Moods

by Helen Thomas

  The tough taskmaster schooled Peter and his own grandson Brett in the art of hardscrabble horsemanship required out back and around Charleville. They were lessons both boys, who remain close friends more than three decades later, took to heart. It was while working with his mentor, his mother recalls, that Peter started writing down all he was seeing and hearing about horses, a habit that he has continued through his career.

  ‘He would come home with a pad, making notes about what Frank said,’ Jan, now 80, says. ‘He’d obviously sit there and listen to him talking to some of his owners. He’s always had a great rapport with older people. He’d listen and take in what they said. Rather than look at the modern methods, he’d find out what the old fellows did.’

  In this way Moody learned to shoe a horse, to ride the lead pony and, by the time he was 12, to drive to country racetracks such as Roma and Tambo, the trainer in the passenger seat beside him. It was certainly a welcome distraction from school, which the youngster found boring.

  No one, least of all his mother, was surprised when Moody left after finishing Grade 10 and headed for Sydney with his cousin Alf. The year was 1984 and Moody was 15 – old enough to make the move, and still young enough to believe he could take on the world.

  Brett Cavanough, Frank’s grandson, found them jobs as stablehands at Tulloch Lodge, one of Australia’s leading racing yards. Cavanough remembers that Moody was ready to go south: he was determined, even then, to make a living by working with horses. The pair had already learned an invaluable amount about horses from the senior Cavanough, as well as from Tony Facey, a trainer who was as much at home in the rodeo ring as out mustering brumbies.

  ‘Tony Facey was way before his time,’ Brett Cavanough recalls. ‘He was an exceptional horseman – he would do stuff with horses that people wouldn’t even dream of. He could ride a horse anywhere, do anything with a horse … He knew how to clip a horse. He knew how to tube a horse … And he’d cook your feed and he’d look after you all day. He was like a day care centre for us young blokes that wanted to be horsemen.

  ‘But he’d make you work in the meantime. If he had a job to do, whether it was unloading feed or going to muster cattle, he’d always find a day’s work. And he always made sure you were clean and tidy – you know, you were showered, you had clean clothes. You know, we didn’t go to a dux college to learn about training race horses. We actually worked with them and learned as we went.’

  The teenagers’ excitement about what lay ahead lasted the long trip down the highway from Queensland into New South Wales, from Charleville to Sydney, until their McCafferty’s bus pulled up in Kings Cross under the famous neon Coke sign. Family lore has it that, knowing Peter had a small joint in his pocket, Alf Moody told him the coach was about to be searched by the police – at which the tall and lanky teenager scrambled out the back of the vehicle and dumped the contraband.

  This was just as well, as worse would have befallen Moody if he’d hung on to the ‘smoke’. They were just a few kilometres from their destination, a stable where discipline more rigorous than anything police officers could dish out awaited them. Working as a strapper for T.J. Smith – Sydney’s premier trainer for 33 consecutive years, and the father of Gai Waterhouse, now one of the world’s leading female trainers – meant that Moody’s short-lived walk on the wild side was over before it started.

  Born in 1916 in Jembaicumbene, a tiny hamlet in southern New South Wales, T.J. had been training since he was 25. His first winner was a bush rogue called Bragger; old-timers swear that the young trainer won the horse’s entry fee for his first race at a game of two-up. From the start, Smith had ground-breaking ideas about how to feed and exercise horses; racegoers still refer to the ‘bone and muscle’ appearance of the gallopers, now trained by his daughter, that emerge from Tulloch Lodge in 2016. Smith’s extraordinary list of winners, including 279 Group 1 victories, highlight the impact of his conditioning and training regime. His great champion Tulloch will always be hailed as one of the country’s best thoroughbreds.

  Although the man known as ‘the Little General’ was already dwarfed by the Queensland teenager, Smith was Australia’s towering racing presence, a country kid who mined gold in Sydney and built an empire at the city’s biggest racetrack, Royal Randwick. Here, new and old money ‘played the horses’ and partied; businessmen (and even some women) hobnobbed with everyone from politicians to barely disguised gangsters.

  Peter Moody was aware that getting the chance to work for Smith, not to mention an entrée to this big-city theatre, was the greatest opportunity of his young life. And he made the most of it. While some of the stable lads around him enjoyed the city’s surf-and-turf lifestyle, he put his head down. And kept taking notes.

  Terry Catip, foreman at the time, doesn’t remember the young strapper’s notebooks. Now training in his own right in Warwick, in south-east Queensland, he does recall how Moody was prepared to listen. ‘Some years, you might have 200 kids or even more coming through the place,’ he says. ‘They’re all trying and all looking to do something with their life. But Pete was a little different … He was a little kid growing up to be a man, who wanted to do something with his life.’

  Still, Moody almost pushed Catip too far one morning, when the foreman arrived back at the stables from trackwork earlier than usual. At the time, Moody was caring for – or ‘strapping’ – three horses. ‘He had three boxes – 12A, 12 Back and 12AB,’ Catip says. ‘Those three boxes and two sand yards. So I’m waiting in the sand yard for Pete to come home. He comes through the back gate and he’s got a cream bun stuck in his mouth, with all the cream over his face. In one hand, he’s got a milkshake; in the other hand he’s got two pies and a bread roll.

  ‘I said, “What are you doing?”

  ‘He said, “I was hungry.”

  ‘That’s little kids, you know?’ Catip laughs. ‘All kids do it, all kids do it. So we had a bit of a discussion there. I think I tripped over in the sand yard coming out, and my hand came down over his ear, just by mistake.’

  The new recruit to the star stable copped the rebuke, but not without sulking. ‘He was going to go home,’ he continues. ‘So I said, “Well, if you want to go home and be a train driver, go home and be a train driver.” I said, “If you want to be a horse trainer, get back in your box.”’

  Catip recognised that Moody had ability, not to mention ambition. The young man pestered the foreman to let him have the stable’s good horses to care for. The foreman told him to wait his turn. Eventually, though, he persuaded his legendary boss, T.J. Smith, to let Moody strap a young horse, Lygon Arms, which the stable thought highly of. ‘That was his first [decent] horse,’ Catip remembers.

  With Peter Moody as his strapper, Lygon Arms ran second in the Golden Slipper in 1987, and went on to win a Doncaster Handicap, one of the Australian turf ’s most feted ‘miles’.

  ‘He was a great horse,’ the trainer says. ‘Great horse. He’s buried up the top, as a matter of fact. I brought him home, when I came home. He lived to a good old age. He had a good life.’

  Working as a stablehand wasn’t the only job expected of the ‘best boys’ at Tulloch Lodge. Riding trackwork was also a respected task, and one the young Moody was well suited to – at least mentally. Physically, it was too hard. His naturally tall frame meant being a jockey was just not on the cards.

  ‘He was as big as he is now; he was that big when he was 13,’ Brett Cavanough says. ‘So he was probably always going to be too big to be a horseman anyway. But look, he’s capable around them. He can ride a lead pony and he can lead a race horse, to be fair to him.’

  Moody’s old friend fondly remembers him standing next to jockey Mick Dittman at trackwork one morning at Randwick. Tall and uncharacteristically thin. Skinny, even.

  ‘He was hunted like a roo dog, you know? Ribs hanging out of him,’ Cavanough says. ‘And he’s standing there in a skullcap, alongside Dittman. I said, “How you going, Pete? What are you doing?” He said, “Wha
t do you think I’m doing? I’m riding work.” And he was actually riding race horses [in] work.’

  While working for Tommy Smith, though, Moody was learning an even greater skill: the art of observation.

  ‘You could work for T.J. but you could also watch Bart Cummings, Neville Begg, who I think [was] a magnificent trainer, old Mal Barnes, Les Bridge,’ Moody remembers. ‘It was amazing – you could work for one and learn off seven or eight. And I used to sit down at night and write things out, to try and imprint it in my memory. I’d write down the pedigrees of the horses that I looked after, and their owners, what trainers would do with horses and where they were going. It really interested me [to] study what trainers would do with horses. There wasn’t a day gone by when you wouldn’t learn something. If you wanted to.’

  Moody looked after his three or four horses, and fought hard to keep the best in his care. If one of his favourites came back from the spelling paddock, he would trade another one off to a fellow strapper so he could take it back, as four horses was the limit for each strapper.

  Competition within the ranks to nurture the good horses was fierce; the stablehands took pride in their horses’ achievements. But there was also a financial incentive. ‘There was always a good cash inducement,’ Moody says. ‘You’d get a week’s wages, you know, if you happened to look after a horse that won a race on a Saturday; it was worth an extra week’s wages to you, in cash.’ A midweek winner was worth half a week’s wages.

  And there was more. ‘Every time there was a Group 1 winner in the stable, I think we all used to get $20 or $50. Everyone in the stables – the work riders, casuals, the permanents. So you were really rooting for your horse every time they went to the races!’

  Like all young stablehands working in Sydney at this time, Moody quickly developed a competitive edge, and a strong sense of loyalty. This was the era of the super stables of Australia’s two training legends, Cummings and Smith. If you worked for one of these behemoths, you could have no time for the other.

  ‘You worked for Tommy and you were dirty on the blokes that worked for Bart, or for Brian Mayfield-Smith,’ Moody recalls. ‘It was like a football team. You were a team, and bugger those bastards!’

  But like everyone else growing up near a racetrack, he paid close attention to Bart Cummings’ methods. As the Cups King’s vice-like grip on the Melbourne Cup tightened, the public’s fascination with him intensified.

  Moody’s rapport with horses and his willingness to work hard meant that he quickly stepped up to a more responsible role at Smith’s all-conquering stable, handling several stars as well as his ‘own’ horses. He saddled up outstanding gallopers including Bounding Away, Star Watch, Comely Lass and Chanticleer at the races.

  But Terry Catip’s tough-love approach continued.

  ‘After I’d been there a little while, Terry kicked me in the arse and said, “Get out and get yourself a haircut like a man instead of looking like a lout,”’ Moody remembers. ‘“Because you’re not a lout. Buy yourself a suit and you’re going to the races!”’

  Happily, that sartorial quest was made easy for this lad from the bush. Every payday afternoon, a row of cars would pull up in Bowral Street, out the front of Tulloch Lodge, with bootloads of merchandise for sale: belts, jeans, shirts, shoes, suits, ties – everything a young stablehand might need. If the travelling salesmen didn’t have what was required – a pair of 630 Levis to ride trackwork in, say, or a pair of size nine RM Williams flat-heeled boots – they would be there a week later, on the next payday.

  So Moody bought himself a $25 suit ‘out the back of a car’, and suddenly the 16-year-old two-legged colt from western Queensland was rubbing shoulders with some of the country’s leviathan owners in the mounting yard – after picking up the saddle from the scales room for some of the leading jockeys, ‘because T.J. and [his brother] Ernie never actually saddled the horses’, as he notes.

  ‘I used to go to all the race meetings and I got to see everything. I got to meet a lot of influential people. I got to talk to all the jockeys, [I] probably got the inside knowledge of what was going on. I was listening to the boss talking to the owners. It wasn’t a matter of earwigging; you were there, that was your job, you were standing just behind [them].

  Being so close to racing’s wealthiest owners and best trainers and jockeys made a big impression on the youngster. ‘Here you’ve got the most influential people in Australia – your Kerry Packers, your Bill Ritchies, Sir Tristan Antico, Lloyd Williams, David Hains – standing in a circle with T.J. and Mick Dittman,’ he says. ‘And I’m privy to all this! And then I walk over and leg Mick Dittman on the horse. It was mind-boggling. Unbelievable.’

  While the trainer must have known he was an omnipotent presence to his ragtag young staff, Peter Moody remembers that T.J. nevertheless made an effort to talk to the stable’s new lads.

  ‘Where are you from?’ Smith would ask, spotting a new face.

  ‘Western Queensland, boss.’

  ‘[He’d] always ask questions about you,’ Moody says, ‘and I think he probably had a bit of a feeling for kids from the bush. Probably like himself, you know?’

  Significant, too, were the thoroughbred breeders who mingled with these Sydney turf icons, including New Zealand stalwarts Sir Patrick Hogan and Nelson Chittick. And of course the other side of the racing industry – the city’s so-called ‘underbelly’ – was not far away, at the Coogee Bay Hotel and Giles Gym, and in Kings Cross.

  ‘Owners’ hour’ at Tulloch Lodge, on Sunday mornings, was especially lucrative for keen young strappers, and it also provided an education in the Smith family’s dynamics.

  ‘T.J. would be there at 11,’ Moody recalls. ‘The Rolls would pull up out the front [of the stable], he’d come in. There was champagne and that, and you could bet your bottom dollar T.J. would drive away at one minute past 12, obviously off to lunch somewhere.’

  According to Peter Moody, there was always a little tension between Ernie Smith and his niece, Gai, who by that time was married to bookmaker Robbie Waterhouse. ‘I wouldn’t say nastiness,’ Moody says, ‘but there was always a bit of an angst, because Ernie had his son Sterling and Gai was “the chosen one”, being Tommy’s only daughter, I suppose.’

  Tips were handed out lavishly. ‘Everything was cash: there was always $20 or $50 … You’d go and pull a rug off a horse and pull it out for Bill Ritchie or Sir Tristan … and you might end up with $200 in your pocket [if it] had four or five owners. At the end of the owners’ session, you might end up with [an extra] two weeks’ wages.’ Moody handed most of these tips to Smith’s secretary, who banked it for him.

  After two years working at Tulloch Lodge, Moody was ready for a change. He was only 17 years old but ready to move on in the world. In his mind, he knew everything.

  3

  THE TURNBULL STAKES has a proud legacy, and an honour roll that includes genuine legends of the Australian turf: from The Barb in the 1870s to Eurythmic (1920), Ajax (1938), Bernborough (1946), Rising Fast (1954), Tobin Bronze (1966), Denise’s Joy (1976), Super Impose (1989), Sunline (2001) and Makybe Diva (2005). It is a prestigious event in its own right, as well being an avenue to some of Victoria’s most lucrative races. Run at Flemington in early October, it’s part of the build-up to Victoria’s Spring Carnival, a marker along the path that trainers take as they nurture their horses towards the Caulfield and Melbourne Cups, with the W.S. Cox Plate splitting them by a fortnight.

  If a horse runs well in the Turnbull, history suggests he or she is an elite athlete with the ability to gallop strongly over a middle distance, with a burst of speed – the critical ‘turn of foot’ for which all trainers pray. In the lead-up to the 2000-metre contest in the spring of 2014, Lidari had been showing signs of being precisely this kind of performer.

  Having arrived in Australia at the end of 2012, the new recruit had settled in well at Peter Moody’s Caulfield stables. The turf no doubt felt firmer under his suspect feet, and starting each da
y before sunrise would have been something of a culture shock for the bay. The local food and water probably tasted different too. Nevertheless, he accepted the new exercise and feeding regime with good grace – or the closest he could come to it – and made his Australian debut at Flemington on 13 April 2013. He finished second in a 1600-metre race, and repeated that placing a month later, over 1800 metres at the same track.

  Three months after that, on the last day of August 2013, Lidari broke through for his first win for his new trainer – over 1400 metres at Caulfield, his home track. Winning at his fourth Australian start gave his connections hope for what might lie ahead. They had to wait another seven months for his second victory, which came on 8 March 2014 in the Blamey Stakes at Flemington, although he then floundered in two starts in Sydney’s much-hyped but very wet Autumn Carnival.

  No matter: the spring of 2014 in Melbourne was what Lidari’s team were aiming for, and the horse was given another well-earned paddock break. When he resumed in August with a creditable fifth placing in the Group 2 Lawrence Stakes at Caulfield, it looked like things were going to plan.

  Three starts later, he lined up for the Group 1 Turnbull, in what was certainly his toughest test since arriving in Australia. The field he faced was the real deal, horses on the same path towards both the Cups and, in some cases, the Cox Plate. If the six-year-old stallion was going to be a genuine competitor, he had to perform well here.

  By now fully adjusted to ‘Aussie time’, Lidari was ready to prove he was worth the faith shown in him by his connections two years earlier. And from the moment he jumped in the race, with one of the country’s finest jockeys as his partner, it looked like he was about to do just that.

  Steven Arnold had ridden many top horses in his time, and one champion: Arnold was the jockey who steered So You Think to his great victories in the spring of 2011. One of those wins was their unforgettable partnership in that year’s Cox Plate, that young stallion’s second victory in the premier weight-for-age event in Australasia.