At the hotel, behind the bar, Suzie the publican checked me in. On the phone prior, she’d already told me they had a ‘pub kelpie’ and my two dogs would be more than welcome with him.
‘Rosco’s upstairs,’ Suzie said of her Casterton-bred black-and-tan ten-month-old. ‘He refuses to go into his pen, so your dogs can have it.’
After she led me through a pretty beer garden at the back of the hotel, Suzie showed me the tall wire fence and convenient two kennels on offer. Fancy. I promptly shut ‘the kids’ in, promising I’d be back to feed and water them soon. It was dark and late, so I quickly unpacked my ute, taking bags up the rickety stairs to my room. They were stairs on which my daughter, a few years back, had seen the ghost of a little girl sitting. As I went back downstairs I said hello to the ghost as I passed and went to ferret out the food for the kelpies. My ute was parked out the front of the classic two-storey sandstone hotel, and as I gathered up dog food and bowls and set off around the corner, in the darkness I realised I was being followed by two black dogs. I thought to myself it was a bit irresponsible to have dogs on the loose this time of night, but it was a country town and folks were permitted to be more casual here than in larger towns. From beneath the dim glow of one solitary street lamp I saw an overexcited tail wagging and thought that was a bit of an excessive way to greet a stranger . . . Then I realised they were my dogs!
Apparently Connie had dug under the gate and Rousie had made the most of his clever mate’s great escape. When I went back into the bar Suzie told me Connie had ventured in and made herself at home, saying hi to the blokes playing Eight Ball. Upstairs Rosco had been so excited to see his own mirrored kind in the shape of two black-and-tan kelpies like him out on the street below that he had squeezed through the fire escape stair railing and climbed onto the pub roof to get a better look! If the first night was anything to go by, I was in for one hell of a perfect holiday. A five-night package tour of Bali couldn’t even come close to this! It was my kind of adventure.
The next day I discovered the rodeo yards were a convoluted maze of old wooden railing with few gates, so the wonderful physical exercise of climbing high fences was now included on my holiday package – gym in the form of heavy water buckets and high top rails. My horses whickered to me when I showed up bright and early for day one of the clinic. I spent my time meeting the other girls, shovelling horse poop and dishing out breakfast for Archie and little Gemma.
As I looked up to the rodeo commentator’s stand, empty and silent for now, it seemed ironic and poignant to be holding Carlos’s clinic in a rodeo ground. Carlos is the ultimate in speaking up for kindness to horses. While I’ve loved my fair share of rodeos in my youth, as I travel further down the road of life, my empathy dial has turned itself up so many notches that what I could stomach in my younger days I simply can’t now. I’d found myself ‘gentling’ lately and not being able to watch horseracing or rodeo without a cringe and a twinge of remorse for the animals amongst them who don’t enjoy it. Trust me, I’ve been to Calgary Stampede in my early twenties and seen the broncs bred to buck, ears forward, pumped up and loving it. I’ve been to the bull-riding beer garden at the Great Western Hotel in Rockhampton and cheered the bulls on to a blaring Garth Brooks soundtrack. I saw they were bulls who were well trained and comfortable in their role, so I’m not going to go all-out ‘animal libber’ on you. I’ve led proud racehorses in the mounting yard at race meets for my lifelong best friend and felt the energy of horses that wanted to be there and those that didn’t. I’ve been in stock camps with branding fires and irons in coals. But motherhood and my farm eviction has utterly changed me, and I think finding Carlos as an instructor was all part of this new path to more nurturing ways.
My goal for the five days was to learn how to transition to be a bitless rider – something Carlos specialises in. In fact, as I discovered, all the women there rode their horses bitless. No metal in mouths for these happy horses! Carlos Tabernaberri has to be charming – he’s bucking the system of the horse industry across all disciplines, including dressage, western, show and pleasure. He has a life commitment to freeing horses from the chains of human misunderstanding and he needs all that Latino charm and a dash of masculine steel to get him past the closed mindsets of humans . . . especially competitive ones where prestige, ego and money are tangled up in the horses they own. I found him to be a very smart man and, above all, kind. Plus he sounds really cool, with his Spanish roll to his words. Even after five days I was not tired of listening to him. And we women weren’t tired of ribbing him for his inflections. He bore our Aussie piss-taking with such good grace.
‘Don’t let the looks fool you,’ he says to top-end dressage people who may judge him for his cowboy attire. They are seeking answers from him to address for high-energy glossy Grand Prix horses who can’t walk from the stables to the arena without a major mental meltdown. His horse language and his willingness to speak it plainly, and impart it to others, means he’s hired by the jodhpur-wearing best all around the world. The stories that unfolded from his full, sunscreen-protected lips over those five days were incredible to hear.
We’d be riding along and someone would mention the summer heat.
‘Oh, this is not as hot as when I was riding for a week in the Pakistan desert,’ Carlos would chip in casually.
Next he would incidentally mention how he would be heading to England soon to help out some friends of the Queen with their horses. Or he would suddenly tell goosebump-raising stories about the Native American women who had seen him on one of their vision quests and had tracked him down, inviting him to the Apache Indian Reservation to help the Native Americans reconnect with their horses the natural way. Then during the course of his instruction he’d throw in a casual reference to the healing and rehabilitation horse clinics he offered for the inmates of an Idaho prison with whom he had once worked. There he spoke of men who had been stripped of their identity and their hope. The former racing thoroughbreds that they retrained were reflecting the very same plight of the hardcore criminals who were essentially deeply frightened, lonely men – like the horses – locked in a system with no escape. Carlos also did brilliant Little Britain impersonations from the hilarious TV show, so he wasn’t one to be ‘on show’ as a cool horseman. He was also a wag.
For me, having lived for a time astride horses daily, married into a family of Gippsland mountain cattlemen, I learned that no matter how many hours I had done in the saddle, it didn’t make me a better horsewoman. I wanted to delve deeper and work on not just my horse, but myself as a rider and a person. Not to gain ribbons or climb social ladders, but simply because I love my animals like I love my own children.
Carlos Tabernaberri weaves wisdom from author Kahlil Gibran and philosophies of Buddhism into training. In his beaut book Through the Eyes of the Horse, he says, ‘Having success with horses doesn’t depend on how long you’ve been around them – horses don’t read resumes. I may be a fourth-generation horseman, but all I could learn from the generations before, if I wanted, was the traditional way of doing things. I knew I wanted to do things differently – to let the horses teach me. I learn from every horse I work with, and I never stop learning.’ It was with this quote that I found myself gaining more and more confidence in myself and my horse. The more I unravel what is false about myself, the stronger I become and the clearer I am with Archie.
By the end of day one of the clinic we were all riding around the rodeo ground amidst summertime dust and the haze of bushfires on our horses bareback in just halters. By day two, we rode out, not one single bit or whip between us, and off we went down the leafy, busy main street of the pretty historic village of Ross in peak tourist season. We pulled up outside the pub and Suzie and her partner Scott brought us drinks. It was wonderful to see all the horses calm after we’d worked on them that morning to create trust. Rosco the pub dog came out to meet his first ever horse. My beautiful boy Archie calmly dipped his head and let the dog sniff his muzzle. Then one by
one we took turns using the old sandstone mounting block outside the old hall that probably hadn’t been used in decades to elegantly help a lady rider upon her horse, or a drunken gentleman. People stopped and took photos. People smiled. People chatted to us and each other. Horses in modern society are great for the soul.
That night, the horses yarded, that same pub became the meeting place for the whole bunch of us in the beer garden, laughing our heads off like cackling hens, Carlos laughing with us. At our feet the three kelpies romped and at one stage Rosco made off with someone’s cap and raced into the bar. By day four, we were cantering on loose reins and forming friendships with each other that I knew would last for a lot longer than just the clinic. By day five we were all out there on that summer-hazed hill with Carlos.
I still have a long road to go towards being a better human for my horse, and my days crammed with raising kids and writing work means it’s rare I find time to ride, but at least Carlos has given me the tools to set myself straight before I go near my horse. If we live by letting go, it gives us greater freedom to really fly high. People hang on to horses’ reins and pull on the bits in their mouths because we are the ones with the control issues.
As I sat looking out from that hill, seeing the overgrazed dry land of Ross, I realised I had work to do, but for now, I needed to stop and rest from my quest in changing the mindsets of farmers. On that horse, I looked within. There was a sensation I’d been avoiding. One that was so unfamiliar that it felt scary to face. I realised in that moment, riding my horse bitless and blissful across a paddock with a bunch of newfound mates . . . I was happy and relaxed. Truly the happiest I’d been in a long, long time. I had let go. And in doing so I had found likeminded women who were all ready to support me and each other in being the best we could be as humans, for our horses and ourselves. My sun-blistered lips, unkissed as they remain, have been smiling ever since at what is ahead of me in the future as a horsewoman.
On our most recent road trip from south to north to catch the ferry, the kids and I drove through a drought-gripped Tasmania. It was a landscape in crisis. As we travelled up the winding ‘Mud Walls’ road, the ute was sideswiped by savage dust storms – yes, dust storms in Tasmania! People think of our island as green. Back in the day when Indigenous people held the land’s honour in their hearts and respected it, it probably was green, but today the landscape is corpse-yellow and scabby brown. There were giant curtains of topsoil eddying away in the sky to the east. Mobs of scraggly maiden ewes were staggering through open gates on bare brown earth looking as if they would topple over with another strong gust. In their midst tottered an even skinnier ram looking as far from virile as any ram could get.
‘I can’t look at it, Mum,’ my son said, averting his eyes away from the landscape. ‘I wish more people understood you can do it another way.’
My stomach turned too for the animals and the land. I knew the horror of the forced pregnancies those emaciated young sheep would endure over a harsh Tasmanian winter, when rain would bring a tinge of feeble green, incapable of sustaining stock. It would be a miracle if the poor ram and his maidens could reproduce at all under such conditions. Why put a ram like that out with the girls onto such exhausted soils in the first place? Was it greed for the next drop of lambs? Was it ignorance? Was it just because we keep doing the same things over and over, because we think the same programmed thoughts daily over and over? The management of most of our farms and urban landscapes is clearly not working but we keep doing the same thing and hope for a different result.
In my lifetime, I’ve been witness to the slow demise of our state’s farmland. People blame it on lack of rain, but I hope now you will see it’s not a lack of precipitation. It’s a lack of awareness, and an inability to see with unblinkered eyes. The Australian landscape wasn’t always this way. It’s been caused by the land management of people over five or six generations who were doing their best, and doing what they thought was right. I am one of many people around the world who are speaking on behalf of the life of the soil, that ought to be nurtured by natural manures and tended to by caretakers, instead of raped and poisoned by modern techniques. It is of utmost importance to our very survival. It’s more than just finding more sophisticated agricultural methods that make corporations rich . . . it’s about actually feeling the life of the soil and hearing your own soul speak. And it’s about consumers boycotting the big company players who don’t nurture our planet. That is when real change will occur.
‘When we get a farm again, Mum,’ my son said, ‘I’m going to run the land like Colin Seis does.’
I smiled, a little sadly. A farm. Oh, for another farm in a new place! I knew our visit to Colin Seis’s property was etched in my boy’s mind and within his young man’s heart. Col’s farm was not just a benchmark of ecological beauty, but of what is possible for the future of farming. My son could see that. When he is at home begging me for more ‘outside jobs’ when there are none, he turns to the internet to seek out information about other farmers who use regenerative techniques. With such a keen young steward of the land, I know there is hope for the future. But for many of us adults without the plasticity, purity and clarity of a young person’s mind, open-mindedness and adapting to change is not so easy. Often it takes a crisis, a big life-dumping crunch, to find our diamonds within.
As the kids and kelpies queued with me at Devonport in lines of cars, utes and bikes waiting to board the ferry to the ‘mainland’, I saw how detached we were from nature. Life for most of us there was plush. There were rows and rows of shiny fancypants gigantic caravans with satellite dishes, solar power and signage that read ‘The great Australian adventure’. It didn’t look like adventuring to me. But because of media conditioning we travel these journeys of life in this way without question. Like the crowd at the cricket, we all flow where we are told to flow. To hardware stores and supermarkets, to theme-park holidays and appliance stores. Do we really need all this stuff? Does it all need to be bigger and better? Bigger houses? Bigger caravans? Bigger ag machinery? Bigger farms owned by bigger corporations? Bigger irrigation schemes? Bigger-sized animals? Do we really need to keep doing the things we do when we innately know it is failing? Failing awfully.
The next morning, still rocking from our Bass Strait bashing, we made our way out of the belly of the boat, along the ever-increasingly wide freeways out of Melbourne towards Ballarat for breakfast, catching up with an old mate, a rodeo clown and clown in general called Kelpie, then on to Hamilton. Full of pancakes, in a rain haze, my little boy was sitting in the front seat of my ute with his head bent over my iPhone, trying to plot a course to dog school at Ian O’Connell’s, near Hamilton. He ignored the physical signs at the roundabouts that pointed us to our destination, and insisted on adhering to the computer version that took us on the shortest route. I let him make that call, knowing there would be lessons to be learned. We found ourselves travelling on a back road, the computer taking us the shorter but slower way as we dog-legged across soldier settlement patchwork farms and bumped along a sometimes single bitumen strip. As the fuel gauge got lower and the phone signal weaker, I wanted my darling, curious boy to learn that technology will fail us every time if we rely on it solely. When we depend on it so heavily, we lose our own senses, and as a society, I believe we are losing our senses. We are falling into screens like when Alice in Wonderland fell down the rabbit hole, and we are forgetting to really see the world around us. It will be a crisis that will wake us all up, like a slap in the face, when the systems crash.
It’s not just navigation systems where technologies are befuddling us, but also agricultural systems. We farmers look at data and apps on phones to monitor the land on which we stand. We log into software programs on our home computers to monitor irrigation flow, weather, manage animals, calculate fertiliser and sowing rates and finances and commodity prices, and yes they help us make decisions, but are we losing the feminine art of feeling the land, truly sensing what it says to us in slo
w cycles and seasons. By focusing entirely on technology, we lose focus on what’s real: soil, water, air, trees, food, connectivity between living things and, above all, love. Yes, love. It is the touchstone to everything.
To teach my kids that smartphones aren’t the only way to navigate, I’d bought us a paper map of the state of Victoria. When unfolded it caught in the wind from the opened window and it wrapped my son up like a gift. After laughing and wrestling his paper map into order, I could see his face turned to the landscape more often than it had been when he was on the phone. He was now looking outwards for signs in the landscape. So much better than a screen! He was also not just seeking signs on metal poles to tell us which road to take, but he was also reading the landscape in the way I had taught him.
He, like his sister, now sees overgrazing and erosion, and knows the answers for how to counter that. Everywhere we travel he sees what the roadside vegetation looks like compared to what’s in the paddocks. He can see where councils have sprayed and when stock don’t have enough diversity in their diet. He knows tiny creatures by the billion exist beneath his mini-man farm boots and that unless we give them a rich life, we can’t have a rich life either. He knows that the way us whitefellas see the world is not the only way. I showed him and his sister how people from our culture place grids across the earth. Straight lines drawn with rulers, overlaying the landscape of cities, states, parks and farms. Land divided with straight fences and lines and more lines. This is how most of us think too – in straight lines. As a contrast I reminded the kids of the map of the 250 Aboriginal nations we’d recently seen on a documentary. That map had flexible borders that squiggled over the entire continent, following rivers, creeks, gullies, mountain ranges and ridge lines. There was not one straight line on that map. Those ancient peoples farmed the continent with no fences and they lived within the landscape, not imposed upon it as we do. We are so used seeing the world our way that we have forgotten how to read the signs the land is giving us that She is in trouble.
Down the Dirt Roads Page 22