Life with Rosie

By Helen Thomas

Life with Rosie chronicles a young racehorse's life as she's broken in, brought into the stable and introduced to her new world; her trainer Robbie Griffiths, the strappers, early morning track work, exercise riders, walking machines, feeding regimes, jockeys and barrier training.

She was born in the wind, on a farm not too far from home, and on an unusually warm Sunday morning. In no time at all, we saw that this was a foal who wouldn't need much nudging, or urging, or hurrying along. Within half an hour, she was up and tottering across the straw on unsteady pirate's legs, making her way straight for the safety webbing, even before she had taken her first all-important gulp of milk. Her already steady gaze taking in her new world. And so life with Rosie began.'

Helen Thomas has long had a passion for race horses. As a teenager, her first high school overlooked Melbourne's most picturesque racecourse; she clipped tales of racing courage from the newspapers and dreamt of being part of the racing world. When she finally becomes the proud owner of Poetic Waters, the broodmare repays her leap of faith with a little foal called Rosie. A foal Helen hopes will one day make the grade as a race horse. But it's a tough, winding road from paddock to track and, despite the attention of stellar trainer Robbie Griffiths, Rosie's trek is marked by frustration as much as triumph.

Life With Rosie charts the blossoming of a young thoroughbred - and Helen's rite of passage as one of thousands of owners across Australia hoping that all the hard work, and just a little bit of luck, will lead her horse to racetrack success.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pier 9
• Release date: Sep 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781742662930

Book preview

Preface

It was, the regulars agreed, like nothing they had ever seen before.

Thousands of people were standing right alongside them, press-ing six and seven deep as they vied for the best vantage spots at this most prestigious of Sydney venues. Most of these strangers had never even been here before and would probably, hopefully, never return. Cheerfully impatient, noisy and completely out of place, they had eyes only for one on this mild autumn afternoon. And who could blame them?

Right from the start, even as a baby, he had been the talk of the town, his presence hugely anticipated long before his arrival, his softly handsome looks and gentle personality much discussed even by those who had never actually seen him.

This was hardly surprising. His birth, at 3.16 am on 17 August 2007, was announced in every major Australian newspaper and relayed around the world within minutes on the internet, with words like ‘strapping’ and ‘impressive’ used to describe all of his 47 kilograms.

His mother, one representative reported, was ‘as proud as Lucifer’ immediately after delivery, and had herself performed admirably. Nothing less had been expected, given what everyone knew she could do and had done in the past. But there was always a niggling concern that this, her first pregnancy, could be complicated. A feeling any family would understand, given the circumstance.

But this was the very best of families, so every possible scenario was mapped out well ahead of time, every contingency worked through in case something did go amiss. In the end, all went according to nature’s plan, and mother and son did well. And as he started his life on the picture-perfect property in the famous Hunter Valley in New South Wales, he was carefully shielded from prying eyes for as long as possible, to allow his famous mother to nurture him calmly in pristine surroundings, and to encourage him to grow at his own pace, untroubled by the expectations of the world outside the manicured pastures.

There was even a media deal in place to ensure only one outlet had the right to capture his and his mother’s images. Little wonder the team that watched his every move, noting every step, certainly every scratch and scrape, nicknamed him Rock Star.

As he grew into his gangly body, this team had gradually relinquished their hold on the light-framed youngster, only for others to take over in his education and care. And now, on this autumn afternoon in Sydney, all their work was coming to fruition, and the next chapter of his already extraordinary life was set to start.

As he walked into clear public view for the first time, a ripple of excitement ran through the thousands-strong crowd, and those who weren’t at the front of the throng gazed enviously at the hundred or so seated around the arena he was heading towards. ‘Standing room only,’ one old timer remarked to a companion, as they tried to edge their way closer to one of the overhead monitors to watch this debut. ‘And we’re doing the standing.’

But at least they could see him, if from a distance, and as he stepped into the main ring, a naturally lit circle of fame, for the next few minutes he was theirs. Public property for all to admire, right there for the taking, as some of the wealthiest, most astute schools fought to make him their own and take him home. For this flashy young thoroughbred, deep bay in colour with a slightly crooked white blaze running down his nose and four white socks on his legs, represented the finest blend of equine blood at Australasia’s 2009 Easter Yearling Sale—a son of an exceptional English-bred stayer called Galileo and, even more spectacularly, the first born of the great mare Makybe Diva, winner of three consecutive Melbourne Cups and $14.5 million in prize money.

As it happened, this particular youngster wasn’t only a publicist’s dream on paper; he actually looked the part, a natural-born show stopper, almost an artist’s impression of a pretty young horse. Too pretty, some experts would mutter later, a ‘softie’ in body if not heart. Yet, as the colt started his lope around the ring, a hush washed over the unusually large crowd, as if there was a collective holding of breath to make sure they heard the opening bid. And there it was: ‘$500,000!’ the chief auctioneer Jonathan D’Arcy sang out, and a thrill slipped through the air, an almost involuntary shudder of exhilaration as everyone registered the exact sum on offer and then waited, again, to see how strong the next bid would be—could be—how high it would climb.

In any other year, experts confidently predicted, this yearling colt would fetch $3 million, maybe even more under the hammer, as major money men vied for position and rose to the challenge, upping the ante time and again as they tried to secure the young horse and somehow, if only for a moment, get their own name up in lights at this extraordinary equine theatre. But not this year.

This particular sale on 5 April 2009 fell right in the centre of the global financial crisis, which meant this promoter’s fantasy could easily turn into a corporate nightmare with dire repercussions for the country’s entire racing industry. A grim picture had been painted from the outset for the overall sale itself, with one senior auctioneer warning his vendors to expect a 30 per cent downfall in prices for their horses. And by the time Lot 90 walked out of his stall and into the sale ring, things were dramatically worse than that, 40 per cent down on what the same equine auction house had reaped for its clients just 12 months ago.

Still, if ever a horse could turn things around, surely it was this one.

Not even a major recession could take the shine off the first son of the country’s favourite mare, a racehorse whose name was known to every Australian.

‘$600,000 …’ Or could it? ‘$700,000.’

Within minutes, the final figure of $1.5 million was reached—a stunning result by normal standards.

But this was not an ordinary ring of sale. Here, dreams were sold in broad daylight, and part of their intoxicating magic was the impossible price tags, large and small. Champions were either bought cheaply, because of scruffy family trees or physical imperfections, or they were regally bred and worth a royal fortune.

So a sense of anti-climax, if not quite outright disappointment, ran through the crowd as the colt left them, because this was Australasia’s elite thoroughbred yearling auction yard and global financial dramas weren’t supposed to penetrate. Financial commonsense, after all, often seemed in short supply here. This was where sheikhs and property barons and mining magnates gathered each year to outdo each other, spending astronomical sums of money on young, untried horses who hadn’t even seen a saddle, let alone had a rider on their backs. Nor had they been asked to gallop over any distance on a racetrack when they went into the ring, potential their only defining quality.

To anyone outside this self-contained world, complete with its own language and professional standards, this makes little sense. But making sense to outsiders makes no difference to anyone involved in this cocoon; money changes hands quickly, often at staggering levels. Just 12 months ago, some 28 yearlings had topped the million-dollar mark in the space of three days.

But not today. On this April afternoon, such prices seemed like a generation away, the $1.5 million a relief for all of Rock Star’s connections. Even though the world’s mega buyers seemed unusually subdued, brought to heel by the tough financial times, the colt had been sold for more than a million dollars, a respectable sum in any year.

He had not been humiliated in the round, his wonderful race mare mother had not been humbled—and the tourist crowd was happy, clapping in appreciation as the youngster left the ring and the new owner, who most couldn’t see and fewer still would have recognised, signed the slip of paper that proved Rock Star was now his.

Danny O’Brien, a Melbourne-based trainer, had apparently come north with exactly $1.5 million up his sleeve to spend on this colt. He was lucky.

As the busy first-day sale crowd thinned over the next three days, two other youngsters sold for a million dollars, while a third—a strong brown colt by Encosta de Lago, Australia’s most expensive sire—topped the lot, the hammer falling at $1.8 million.

This comparative unknown, then, was the real show stopper, stealing Rock Star’s thunder by $300,000. Was he better bred, a more correctly conformed individual? Was there more of a ‘buzz’ about the colt within the moneyed-up circles of serious buyers? Or was it simply a matter of expert egos taking a fancy to the colt? Beauty, the old saying goes, is in the eye of the beholder and at these pageants, every eye sees a thousand different things.

Seventeen other yearlings went for $700,000 or more, further proof that hope and just a touch of madness do spring eternal when it comes to imagining what lies ahead for these thoroughbred babies. Something really does happens to grown men and women when they draw near these youngsters, something potent enough to make them throw natural caution to the wind.

And this was just one yearling sale, in one city. The same thing happens around Australia through the first five months of every year, an annual punt of whopping proportion, a recurring display of extraordinary excess and constant dreaming.

But for me, like so many others, the sale this year is different. Every single yearling entering these arenas represents a competitor for a filly nowhere near the sale yard. A filly I had bred and hoped one day, not too far away, to race.

Chapter 1

At the start

She was born in the wind, on a farm not too far from home, on an unusually warm Sunday morning.

A typical October breeze, gritty with dust, dipped over the paddocks and whipped through the trees, constant in its quick unpredictability.

We had been waiting for her for days, watching every move her gentle mother made as she listened to her own internal, maternal clock and tried her best to ignore us.

Having been through this seven times before, she knew what was about to come, and stayed well within range of the shelter shed overflowing with pale, fresh straw—always in view of the kitchen window of Diane, the farm manager, who had fed her twice daily for the past two months and who would help her with this arrival. Old hands, the two of them, they poked about each other calmly, leaving me to deal with the rising sense of urgency.

I was hoping the foal would arrive before I left to work interstate for several weeks and had visited the mare a couple of times already that weekend, willing her on. ‘Come on, Po, you can do it!’ I would say, as she methodically searched my pockets for the lucerne and molasses sweeties she so loved.

This was the first horse I had ever bought as a fledging breeder eight years earlier. Poetic Waters knew me well enough to happily accept the treats I showered on her, allowing a few minutes more for me to plead the case for action—‘Please, Po, you know I’ve got to go to Melbourne tomorrow morning, let’s get this show on the road’—before she sauntered away, a regal swish of her tail and sway of her hindquarters indicating enough was enough.

I should have known better than to try and hurry her, or ramble on about due dates and timetables, or the fact that most foals are born between 10 pm and midnight. As we all know, babies, equine and human, are unconcerned by such detail. They arrive when they are ready. And she was, finally, at 10.28 am on the first day of October 2007. The mobile rang with the news just as I was closing the front gate of my little farm on the other side of town and the Shoalhaven River.

It was Diane. ‘You’d better get over here, your mare’s having that baby right now!’ was all I needed to hear before jumping in the car and flooring it. Ten minutes later I was running into the stall in the paddock, ducking carefully under the soft webbing designed to keep the mare and her new foal safe from a sudden, very big outside world. And there she was, impossibly long legs tucked under her tummy, her mother already back up on her feet and hovering, licking her dry and nudging at her tiny, knobbly bottom.

But no time at all elapsed in this brand new life before we all learned that this was a daughter who wouldn’t need much nudging, or urging, or hurrying along. Within half an hour she was up and tottering across the straw on unsteady pirate’s legs, making her way straight for the safety webbing, nosing at it even before she had taken her first all-important gulp of milk. Her already steady gaze taking in her new world.

‘OK, I’m here now,’ she seemed to be saying, looking out over the immediate paddock to the hills and great sky beyond. ‘What’s going on out there?’ She was confident and curious, keen to know what was happening around her. This, we all agreed, was one cool filly!

‘What are you going to call her?’ Diane asked. Having worked with horses her whole life, she had offered to be Po’s midwife one afternoon when we bumped into each other outside the local newsagent’s, which also doubled as a TAB. It was an offer I accepted on the spot; she was well respected as a horsewoman and I liked her directness. ‘This one needs to know her name straightaway,’ she added.

I watched the pretty bay foal peg-legging around the stall, suddenly intent on learning how to take that first sip of milk from Po, who was already wearing the mantle of Patient Mother. I thought for a few more minutes as the filly foal grappled with her initial task in life. No need for anything too cute with this one, I decided, though that smudge of white on her forehead was endearing, and her tiny tail hilariously charming. She needed a pretty name, but one that was durable, one that could grow right along with her.

‘Rosie,’ I said. ‘Her father’s King of Roses—let’s just call her Rosie.’

‘Let’s do that,’ Diane laughed.

And so life with Rosie began.

Getting to this stage was part of a journey that had started nearly a decade before, when I decided to stop talking about getting into horses and actually do something about it.

As a teenager, I had developed a passion for racing during three months of enforced bedrest due to a serious bout of pneumonia. While I hardly remember the illness itself, I have vivid recollection of the horses that raced through that time and have kept me enthralled for four decades: the great sprinter Winfreux was the best of them, but there were others, like a little mare called Spell and a stayer known as Padtheway who won my heart, too. I read the stories of racecourse courage in the daily newspapers, clipping tales from The Herald in the afternoons and pasting them into scrapbooks. Along with many good novels, these horses did more than just fill up the long hours of my recuperation. They opened up a magically different world, of human and equine partnership that was as sweepingly romantic as it was breathtakingly competitive.

It was also full of irascible characters who spoke about things I had never encountered in my young life, in a language I had never heard. Even though my family had no connection at all to racing, once I had stumbled upon it, this world seemed to be … everywhere.

The first high school I went to looked over the most picturesque racecourse in Melbourne. Even closer to home, my elderly next-door neighbour remembered going to the races with her late husband and seeing Bernborough, the big horse from the north—the Toowoomba Terror—race at Flemington. She was adamant, too, as we sipped tea from her dainty bone china, that her husband had told her about the time he saw the legendary Phar Lap, before he was shipped to America, where he died in controversial circumstances. Big Red, she called him, like everyone who lived through the Depression did.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful, I thought—even as a young teenager—to really be a part of this world, to somehow have a horse good enough not just to win races, but to be written about by legendary racing scribes like Jack Elliot? And loved countrywide?

For a city kid, and a girl at that, it was a funny dream, the kind you just tuck away in your back pocket and hold onto. For one thing, I knew no one who could even lead me to a door marked ‘enter’. Horses weren’t part of our daily routine, and there certainly wasn’t a pony club nearby.

Yet, horses have a funny habit of finding those of us who are drawn to them, whether we are sure of it or not, and suddenly there was a rather unruly mob of them in the grassy green paddock that ran behind our back fence in Ascot Vale, and the other side of the meandering Merri Creek. The adults warned us to stay away from them as they were on their way to the abattoirs or ‘the doggers’.

Having no real idea what that meant, we tried to befriend the few that still yearned for such friendship and learned to ride—bareback with a dog lead and rope for bridle and reins—on a couple of the older mares amongst the gentle hills and weeping willows that eventually gave way to the Tullamarine Freeway.

There were also the monthly race trials held during the day at Moonee Valley Racecourse that actually stopped our school classes every half hour because the race calls were so loud. Looking back, it doesn’t seem at all surprising that horses had a hold of my heart before I had reached my mid-teens.

But racing was obviously a wildly expensive passion to pursue. Even from the sidelines, it was obvious not every horse that went to the races came home a winner, and from the start I understood that trainers and jockeys had to be paid. It was their living, after all. Maintaining this passion only seemed possible from a distance.

So for the next couple of decades, I followed the horses as a (very) small-time punter, which meant keeping a close eye on what was being written about them, but never getting involved. In many ways, it was the perfect love affair: no close ties, no emotional or financial bonds, just a lot of fun with nothing more to do than just follow my favourite horses, and cheer them home.

Still, once bitten, never shy. The lure of the track is impossible to ignore, the call of the turf hard not to hear, and over the years I took small shares in a couple of racehorses with a few friends and my younger, equally enthralled brother. This was hardly demanding. Again, the financial outlay was minimal, the syndicate arrangement so removed from the actual hard work of the stable, not to mention the day-to-day planning that these horses demand, that we could have been investing in anything. Perhaps it was a little eccentric, but nothing really for anyone to get excited about.

In a way, that was precisely the problem. It was almost too little, and nearly too late. As I hit my 40s, I realised I really did want to become more involved and had to make a decision before I got too old and scared to take the plunge. I also had to face the fact that I was starting to bore even my closest friends and family; having talked about buying a racehorse, or trying to breed one we could race together, for such a long time, I either had to stop talking about it or actually do it, full stop.

So I started to go to as many of the regular horse sales in Melbourne and Sydney that I could fit in around my work as a journalist with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), in an attempt to get a better understanding of the horses themselves. There were certainly more than enough to choose from, the regular auctions of tried (and often failed) racehorses mixed in with the higher profile sales of yearlings and broodmares. But having some clue about thoroughbred ancestry, not to mention equine conformation, was essential when attending these events if you wanted to properly follow what was happening around you. And I quickly came to see that, despite a lifetime of listening to and going to the races, I had only the barest understanding of both. If I was going to achieve anything at all in this field in this lifetime, I had to keep cramming and learn fast. And at some point I had to jump in and buy a horse.

But it was logical, actually sensible, to keep putting such a major move off. Let’s face it, horses are big and eat a lot and cost even more to care for. It made sense to keep stalling! Clearly I needed a hook, some kind of emotional tie, to kick me over the line on such a life-changing decision. When the thin, green catalogue for the broodmare sale at Scone arrived in the mail early in 2001, I found it.

Her name was Poetic Waters, and she was a 10-year-old bay mare sired by an American stallion called Yeats, renowned as a getter of good sorts, both on the track and at stud. Even more importantly, for me at least, the mare’s maternal family was of special interest. She was a cousin of