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 talking 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.
It put our brush with death in perspective.
The next few weeks are uneventful, at least for the two fillies enjoying the open space of the pasture after being cooped up for so long in the stable on the hill. The weekend after they have walked out of the stables, I clean it out completely, going into Roxie’s stall to finish the job. Noticing the plastic feed bin she’s knocked to the floor, I bend to pick it up before something stops me reaching for it with my hand and I kick it over instead. Curled up in a sleepy coil lies a tiger snake.
With my heart beating loudly, I try as calmly as I possibly can to back out of the stall, grab a rake and a spade from the feed room and walk back in, hoping the deadly visitor has slithered away from sight. Instead it is sluggishly heading towards the back of the stable, and when I step back into view, it rears up to face me, ready to strike. Thankfully the horses are well away down in the paddock.
Having seen my old farming neighbour Damien deal with an even bigger ‘tiger’ a year earlier, I know what needs to be done and do it quickly before the snake attacks first. Using the rake I pin it to the ground and chop it in half with the spade. I hate having to kill it, but a dangerous, hibernating reptile in a stall is a risk not worth taking.
In the open air, away from the stable, Rosie’s wound continues to heal and shrink. It has become a hard scab over slightly puckered skin under her mane. She’s impatient with it, tired of the attention it requires, although she is beguilingly cooperative when being handled.
Even when I have to drench all the mares midway through March, she accepts the liquid being syringed into her mouth without any resistance. Of course, Express more than makes up for Rosie’s acquiescence, making me work to achieve the same result. For some reason, the old mare is incensed at this intrusion, wheeling about in half circles as I try to get the plastic drencher in her mouth, all the while pushing me back to her good side, so she can see me clearly with her one good eye. She’s remarkably strong for one so aged and tosses me around her shoulder, ears back in annoyance while she tries to hold me against her body. Like a naughty foal. She’s not exactly a good role model for the two young ones. But old trouper that she is, she eventually allows the task to be completed. I marvel, again, at this mare’s character, her robust nature—and just how fitting her name is.
They really got it right, I think, as, dreaded drench behind her, Express starts to search my pockets for sweeties.
Little wonder she’s lasted this long; even less of a wonder that she reigns supreme in the paddock—deciding when the small herd moves from one patch of grass to another, or down to the dam for a drink. And when it’s windy or wet, she is the one who stands in the shelter shed, occasionally deigning to let Po or another mare join her.
My friends used to laugh when I told them about these interactions, how Express rules Picayune. But now most have visited and met her for themselves, they know it’s true. Horses have hierarchies. And personality traits, it seems, can be inherited.
The following weekend, One Love—Express’s daughter, who we still call Mouse, the name we gave her as a weanling, despite her being twice the size of her mother now—takes up the cudgel as I start to walk her and her paddock companion Swirl (aka Miss Unexpected) and the two yearlings into a different paddock, one a little further away from the older mares. As they lose sight of the herd, Mouse gets panicky and rears back on the lead rope I’m holding, tearing it from my hands.
She then takes off at full gallop, heading back into the paddock we’ve just left, spooking Roxie and Swirl into following her.
But Rosie, for some reason, refuses to take any part in this mutiny, and continues to trot just ahead of me, at one point stopping and turning to me as if to say ‘What’s their problem?’ Even when the trio gallops back, suddenly furious there is a fence separating us and forgetting about the gate they have just run through minutes before, Rosie just tosses her head from side to side and actually comes back to walk beside me, all the way up to the top gate. The one we usually use.
It is as if she knows the little band will be reunited as soon as we reach the top of the paddock. Good powers of deduction, I think, opening the gate so she can trot back to her friends, who have taken off again in the direction of the older mares. But this is what can happen with horses, all the time, any time. No matter how steady they usually are, no matter how sure of their surroundings, it doesn’t take too much for them to redesign the playing field. And rewrite the rules for good measure.
The quicker I can get the filly to Robbie Griffiths’ stable, the better. At least there, this intelligent, robust young lady will be under constant supervision, safe and hopefully sound before something goes really awry, here on the farm.
All I have to do is go meet the man!