In The Man from Snowy River Paterson wrote a description of the Australian stock horse. In it he dwells on the unflinching courage, the enduring toughness, the dextrous tread and the sympathy of the horse to the rider’s goals. Useful, beautiful and brave, they were nearly all gone by the 1930s.
‘The Australian stock horses were sent in their thousands to the British in the Boer War and were used again in World War I. But then the machines took over their work in agriculture, and in war: motorbikes, tractors, utes. To preserve the breed, a loose association formed, and they began by creating a list of characteristics and breeding to it. About forty years later, in 1971, they opened a stud book and decided which horses would be the foundation sires and dams for the breed,’ says Steve.
And then Steve found that one piece of horse heritage was disappearing fast. ‘The seventies saw a crisis in keeping the skills and tradition of the packsaddle: the old saddlers were dying, the handlers and riders were going, the knowledge was disappearing from the landscape,’ he says. Packhorses were used throughout Australia for many years, most particularly in remote regions: the early mailmen used them, as did station hands on their long runs to build and maintain fences, the drovers and of course, the explorers. Steve was utterly hooked. Here was not just the right girl, but for him the right quest: a race against time to preserve a vanishing and precious heritage. Preserving that tradition, they felt, was a job that somebody needed to do. Without committing to the job of saving the packhorse tradition, they decided to learn as much as they could about it from those willing to teach them.
‘As someone who was always looking for adventures and journeys into the bush, in the grander sense, travelling with packhorses into remote places was a perfect fit,’ says Steve. The tradition is a mix of linked skills: saddle design, making and caring for the saddles, packing them with the right things, packing effectively, balancing loads (of up to eighty kilograms per horse), caring for the packhorses, training horses to work together, camping out with horses, planning for safety and managing emergencies.
‘At this time a few of the mountain-cattle families included horse tours in their mix of business and we got involved in riding and working with a Gippsland mountain cattleman, Clive Hodge, of Valencia Creek. Clive held the Moroka Run up on the side of Mount Wellington. He was a hard man, but he was generous with his knowledge of working with horses in the bush. I was like a sponge and probably made a nuisance of myself. Kath and I had some great experiences in those days, before we had kids. We rode the High Country from Kosciuszko to Bunyip with him and learned our lessons the hard way,’ says Steve.
The years flew by. Steve worked as a builder locally, and together Kath and Steve helped out her parents with their trail-riding business. They built a house in Tonimbuk. On meeting the Bairds I felt their song must be a sunlit, steady, simple piano piece in a golden major key. They are neat and elegant, as lovers and riders of horses so often are, and practical. Spilling from their smiles is their spirited warmth and hospitality, their interest in their fellow woman and man and child. But that’s not all their song. These two have lived big lives. Quite early on in their relationship they found that each separate family tradition of getting caught up in larger events had been somehow multiplied in their shared lives. Their story is peppered with dramatic and tragic incidents, and naturally, this only fed Kath’s pre-existing anxiety.
‘Did I tell you about the time,’ says Kath, ‘when we were held up by three men?’
It was 1982, two o’clock in the morning and Kath was pregnant with Lin. She and Steve were driving along the Princes Highway when they saw a car crashed by the side of the road with a young girl in a chiffon dress standing beside a man, who was waving for help. They stopped to help. When they pulled up the young man was revealed as an aggressor. A gun was put to Kath’s head, and, as Steve went to protect her, another gun was swung into Steve’s head with force.
‘It would be so easy to kill you,’ the man yelled, ‘BANG, BANG!’
As she cradled an unsteady and shocked Steve’s bleeding head, Kath was sure they were both going to die.
In fact, the biggest manhunt in Victoria’s history was underway at that moment for these men, who were wanted for rape and theft. There had been no car crash. The car had been smashed up to mimic a car crash and thus attract a Samaritan with a new car in which the criminals could escape.
Kath was forced inside the car, where she discovered three young men, all with injuries. Steve, who had a fractured skull, was thrown in on top of her.
All this violent activity caused the interior car light to come on. The young man closest stared at Kath.
‘Hey,’ he said, leaving Kath amazed at some people’s ability to make small talk no matter the circumstance. ‘Aren’t you Kath Viney?’
The men took the young girl with them, and with her as a hostage, escaped in Kath and Steve’s vehicle. The manhunt would go on for days, but the girl, says Steve, was brave and clever and escaped, following a spur line of trees down to a river. On the other side were the police searching for both her and her abductors. As she walked into the river, a policeman strode in to collect her, lifting her in his arms, a moment caught by the press in what became one of the best photographs of the 1980s.
Steve followed with difficulty as Kath ran from the car and found a farmhouse and help.
She had coped valiantly, but in the long moments of terror by the roadside the anxiety Kath had kept at a distance for so many years returned. There’s no answer to anxiety; it keeps you on the treadmill of trying to find reassurance, and the reassurance only works for a little while, and then you need more. For people living on the land there is no need to invent terrors—such as a carjacking—our loved ones face hazards on the most ordinary of days.
For death to threaten in such a random fashion made all of Kath’s other fears appear even more likely. Kath’s imagination, which had woven together other people’s ideas into performance, was every bit as good at presenting her with nightmare scenarios. This part of our minds—our imagination—partly exists to help us keep our loved ones safe. A wild imagination can work magic in the arts and make us the most intuitive of friends. In the everyday world a wild imagination in overdrive can flood the body with an ugly cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol and make us ill. Kath fought back against anxiety by immersing herself in motherhood, the horses, the Tonimbuk community, and, at that time, it worked for her. Lin was born, then Clay. Kath saw in each boy’s birth an opportunity for the family—the whole family—to grow closer. She transformed the arrival of her babies into a whole-family show in her own home, aided and abetted by her doctor.
‘I said to Mum, “I want you to be with me.” She was very anxious about that, and I persuaded Dad, too. I said, “Come on, Dad, you can do it!” I had a midwife and a doctor—it was a responsible homebirth—and the doctor had been to university with my dad, which was so serendipitous. He said to Dad, “You didn’t see your own children born. You’d love this.” I held Dad’s hand as Lin was born, my first, he turned his head and he was looking right at my dad. I remember just glancing at my dad and he was crying. He had tears streaming down his face, but he was smiling. It was pretty special.’
Kath and Steve grew shared skills in riding, packsaddling, business management and running tourism—but as Kath’s skills and confidence grew, she and her father agreed less and less. In particular, they could not agree about something of great value to both of them: the management of horses.
‘They were too alike,’ says Steve. The prospect of losing again the warmth of the relationship she had rebuilt with her father was not something Kath could bear. ‘Kath decided the best thing she could do to preserve her relationship with her dad was to move away, and make a new life elsewhere. We decided then that we would preserve the packsaddle tradition and take people into the High Country,’ says Steve. In 1986 they left the forested-in farm and their home in Tonimbuk for the open high plains of the Alps.
‘I did
a quick road trip with my mate Andrew in an old Toyota driving right up through western Queensland calling into old saddleries and buying bush gear and saddles. We got some war surplus packsaddles that saddler Harry Downs had stored in pig fat,’ says Steve.
With this recently purchased tack and gear, a truckload of horses and two little boys, Kath and Steve set off for their new life. They rented land and a small cottage and, having purchased the goodwill of the previous operator and her riding business licence, established their tour company, Bogong Horseback Adventures.
In 1987, a year after she and Steve had moved to the Kiewa Valley, Kath’s dad was killed tragically and unexpectedly in a horse-riding accident.
‘When Dad died so suddenly, I was just so grateful that a few weeks before I’d given him a hug and told him I loved him. It was at my sister’s wedding.
‘I said to him, “Thanks for holding the service up so we could be here,” and he said, “That’s okay, that’s okay.” I hugged him and I said, “I really love you, Dad.” I’ll never forget it. He put his arm on my back and he just patted my back and said, “Oh yes, yes, yes,”’ Kath says, imitating her father’s tone, of a person deeply touched but determined to contain their emotions.
‘He always treated me like I was the emotional one, the one who was too sensitive, the one who didn’t finish school. After he died, I remember thinking, “I’m going to say that more.” I promised myself I would say “I love you” to my boys every day.’ And she does. ‘Mum always said to me: “You were the one in this family, Kathleen, who built on family, on your own need for strength in family—not many daughters would let their father be there for the birth of their children.”
‘She said: “I’ll forever be grateful to you for letting me be so close to your children.” And it was very important for her to have her grandchildren in her life after Dad died. Lin was six and Clay was four. Her involvement with them kept her going.’
After her father died Kath’s anxiety became more aggressive.
‘Of course, Kath’s dad died unexpectedly just as we were starting our business and I was away for days and weeks in the mountains, riding horses in the same kind of environment,’ says Steve.
Kath began to have frequent panic attacks. This neat phrase belies the ugliness of being so anxiety-racked that your body systems react as if your world is ending in anguish and torment. When the attack subsides you are left feeling unfit for the business of living. But Kath refused to surrender to fear, and continued on the path she and Steve had planned—preserving the packsaddle tradition, opening up their lives to enrich other people’s, helping other people find a connection to horses and to land.
‘Connecting with the High Country is something that just happens,’ says Kath. ‘It doesn’t grow on you, it hits you in the face. People fall totally in love with this landscape: it speaks to something really deep in us. The Indigenous people felt this, too, and to connect with land is something not only Indigenous people do. That connection is something that happens to any human being.’
So despite the agony of her anxiety and despite the difficulties of a pioneering lifestyle in their tiny, freezing house, Kath believed that the right thing to do was to keep going as they were.
Kath had finally brought her trichotillomania under control. ‘I hid the affliction for years from Steve,’ she says, ‘and one day when I was quite bad I blurted it out in an ashamed emotional way, Steve hugged me and said, “I don’t care, Kath, I will love you if you have no hair at all!” and from that day on I started to heal.’ But she was determined nothing like that would occur in her sons’ lives. When Lin and Clay went to school, they were creative, artistic, sensitive and adventurous. ‘I could see when they were starting to have the same kinds of difficulties I did, and I was down there, talking to the school.’ Finally Kath’s own trials at school were something she could really value. With understanding for how her parents had been fettered by the time period, Kath did her best to set aside her own generation’s prejudices in child rearing. Painful experiences as a child often create a very good parent. Such parents remember how very lonely children can feel, how ashamed, how powerless—how very hard childhood and adolescence can be.
In 1988 Kath and Steve pulled together the wherewithal to begin paying for the little property adjacent to where they were living: Spring Spur. Together they embarked on breeding their own horses, horses that would thrive in high altitudes, had the temperament for packsaddle work and for people, for working as a team. In other words, a special brand of Australian stock horse. Kath and Steve shared all roles in a balanced partnership: making up provisions, caring for Lin and Clay, maintaining the homestead, teaching and caring for trainees, managing their stables and conducting the tours. In the spring, summer and autumn Steve took horses and people into the Alps and was away with them for days at a time. In the winter months, when ‘up top’ is covered in snow, Steve was away for even longer stretches, conducting tours for the Diamantina Touring Company in Central Australia and the Western Desert, making the extra cash the family needed. To his notebooks he added sketches of clay pans, salt lakes, abandoned objects and desert plants that cunningly gather and fiercely protect their water.
His feeling of being with Kath endured on those long journeys, and it continues to do so.
‘You can be with someone who is not there. In the afternoon, even though I’m with a group of riders, I might just drift away with my horse and be alone for two or three hours, but I’m not really alone. Solitude is something I enjoy—long drives on my own, or astride my horse rhythmically travelling across country. In fact, I need and value that solitude—but I’m not really ever alone.’
He is referring again to his extended sense of self of which Kath is part. For Kath, solitude is not so enjoyable. Thinking of another person in their absence quickly leads the person with anxiety to worry for their welfare. A person’s physical presence is what reassures Kath: seeing, touching, talking to, learning about, feeding, telling that person she loves them.
She is very much the same with her horses and dogs. Watching horses nose-to-tail, both surrendered to sleep, hearing the beat of her dog’s happy tail upon the floor, enjoying the mad playful early-morning gallop to the water trough, the way an animal leans into her scratching hand or gazes at her: all of this is deeply reassuring for Kath. So in addition to her interest in finding better ways to care for people, she is also always looking for new ways to care for these other companions, too. She found both in a revolutionary, innovative method of handling horses.
‘In 1990 we saw an advertisement in the paper that read, “Do you have a problem horse?” Below the question was advertised a clinic with one of Australia’s best-known teachers of Natural Horsemanship, Wayne Banney. I said to Steve: “Do we have a problem horse? We will need a truck!”’ Kath and Steve were captivated by what Wayne said, becoming early adopters (and sharers) of thinking and handling techniques which respect horse psychology. ‘It’s taken off like mad now, of course. The only part of the horse industry holding out against it is the racing industry,’ says Kath.
Understanding animal psychology better is one of the most powerful and little-known new ‘technologies’ in Australian agriculture. Its power was first demonstrated with horses, but the same way of thinking applies to many different species. To begin with, Kath says, horses are herd animals, and they are also prey animals.
‘People are the horses’ predators. Their eyes are at the side of their heads; ours are in front.’ She is making the point that humans immediately convey their predator status to horses—and that we have to work hard to convey that we don’t wish to eat the horse but instead are worthy of being trusted. The ability to empathise with the horse is key. From Wayne Banney, Kath and Steve discovered that what frequently creates ‘problem horses’ is miscommunication between human and horse.
‘We as humans need to understand their language, not vice versa,’ says Kath. When you understand what they are feeling, when you can r
espond in that same language, when you are utterly consistent, then, and only then, can a horse trust you and relax into doing as you direct.’
Even before instituting training techniques based on horse psychology, Kath and Steve were proud of their horses. Each horse is part of the intergenerational pageant of the re-created Australian stock horse. Their foundation sire, Inca Gold, was leased from a friend. In his veins ran the blood of four of the fourteen foundation sires listed in the stud book created in the 1970s—including the renowned blood lines of Radium and Bobbie Bruce, all exemplars of the breed.
There is another heritage that the Bairds have also bred into their horses.
‘The brumbies are part of the Australian stock horse story anyway. Some graziers used up top for grazing—which doesn’t occur now—but back then they always kept an eye on these herds. They’d turn out one of their own stallions to run in with them over summer and improve the breeding. They would muster them and run them through the yards, cull anything that looked inbred. They might capture and break in a particularly good-looking filly,’ says Steve. ‘During World War I, breaking in and selling these horses was a profitable second income.
‘Recently, through the noughties drought, the government used salt baits to trap the brumbies. Horses will go a long way for salt and there’s not much in these mountains. The trap yards were cleared daily, then the horses were kept in our yards down in the valley until they were collected by the Brumby Association for training and sale. Among those horses there was one beautiful mare …’ So some of the horses working in Bogong Horseback Adventures are cousins to the wild brumbies on the mountains.
Love In a Sunburnt Country Page 15
