The Big Book of Australian Racing Stories

by Jim Haynes

  Bev Buckingham was another pioneer female jockey. She grew up in Tasmania after migrating from England when she was two years old. As well as taking riding lessons, she would help her father, a racehorse trainer, in his stables and at the age of fourteen she became an apprentice jockey under his tutelage.

  Bev had her first race ride in October 1980, just a fortnight after Alison Anderson had made history as the first woman to race against men in Tasmania. On arriving at the Mowbray racecourse, she found that the new facilities for jockeys had not been completed and she had to change into her race gear in a small, unlit room on the construction site.

  A win on her fourth ride at Elwick in 1980, Limit Man, launched Buckingham’s career. By the end of her first season’s racing, she had ridden 22 winners and was ranked ninth overall on the jockey table. With a total of 63 winners in her second season, at the age of seventeen, Buckingham became the first woman in the world to win a state jockeys premiership. Over her eighteen-year career she brought home trophies for the Devonport Cup, the Launceston Cup, the Queen’s Cup, and the Hobart Cup three times—in 1986, 1996 and 1998. In 1984 she became the first woman to ride in the Caulfield Cup. Bev would also become the first female in the southern hemisphere to ride 1000 winners.

  Bev’s riding career ended after a tragic race fall on 30 May 1998 in which she fractured two vertebrae in her neck. She spent three months in rehabilitation in Victoria, before returning to the family’s Tasmanian property, Brigadoon, where she continued an intensive rehabilitation program. Told that she would never walk again, Bev has since proved doctors wrong and has forged a successful career as a horse trainer.

  Pam Baker was another who blazed the trail for female jockeys. As the wife of trainer Rodney Baker, she was allowed to ride her husband’s horses at trackwork, but not in races.

  After a male jockey had ridden a ‘shocker’ on one of Rodney’s horses at Terang in 1971, Pam complained bitterly that she could have done much better. Her husband agreed and said she should ‘do something about it’.

  Pam promptly organised a meeting with Victoria Racing Club secretary Rodney Johnson to ask why women could not ride professionally. Johnson reportedly replied that he didn’t know why, except that ‘no one had ever asked’.

  Pam’s next step was to approach then Victorian Minister for Sport, Brian Dixon. He was sympathetic to her suggestion and, in 1972, apprenticeships were made open to both sexes.

  In an interview with Matt Stewart, in the Herald Sun in 2013, Pam remembered, ‘By the time we got the technical bits out of the way, getting things organised, it took two and a half years.’

  Pam helped to form the Lady Jockey’s Association of Victoria and, when the first professional race for women in Victoria was held at Casterton in August 1974, the association had 45 members and the race was named the ‘Pam Baker Ladies Handicap’.

  In her interview with Matt Stewart, Pam recalled that the ladies had to suffer jibes and trivialising, with names such as ‘jockettes’ being suggested. It appears they were treated as a passing fad by the race club administrators, and the early female jockeys, such as Pam, Liz Albers, June Lossius and even later arrivals on the scene, including the Payne girls, Maree, Therese and Bernadette, had to change in a caravan. They were lucky to even have that! Franklin Caravans had come to the rescue and donated a caravan to the association, which was used for many years around the state as a mobile ‘Ladies Jockeys Room’. It was well into the 1980s before the racing clubs got around to providing decent changerooms for them.

  Pam, who now runs an agistment property near Geelong, told Matt Stewart in 2013, ‘All I wanted was that they be given a chance to compete with the boys—no favours.’

  Fast-forward and the number of female jockeys is now at its peak. Today 25 per cent of jockeys are female, while only fifteen years ago that figure was less that 5 per cent. And those numbers are set to soar with almost 50 per cent of apprenticeships being filled by young women. Female jockeys not only make up half the apprentice workforce, they are at least as successful as the boys.

  Last season, four of the seven state and territory apprentice jockey titles were won by women.

  In today’s racing landscape, female jockeys are competing with great success across all states of Australia, and are making it known that they are not afraid to take on the boys. Jockeys such as Clare Lindop (first Australian female jockey to win a Group 1 race, on Rebel Raider in the VRC Derby, twice winner of the South Australian jockeys premiership, and the first female to ride in the Melbourne Cup), Kathy O’Hara, Linda Meech, Michelle Payne, Christine Puls, Katelyn Mallyon, Holly McKechnie, Winona Costin and Jamie Kah are just a few of the top-class female riders staking their claim on the big city tracks.

  Like the female jockeys before them, they are the still pioneers in an ever-changing landscape, but the road is less rocky these days.

  Penny Hand’s website for all things female in racing is .

  THE DAY THAT IS DEAD

  HARRY ‘THE BREAKER’ MORANT

  Ah, Jack! Time finds us feeble men,

  And all too swift our years have flown.

  The days are different now to then—

  In that time when we rode ten stone.

  The minstrel when his mem’ry goes

  To old times, tunes a doleful lay—

  Comparing modern nags with those

  Which Lee once bred down Bathurst way.

  The type today’s a woeful weed,

  Which lacks the stoutness, strength and bone

  Of horses they were wont to breed

  In those days—when we rode ten stone.

  But all of us remorseless Fate

  O’ertakes, and as the years roll on

  Our saddles carry extra weight,

  And old age mourns the keenness gone.

  The young ones, too—’mong men, I mean—

  Watch not the sires from whom they’ve sprung,

  They nowadays are not so keen

  As when we—and the world—were young.

  They’ve neither nerve nor seat to suit

  The back of Paddy Ryan’s roan—

  That wall-eyed, vicious, bucking brute

  You rode—when you could ride ten stone.

  But, Johnny, ere we ‘go to grass’—

  Ere angel wings are fledged to fly—

  With wine we’ll fill a bumper glass,

  And drink to those good times gone by.

  We’ve had our day—’twill not come back!

  But, comrade mine, this much you’ll own,

  ’Tis something to have had it, Jack—

  That time when we could ride ten stone!

  VALIANT LADY

  JIM BENDRODT

  So you go to the races? You form one of the amazing multitude who follow the Sport of Kings and deadbeats, and all the varied kinds of people in between. Perhaps the siren call of ‘easy money’, the thrill of a close-fought finish, the love of a satin-coated thoroughbred, the performance of a social duty, brings you there.

  Whichever it is, there is one thing I do know, and that is that you who see the gigantic stage, set with its tens of thousands close-packed in colossal grandstands, its glorious flowers, its great green stretches where the cream of the equine world sob their hearts out in a game where only the superlative survive, know little of the work and the thoughts and the hopes and the fears of that band of men who produce the four-legged stars you come to see do battle for fame and fortune.

  Well, I’ll try to tell you why I go to the races. I’ll tell you how I, an owner-trainer who loves a thoroughbred, feel from the time I go with a few hard-won shekels to some famous sale ring, to the moment that my colours flash into sight where the field is bunching far up the home stretch for that heart-stirring, heartbreaking run to a little white line on a little black board, and the eagle eye of a judge from whose decision there is no appeal. And if you love a thoroughbred horse, if you really love them, you can read this, and if you don�
�t—well, read something else, because you won’t be interested, and you won’t understand.

  They’ve come from the four corners of a dozen beautiful pasture lands, from the studs of men who have studied the production of the ultimate in horses for generations. Each of these soft-eyed babies could tell you that his, or her, blood lines could be traced exactly to equine horses who came from their desert homes to Merrie England, along with the fashions Charles the First made à la mode. Believe me! And some of them could speak of ancestors who cropped the grass of Devon when Henry the Eighth displayed his catholic taste in harems.

  A little nervous, more than a trifle frightened, they have come from their lovely homes to this noisy, terrifying saleyard, so that you who have burned the midnight oil studying pedigrees may choose and buy a champion. If you can. Yes, indeed! If you can!

  Hundreds of them, all well bred, all beautiful, or nearly all, but only a meagre handful who will ever become that miracle of speed and courage and stamina that will fling their names in flaunting banners across the sporting pages of a continent.

  For days you study them. Hour after hour, you tramp from stable to stable, comparing, measuring, concentrating, and, curiously enough, it is only at night-time that you know you’re weary. Then, just a few hours before the auctioneer will call the babies forth to face whatever the future may hold for them, you open the door of a box you have not yet entered and there, in a corner, stands a baby filly.

  Now for weeks a colt had been in your mind. You are almost Chinese in your ironclad preference for the male of the species, but here is one little lady you feel you must really have a word with. She is too beautiful to pass by, as you have passed by so many of her sex, because you want a colt. A dark bay, this one—perfect from the points of her tiny black-tipped ears to her almost equally tiny feet. A glorious example of what hundreds of years of careful breeding can produce.

  A long five minutes you study her intently, while she gazes fearlessly and just as intently back at you with her soft dark eyes. There is no fear in those eyes—just a quiet curiosity. Marvellous, you say; small, yes, but still—marvellously perfect, and she will grow—just a baby. But you want a colt, not a filly, and then, just as you turn to go, she takes a step towards you.

  She is curious, or perhaps Fortune smiles, and you stop and call her softly—encouragingly. She comes and lays her muzzle in your outflung hand, and then, as she stretches her glistening neck, her lovely head comes to rest against your own hard face, and so, for a moment, for you and for her, the world stands still.

  And then—well, and then believe me or, as Mr Ripley says, believe me or not, in the quiet of that stable you think you hear a tiny voice say, ‘Buy me! Never mind that colt. Buy me!’ And instantly you tell her, ‘All right, baby, I’ll buy you if I have to bust the bank-roll wide open.’ And that’s a promise! Weeks of study, weeks of tramping, weeks of indecision. Then finality! Just by chance—just like that!

  So you go to the ring, and you wait for her, when for weeks you’ve thought you were going to that ring to wait for a colt, and never did lover wait for sweetheart more anxiously.

  You look round those hundreds of intent faces. You study that close-packed amphitheatre. Tier on tier of keen-eyed men—prince and pauper, stable boy and lord of a million acres, cheek by jowl, shoulder to shoulder, but horsemen all, come to buy a champion if they can. Always that ‘if’ in racing! Will they see what you have seen? How many of them will have picked that soft-eyed filly waiting in her stall for her turn to face the play of Fortune’s wheel? Where will the fall of the auctioneer’s hammer send her? What sort of a master will guide her destiny?

  Well, you made a promise, so you know where she’ll go, if the bank-roll will stand it—if some lord of a million acres doesn’t make your meagre shekels look like the change he uses for car-fare. What if they bid a figure you can’t come up to? But she’s very small. Oh yes, of course, that’s your chance—she’s very small.

  Well then, here she comes, head held proudly like the tiny princess she is, little hoofs hardly seem to touch the velvet turf she steps upon. Eyes wide with bewilderment as she faces that crowded circle of quiet-faced men.

  The auctioneer’s voice drones on and on. Her father did this, her mother that, her brother did this, her sister that. The recounting of the miracles of her forebears comes to an end, and eventually the courteous question is asked, ‘And now, gentlemen, what am I bid?’

  And an optimist says ‘One hundred guineas,’ and the race is on. Once again Fortune smiles. ‘Three hundred and fifty,’ someone calls, and instantly you snap back, ‘Three hundred and seventy-five,’ and there is silence.

  It’s all you’ve got to spend on her. It isn’t much, I know, but you don’t own a million acres. The time will come when you’ll spend ten times as much for just one horse, but you don’t know that then. Quietly you pray that no one says, ‘Four hundred,’ and then, after what seems to you to be intolerable aeons of time, that hammer falls, and she belongs to you.

  Her attendant leads her back to a stall where you are waiting to praise her and pat her, and tell her everything is OK now. And she puts her head in your arms, and rests it there, which is by way of saying, ‘Thank you, master, thank you very much indeed.’

  A small boy, who must lose her now, says sadly, ‘I’ve looked after her, mister, since she was knee-high to a grasshopper. You’ll take care of her?’

  And you say, ‘Sure, son, sure, I’ll take care of her, never doubt it.’

  There is so much to do from that time on. Floats, ships, attendants to take her on the ocean voyage which will bring her to the dockside at which you wait so anxiously. There has been a cyclone. The papers tell you that the ship on which she travels, tied in a narrow stall deep in a stinking hold, is labouring in a welter of furious seas and howling gales. The Storm Gods chose an awkward time to rave and rant. Two days ago those tumbling seas were calm. Has she been hurt? You’ve paid a man to guard her well. Has he done the job you paid him for? Well, you’ll soon know.

  Out of an evil-smelling hold she comes, slung in a crate high above the ship that carried her. Winches rattle, raucous voices spill commands, the crate lands at your feet, and from it, very tired, very sick and very frightened, steps your tiny filly. Wide dark eyes seek yours in that bedlam of shouting stevedores, rattling winches, snarling motors, and your voice is very soft, and your hand is very gentle, as you tell her that she’s home now, that everything at last is as it should be.

  Then, after you’ve rattled and bumped through a great city, in a gigantic vehicle they call a float but which has precious little ‘float’ about it, she is ‘home’. A cool, quiet stable, knee-deep in straw, water, food, and your foreman’s voice: ‘Sure, boss, she’s beautiful, but small, strike me, very small!’

  And you say, ‘Sure! Her grandfather won two Ascot Gold Cups, and her grandmother won the Oaks, and she’ll grow.’

  Then knowing hands probe and delve as the ‘stable’ looks her over, and heads are shaken, and ‘too small’ they say, even if her grandmother won the Oaks with nineteen flaming stone.

  Just for a moment you feel a tiny doubt. Perhaps a colt would have been better. There was that one from Star Sapphire, and then you look again at the weary little mite you’ve gone to so much trouble to get and—shrug your shoulders.

  Your foreman’s eyes have never left you, and he says suddenly, ‘To hell with them, boss. They wouldn’t know a racehorse from a Rocky Mountain goat, but me—well, I’ll be looking after her myself.’ And this, you know, is honour in excelsis.

  ‘She’ll grow,’ you’ve said. Oh, yes, you’ve said it so many times, but she doesn’t grow. And she doesn’t eat, and she doesn’t do any of the things you had figured on. Instead she becomes very ill. You try everything you know—uselessly. That tiny horse is very sick indeed. So you call in the vets to help you. They come, examine, question, shake their heads. No constitution—colitis, that dreaded disease—possibly had it for months—probably ne
ver race—certainly not ‘early’. Still they’ll do the best they can. And you know they will, even if their bills are never paid. That’s racing. And you’ll do your best too. Disappointing? Oh, sure!

  Away in the distance a dream, something or other to do with the Gimcrack Stakes—just a dream—a long way off now—a very long way off. Horses bunched at the turn for that battle down that long home stretch. The thunder of the multitude. A name on the lips of thousands in one long roar of sound—your filly’s name as she battles with the favourite at that vital furlong pole for mastery, and gains it, goes on, spread-eagles the cream of her age—flashes past that little white line against its little black board, and that judge from whose decision there is no appeal—lengths to the good!

  Oh, sure! Just a dream, especially with a weary little horse, despondent and sick, asking to be petted and helped—not trained and harried about for a race a bare six months away.

  Her breeder comes to Sydney. A sportsman, this. He hears the vet’s report and—offers you another horse if you care to send her back. He will give you that Star Sapphire colt you liked so much in her place. You go into your filly’s box to say goodbye, and you go when no one else can see you, because it isn’t an easy thing to do. I mean easy to say goodbye. And then Fortune, who must take care of all horsemen, if they are ever to own a racehorse, smiles again. With that little head pressed against yours, you just can’t do it, and so that night, you tell the quiet man who bred her that you’ll ‘carry on’.

  You go to work. Day after day, week after week, month after month, the treatment continues. But that little filly is very close to those Happy Hunting Grounds to which all good horses go, before she turns the corner. You do just exactly what those clever vets have ordered—special diet, cunning medicines, warmth, care, kindness. Oh yes, lots of kindness. You feed a racehorse oats, or you feed it nitrogenous food of some sort. You have to. No alternative. But you can’t feed this filly oats, or nitrogenous food of any kind. It’s pure poison to her with the malady she has.