by Helen Thomas
It was a learning experience unlike any other.
That first weekend alone, I watched in dismay as a good 10 kilograms disappeared from Rosie’s frame, dissolving her solid condition into a less impressive, lighter frame. Then the relatively fresh wound became a squirming, thick mass of white as maggots set about cleaning through the puffy, red flesh.
After taking anecdotal advice on how long nature’s little helpers should be left to work the wound, I tried to sluice them off with lukewarm salty water in a syringe a couple of days later, to no effect. On the vet’s advice, I switched to an eye-drop solution, and this did the trick, the curling white throng leaping almost as one from the cavernous chunk of missing flesh once it was dripped in. Within a couple of days of repeating this treatment they were gone, leaving trimmed pink skin in their wake. Clearly healthier, the wound started to close, centimetre by centimetre, and as it did, Rosie’s equilibrium was restored.
Six days after being injured, the filly’s sense of wellbeing was such that she was refusing to accept the antibiotic paste that I had been giving her each morning, which meant it now had to be mixed in powder form into her feed. This became more complicated than it should have been as she and Roxie still shared every meal, no matter how hard Diane and I tried to persuade them to eat from separate feed bins. This meant I had to come up with a crafty manoeuvre, whereby the medicine went into a bucket with a handful of yearling prep and chaff that I held in one hand for Rosie to eagerly gulp down, as I wrestled an indignant Roxie on a lead rope with the other.
The two friends would then share the rest of their breakfast from their feeders. A more experienced horsewoman would no doubt have managed things more smoothly; it certainly wouldn’t have taken as long as it took me every morning. But somehow we got the antibiotics into the right horse every day—job done. Things were looking up.
As much as I was learning about animal husbandry on the run, at some point soon I had to go back to my job managing ABC NewsRadio in Sydney. A decision needed to be made about how best to continue to care for the filly. We decided the only way was to leave the youngsters where they were, in the clean and green front paddock. Even though they weren’t under constant supervision, it was going to be more practical for Diane to check on them daily, rather than move them back to her farm.
With more stock on it, her own pastures were low, her yards dusty and at the height of this harsh summer, that dust could lead to Rosie’s wound getting infected. The vet also advised the paddock at Picayune was the safest place for her to be in, as Rosie could keep moving about freely, using the muscles in her neck to eat grass, gradually strengthening the injured area.
On the morning I was about to make the three-hour drive back to the city, I stood on the hill and watched the wind suddenly change, whipping in from the north and sending spirals of dust across the farm, sending cattle, sheep and horses in a sudden scramble for shelter. And I knew that what we had feared would happen at Diane’s property was about to happen right here, in just a couple of hours. We needed a new plan, fast.
‘We have to put them up in the stable,’ Diane declared, jumping out of her claret-red pick-up truck. ‘It’s the only way to keep that bloody wound clean.’
And for the next month, for most of January and the hottest part of that summer, the two yearlings live side by side in two stalls, safe in the stable on the hill, and my desk job moved to the country. My colleagues adapted with remarkable ease, calling me either very early in the mornings, before I took the fillies out to muck out their stalls and exercise them in the round yard ahead of the day’s heat, or an hour or two later, just after I had fed them and was about to have my own breakfast.
It is a crash course in handling young horses and an equally steep learning curve for the two fillies, as they suddenly had to cope with a more confined life, as if they were in training. As back-breaking and sweaty as it is cleaning out those stalls twice a day, topping them up each time with fresh straw, and as boring as it must have seemed to the fillies, it’s quickly apparent that this enforced regimen is actually a good thing for the three of us.
Certainly it’s introducing them to an environment they will eventually spend a large amount of time in. Had these yearlings been bred and reared commercially, this kind of education would have started as soon as they were weaned from their mothers and they would already have undergone at least one intense round of handling and stable life. They certainly would have spent at least a couple of months doing pretty much the same things as they were doing now, getting ready for the yearling sales, a process that would have been in full swing well before Christmas. But stable life is one thing; taking part in Australia’s yearling sales involves a more intense set of manners and skills. Walking in and out of a stall in a steady fashion is just part of this: youngsters up for sale also have to learn to stand outside that stall—in a nearby walkway specially designed for thoroughbred inspections—sometimes several times a day, while various groups of people look them over.
This is difficult work for such young animals, involving a high degree of emotional pressure for even the most mature and intelligent horses. For the majority, this physically and mentally draining attention can start days before the official sale. With these auctions running over five, sometimes six, days, it’s a process that can wear out even the hardiest souls.
How would these two girls have coped with that, I wonder, as I lunge them in the round yard, literally running them in circles for 15 minutes or so to get a sweat up (not hard in the summer heat), and iron out the kinks from standing in the stalls, night and day. By default, Rosie’s accident has led to a similar ordeal, which should add a positive layer to their overall knowledge and experience.
By the end of the first week, I genuinely appreciate Rosie’s robust character. She has adapted well to living in the stall alongside her equally amenable friend, and she has allowed me to clean and dress her wound each morning with a stoicism that belies her age.
Better still, the wound has begun to close over. Slowly but steadily. She is putting back the weight she had lost and held it, a good sign for sure; she doesn’t look quite the picture of health that stepped off the float a few weeks ago, but her coat is starting to get back some shine.
So I start to think seriously again about what to do next with this strong-minded yearling, as she’s almost through an ordeal that could have flattened her, physically and mentally. Instead, she’s come through it with genuine good grace and humour, so remapping her career path is obviously critical, perhaps even more so than before. Now Rosie has even more catching up to do.
All I have to do now is talk to the trainer who has agreed to take her on—and work out what’s next.
Chapter 7
The big move
At 41, Robbie Griffiths is one of Victoria’s leading horsemen, a former jockey who grew up around horses and took up the challenge of conditioning them after deciding that riding professionally wasn’t working for him. Weight got the better of him, he admits simply. This must have been a challenging change of professional direction, especially as he was an outstanding young rider, winning more than 250 races as an apprentice.
He knew that if he couldn’t ride horses, he had to stay working with them. So he started learning how to train them, working as a foreman with leading Caulfield trainer Tony Vasil before venturing out on his own.
For the past 17 years, Robbie has been building his own training base at Cranbourne, about an hour’s drive south-east of Flemington, Australia’s most famous track. During this time he has made a significant impact in the Victorian training ranks without the benefit of a huge number of horses in his stable, or a handful of wealthy clients to bolster his yard with million dollar purchases every year. And while he is not as well known as Mark Kavanagh, Lee Freedman or Peter Moody, he is certainly regarded as one of Australia’s most respected trainers. According to his profile on the Griffiths Racing website, Robbie’s biggest achievement, to date, has been winning the Group 2
Saab Quality with a horse called Big Pat on Victoria Derby Day in 2003. Three days later, that horse ran a credit-able race in the Melbourne Cup, our greatest staying event. It’s not surprising to read that Robbie’s main ambition remains winning this race.
Given his professional dedication, not to mention the fact that he is currently sitting in sixth position in the Top 10 of the Victorian training ranks, I assume he has more than enough local clients on his books to not need a blow-in from New South Wales like me. I feel fortunate that Robbie’s agreed to take Rosie into his yard.
If all continues to go well wound-wise, she can be tipped out into a paddock on the farm to unwind for a month or so and then head down to Victoria to be broken in around March. After that, the pre-training will start. So we knuckle down for the rest of January, doing all we can to allow the filly to recover as thoroughly as possible.
Eventually I have to return to Sydney, so Diane volunteers to come in every morning, Monday through to Friday, over the next fortnight, to muck out the stalls and feed and exercise Rosie and Roxie. The afternoons are more problematic, as she manages her own farm with horses and has cattle to run, not to mention her family, which includes two teenage sons. To get some extra help in, she organises a neighbour’s teenage son to come over and feed our fillies every evening, their menu instructions written out on a small piece of paper that’s stuck on top of one of the big feed bins. Rosie’s antibiotic powder—still the critical ingredient—is written in red.
It’s not the ideal scenario for either the horses or humans involved, but it is the best we can do short of shifting Rosie to another property, which would knock even more of the stuffing out her. Incredibly everything hangs together over the next ten days. Our swing shift pulls it off.
And on the last Saturday of January, and in searing 42-degree heat, we walk the two fillies down the hill and into the middle paddock that runs along the hill. Diane leads them both, Rosie on her left, Roxie on the right, as I bring up the rear in the four-wheel drive, with Henry the blue-heeler riding in the back seat, so we don’t have to walk back up the hill. As Diane points out, it’s not the weather for that kind of exertion.
True, but I do insist on leading my yearling into the paddock behind her friend and once their lead ropes are unclipped and their halters removed—Rosie’s literally caked with the sweat and blood and tears of the past few weeks—we watch as they canter easily down to the dam and back into the gum trees, as if nothing bad at all had happened here four weeks ago. As if they had never been away. Just the way it should be.
We begin the drive back to town with a sense of exhilaration mingling with relief. We have done it. The bay filly is back on track, almost good to go again.
Diane suggests a detour, her high spirits getting the better of her, not to mention the heat she has really been feeling these past couple of days.
‘I want to show you a house I love that was on the market recently,’ she announces somewhat out of the blue, as we come up to the turn-off to Jinglemoney Road. We had been discussing another property that had been on the market for ages that Diane didn’t like much.
We turn off the main road and head back towards the Shoalhaven River, eventually stopping metres back from the water to gaze at an old farmhouse on the opposite bank. It’s a traditional weatherboard nestling against the river and I can see why my friend likes this particular house so much. But it’s too hot to linger and we start to back the car out along the sandy path. This seems to take longer than usual, as the unbelievably intense heat bears down on us. And the four-wheel drive. Suddenly Diane asks sharply, ‘What’s that smell?’
‘What smell?’ I reply, sensing I’m missing something critical.
‘I think the bloody car’s on fire …’
Both of us look at the bonnet of the four-wheel drive to see a thin wisp of smoke wafting lazily up from under the bonnet.
‘Get out, get back!’ Diane yells, and without knowing quite what is happening, or what we are doing, I throw open the back door and drag the unusually calm blue-heeler off the back seat just as the fire rolls out and up from under my car, lighting the brittle yellow grass in its way.
We stumble backwards, keeping what is fast turning into a horrifying spectacle in view as Diane rings the local fire brigade to give them our location. She then calls her husband.
‘We’re in a bit of strife here,’ she tells him.
She’s not wrong. Flames are lurching from beneath the bonnet, growing longer by the second. For some reason, it occurs to me that the car’s engine is still on and I dash back to pull the keys from the ignition. Minutes later, the first of the car’s tyres explodes like a short thunderclap and a small brush fire is skipping down towards the river—the house we have come to see is directly in its path, just across the water.
We’re in more than a bit of strife.
We back-track to the road, dog in tow, only too aware of how far away we are from the main road into town and careful to keep within sight and sprinting distance of the water. When we eventually stop, because it is just too hot to keep going, Diane sits hugging her knees, talking to the heavens and literally willing the wind not to change.
Bang! The second tyre goes.
Given that she’s been physically suffering from the heat for most of the week, I’m grateful we have managed to stumble this far from the burning four-wheel drive. I try to maintain a pose of outward calm, hands on hips to help keep me standing as I watch the plume of ever darkening smoke rise above the spot where we have left the car.
Bang! The third …
Henry, I suddenly notice, is instinctively smarter than both of us. Not liking the noise and the smell of burning grass that’s enveloping us, but too loyal to head for the safety of the main road, the bluey’s dug a hole under a tall old gum tree and hunkers down against its roots. Clever boy.
Bang! The fourth tyre’s gone, the pillar of smoke rising above the river and trees now a threatening, thick black cloud of smoke.
Diane’s husband arrives with a teenage son, driving his ute like a rally car to reach us.
‘You don’t look too good,’ he yells, as he runs. By the time the first of five fire trucks arrive to bring the blaze under control, the fire has burned across a good hectare of grass and scrub in front of what’s left of my car, right down to the water. It was just waiting for the wind to turn and lift it further. Luckily the old sandy riverbed—living proof of days long gone, when the Shoalhaven used to flood—helps keep the fire in check.
‘Just one of those things that happens on a day like this,’ one of the fireys says, staring at what was the back door of the car. But what happened, I keep asking? What went so wrong to make a reliably sturdy four-wheel drive just burst into flames?
Patiently, the firey tells me: ‘When it’s this hot, a car is just another piece of equipment that can overheat. Maybe a bit of grass got stuck on the exhaust or under the bottom of the car.’ Basically it seems no one will ever really know what triggered the fire, apart from the extremely hot weather conditions.
He gazes at the burnt-out shell. ‘What make was it?’
The fire had been so fierce that my Mazda Tribute is burnt beyond recognition. Astonishingly, lying on the ground just behind the car is a square of lucerne hay, a bit singed around the edges, but basically intact. I had thrown it into the car to tempt Rosie and Roxie if they had been reluctant to leave the stable and needed coaxing down the path to the paddock at Picayune.
This could have been worse, I think, kicking the hay over on its side, so much worse. Sure, the car is a total write-off, and it’s been a frightening, sobering experience, one apparently typical of the relentless, unstoppable summer. But no one is hurt and the fire is out. As the fireys cover the burnt-out shell with foam and metallic-smelling wisps of smoke drift back to us, I realise a strange calm has descended over the still-busy group of fire-fighters. Crisis averted, the fear—and adrenalin rush that comes with it—is also extinguished, though Diane can’t stop talki
ng about what could have happened if the wind had changed.
‘But it didn’t,’ her husband and I keep saying. ‘It didn’t.’
I take three quick shots of the burnt-out wreck with the camera on my mobile phone for visual proof that this ‘act of God’ actually happened. One of the firemen hands us bottles of water and, gratefully, we pour most of it over our heads.
A volunteer State Emergency Service officer drives us back to town, Henry squashed on the floor between the front and back seats. He doesn’t seem to mind. Diane still can’t stop talking, as if she is trying to make sense of what’s happened.
‘You seem calmer than she does,’ the SES officer remarks, looking at me in her rear-vision mirror. ‘Are you OK?’
I only have enough energy left to nod.
‘She’s a journalist,’ Diane replies, apparently explanation enough for my less than chatty state. After the intense excitement and rush of fear I have slipped into the classic journalist ‘observer mode’, carefully noting everything happening around me without reacting. In a way there is not much to say, really—we got out with our lives and Henry intact. Later that night, an unusual exhaustion rolls over me, though I find it impossible to sleep.
And for the next few days, I am intent on finding out what went wrong to get things clear in my own head. But it’s the question no one is able to answer. Several weeks and two independent investigations—one by the car’s insurer, the other by the manufacturer—go by before the matter gets officially wrapped up. The car is too badly burnt for the cause of the fire to be determined.
Yet, shocking as this fiery accident was, what happened to us that hot, hot afternoon on the last Saturday of January 2009 was nothing compared to the tragedy that occurred a week later further down south when the apocalyptic bushfires raged across north-eastern Victoria, killing 187 people.
