 tons of tallow, 747 000 nails and 589 women’s petticoats.
What became of the petticoats is lost to history, but by the turn of the nineteenth century there were 203 horses in the colony, and an uncounted number of strays. These soon had a name, a first sign of purely local equine lore. Private James Brumby, of the New South Wales Regiment, was a landholder from 1794. He ran horses, many of which he left behind when he moved on to
pursue fortune in Van Diemen’s Land. ‘Whose horses are they?’ colonists are said to have asked. The answer had an enduring ring: ‘Brumby’s.’
By the turn of the twentieth century there were 1 620 420 horses, more or less, in the new federation. In recent years we have become less particular in the counting. Estimates of Australia’s contemporary horse population swing between 900 000 and 1.8 million, all of which—other than 300 000 or so freewheeling ferals—are engaged in some sort of relationship with humans. About 31 000 thoroughbreds are in training for various feats of athleticism. Others go to pony club—8000 or so in Victoria—work the farm, compete at dressage, showjumping or eventing, keep law and order, hunt, play polo, ferry tourists in slow circles of various CBDs or simply hang out as pets. They are thoroughbreds, standardbreds, Welsh mountain ponies, Appaloosas, palominos, Andalusians, Irish sport horses, Connemaras, Shetlands, Percherons, Criollos, half-Hungarians, Australian stock horses, Arabs, Clydesdales, Hanoverians, barbs, Trakehners and don’t knows.
We treasure—even dote on—their wildness, but we’ve all but bred it out of them, creating an animal that still runs on deep instinct but one that has been engineered over generations to suit our tastes and needs. The resulting bloodlines are narrow, worthy of a royal family. All thoroughbreds, for example, descend from just three eighteenth-century sires: the Byerley Turk, the Darley Arabian and the Godolphin Barb. Every other breed is as profoundly incestuous.
As a result, we have produced a rare population of beasts, animals docile, domesticated and seemingly wilful and untamed. Intellectually unfathomable in some ways, yet capable of extraordinary feats of memory and learning. Able to lash out in confused annoyance, to rear and run away, yet still bend to the arcane subtleties of the dressage arena, or the everyday acquiescence of allowing a saddle, a bridle, a ride.
This is the raw energy we harness when the horse performs, the wild, thoughtless impulse that can also have us pitching, in the instant of a buck or shy, to the ground. It is a tension between the learned and the instinctive that can never be quite resolved, an issue between humans and the horse that can only find its end in mutual trust.
At the Victorian racing industry’s Hall of Fame there is one sight among the rooms of memorabilia, paraphernalia and time-hardened tack that comes close to an illuminating equine revelation. It is the skeleton of Australian racing legend Carbine, a set of bones not all that different from any other thoroughbred’s. The legs are long and fine, the neck arches out in powerful vertebrae the size of bread plates. At the quarters there is a sense of the enveloping mass of muscle and ligament that propels two-thirds of a fleshy tonne at better than 60 kilometres an hour. And there’s the great barrel of ribs, home to a 5- or 6-kilogram heart and lungs big enough to shift 150 litres of air a minute at the walk and 1800 at the gallop.
Which takes us to the head. Big, empty sockets for eyes that are the largest of any land mammal. The ears are just as sharp, capable of hearing at sensitivities above and below the human range.This is a machine designed to do little more than apprehend danger and flee from it at speed.
Somewhere here, too, hard to see, is the tiny cavity that houses the horse’s brain, an organ of no great size or sophistication, one that even lacks the physical attributes that in other species enable imagination, insight, introspection. Or love. It makes a mockery of all the anthropomorphic baggage thrown at this simple creature. It has no will to be ‘broken in’. It could hardly have courage or desire, least of all be thrilled by a race-day crowd roaring its name. It has memory, hunger and a sense of comfort and certainty. For as much as Jungians might single it out as a dream symbol of the higher, inner self, the horse is not a human being. A horse, as Mister Ed once so nimbly put it, is a horse. Of course, of course.
But no less put upon for all of that. Since 1345 BC and Kikkuli, horse master to Suppiluliuma, the Hittite king, we’ve had theories of horsemanship and equitation, theories that have ultimately rested on the horse’s remarkable capacity to submit, through an intricate physical language based on balance, pressure and release, to the demands of its rider. This is the paradox of a beast we idolise as wild, muscular and wilful, but one we insist should turn a balletic piaffe for the sake of Olympic dressage glory if we ask it long and often enough.
The horse in work places its wellbeing almost entirely in the hands of its rider. The lowered head of the horse moving forward on the bit is a perfect example of this utter submission. The horse in this attitude is accepting the presence of the bit in its mouth and—in dressage, for example—will perform the most intricate choreography while barely fluttering a nostril. But the horse in this position is also almost utterly blind to anything ahead of it.
The horse’s eyes provide almost complete 180-degree peripheral coverage, but they also have an inbuilt blind spot to the front. A horse approaching a jump in showjumping will not be able to see that jump for its last stride and will leap out of memory and faith. The horse moving liquidly nose down in dressage can see nothing ahead other than the surface of the arena directly under its nose. It places itself utterly in the hands of the rider, this from an animal whose first instincts are to constantly assess the world for threat and flee from it at an instant. We’ve bred them for supine docility. Trained them all their lives to give so readily.
Simultaneously we’ve made much of their raw power. On the elevated mound behind Melbourne’s floral clock is an imposing statue of Edward VII. The king is mounted, as befits his station, and gazes out from the saddle with an air of calm disdain.
The horse? The horse is beside himself. The head is over-bent in an attempt to avoid the harsh metal of the heavily levered bit. His ears are reversed towards the rider in a gesture of resistance and discomfort. The near foreleg is extended flat-hooved in utter defiance, anchored to the spot, with the offside foreleg raised, ready to stamp with impatience. The great bronze balls of the stallion hang heavy, redolent, on the underside. This is a frozen moment steeped in will, testosterone and dangerous equine energy. And the king? The king is unconcerned, solid in his seat, sceptre in the right hand, double reins loose and looping to the bit in the left.
This is a portrait of control, of mastery over beast and dominion.
As a statement of equine nature it is just a little overstated. The truth, after 6000 years of selective breeding and a dozen conflicting sciences of submission and duty, is little more prosaic, almost ovine.
The horses you see grazing sleepily in the typical agistment paddock are more long-term detainees than free spirits of the plains. The males will be castrated and consequently dull. The whole herd, captives from birth, will show behaviour conditioned almost utterly by their interactions with humans and the degree of distress, trauma or well-fed content that they have brought.
And yet, at a whisper from the grass, at a secret sign from the sky, their minds will shrug off the burden of man and all the ages, and they will run like the wind. Lost in the moment. Almost free.
Island Bream
John Harms
I think of Fraser Island every day.
True.
I am reminded of it each morning by a simple oil painting that hangs on our bathroom wall. Sometimes, when I am riding the kids to get them ready for the day (‘Get your shoes on, have you done your teeth, I’ll get a new toilet roll’), I catch a glimpse of the painting and think of Fraser’s tranquillity, her forget-the-worries-of-the-world isolation, and her beauty.
And I think about Acanthopagrus australis. The bream. A sleek silver fish, oval-ish in shape, a little longer than a school ruler, which zips around, here and there, in the gutters along the beaches of most of Australia.
The painting is of Indian Head, the rocky outcrop up the northern end of the island, on the eastern side, the first real interruption to a wide Pacific beach that stretches for almost 100 kilometres. It was painted, in his naive style, by a mate of mine, PJ, for many years a Mooloolaba dentist, and still going, whose family have enjoyed Fraser for half a century�
��from the 1960s, when all you’d find was a handful of laconic fishermen trying to keep their favourite spots secret.
I first met PJ when I had just enrolled at uni in Brisbane. He didn’t attend as such, I don’t think, it was more that he hung around. He was from the Sunshine Coast, where he spent a happy boyhood surfing until his father, Paul, the dentist at Nambour, realised his third child could only be saved by the brothers at Nudgee College. Off he trudged. As a boarder, PJ learned rugby and indolence.
One of the blessings of varsity and college life is it gives the like-minded a chance to find each other. We were from all over Queensland but each had found our own path to indolence. PJ didn’t live at Union College, with many of us, but he was always at the Rec Club, enjoying the delights of multi-ball pinball (‘Destroy Centaur’), drinking rum and Coke—Bundy, of course—and singing Daddy Cool’s ‘Bom Bom’ with the covers band.
He was a good conversationalist with a wealth of experience. He had many theories. He believed a bloke should only own one pair of shoes. He preferred the ripple-soled golf shoes, which he wore to uni balls at Cloudland, at court appearances, to nightclubs (always thongs to the pub), and on the West Course at Indooroopilly.
I don’t think I knew PJ was studying dentistry until he offered to make Madge, the toothless barmaid at the Royal Exchange in Toowong, a set of dentures. (‘That’d be bonzer, darl.’) I reckon he was in fourth year. Madge, who’d been around, and who knew your school’s order before you got to the bar, was pleased as punch.
I also didn’t know of PJ’s deep affection for Fraser Island. He was one of those students who’d duck off for a surf regularly, but his family often went to Fraser—the whole lot of them besotted by the place—whether the fish were biting or not. They had an old four-wheel drive and they stayed in some ancient shacks.