The Horse and the Nation

Most readers will recall the unseemliness, violence and still-lingering political odours surrounding this year’s Australia Day incident in Canberra—the riot which was said to have arisen from that long-festering slum called the Aboriginal Tent Embassy. Sceptical minds tend rather to think that its seeds might have been germinated in the private office of the Prime Minister herself; media reports made much of the fact that, in the ensuing fracas and the security hustling, the Prime Minister lost a shoe.

A wit of my acquaintance instantly exclaimed: “That’s no big deal, surely? They can just nail it back on again.” He was referring to our own national leader (and a member of the gentle sex at that) in terms which would normally be applied only to a horse; that struck me as offensive and unfair.

Offensive and unfair, that is, to horses.

I may not be wholly impartial in this judgment, for I love horses—a romance which began some eighty-five years ago, when I was three, and which shows no sign of cooling. I had to ask myself what harm a horse had ever done me in all that time. Strenuous search of memory recalled only one sly sideways kick in the frosty morning, and one ungrateful little mare who nipped me on the bottom as I bent down to replenish the chaff in her feed bin. Compared with the monstrous and perpetual inflictions of politicians, these were mere nothings.

In more than two thousand years of history, I could think of only one horse who, on his own account, had achieved high public office, and who might have been in a position to wreak civic mischief. His name was Incitatus; almost exactly two millennia ago he was the favourite steed of the Roman emperor Caligula. He occupied a golden stable, and was cared for by a specially recruited cohort of slaves who waited upon his every want and whim. Caligula then appointed him to be Consul, much to the offence of the Roman Senate. Unfortunately, the near-contemporary historian Suetonius does not go on to describe the achievements of this noble animal in high office, but at least there is no evidence of his doing the slightest harm.

What prime minister could claim such a benign record? Has a horse ever looked me square in the eye while she told a blatant and deliberate lie? And then, without blink or blush, followed it up with another whopper? No horse ever picked my taxpayer pocket, allegedly for public benefit, but really to buy votes for her corrupt and incompetent party.

Mark Twain, that shrewdest observer, put it this way: “Man is the only animal that can blush—or needs to.”

The kindest act possible towards our dumb friends would be to expunge all their names from our whole political discourse. When we do otherwise, the result is rarely edifying or helpful. Even today, on the Left, when they speak of two of our most significant past prime ministers, Billy Hughes and Joe Lyons, you are likely to hear reference to “that Labor rat”. 

How central and how vital has been the horse in the short couple of centuries of Australia’s national life! And how swiftly and completely has its power now retreated, largely to roles which are exceptional, marginal, frivolous, ceremonial or recreational.

Two hundred years ago, when Sir Joseph Banks was sponsoring Allan Cunningham from Kew Gardens as Australia’s pioneering botanist, it was vital that Cunningham be provided with a horse, together with stabling, shoeing and fodder. By the 1960s, Melbourne University Press was publishing for the Victorian Government Botanist, Jim Willis, his magnificent Handbook to Plants in Victoria. In the course of his work, Jim would make an occasional research foray into the High Alps, bed-rolled and fed from the back of a quiet old packhorse which moseyed along behind him. Those were, let us confess, “the old days”. I suppose a quick helicopter trip would do the job today.

The horse’s immense part in Australia’s history and tradition can hardly be overstated, yet the poor, patient four-footed fellow is often short-changed when credit is handed out.

It was not the horses who led Burke and Wills astray, or who lost Ludwig Leichhardt. The course of Australian verse would be greatly shortened by the disappearance of Adam Lindsay Gordon and Banjo Paterson. (True, the latter praises the sterling qualities of the Man from Snowy River’s horse, even while calling him “a thin and weedy beast”, but there is no hint that The Man could have got to the spot on foot!)

Many beautifully drawn horses appear in the pictures of Norman Lindsay, but few know that Norman was not merely a rider, but a practical farrier, who forged his own horseshoes and shod his own mounts.

And so our story went—hand in hand, so to speak, with a horse: Ned Kelly and the bushrangers; drovers and the overlanders; the shearers who very often rode horseback from a “cut-out” shed to their next job; the country parson who drove his buggy to visit his scattered parishioners. Indeed, well within my memory, the local suburban butcher, whose man delivered your pound of chops right to your house in a horse-drawn light cart.

Police troop-horses still offer an irreplaceable real-life role, when ugly crowds are about, but there are few others. The Army’s horses rarely draw a piece of artillery, or carry into action light-horse men or cavalry. Their latter-day role is chiefly ceremonial, and how splendidly they fill it.

I suppose (I have not made inquiries) that most horses today are bred for the racing and trotting industries. There are a few hunters; there are riding schools, pony clubs, agricultural shows and other “recreational” ways of maintaining touch with your philosophical adviser the horse. But there are very few horses nowadays engaged in regular, useful daily work on farms; not when you can get your utility, your tractor or your trail bike on to the spot.

I have just heard about an organisation in Melbourne called “Riding for the Disabled”, where even the severely handicapped can be got into the saddle safely. That sounds more like my cup of tea. I never met a trail bike yet which would turn back his ears to listen to your conversation from the saddle.