Love In a Sunburnt Country (20 page)

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 respond 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.

Part of what the Bairds now offer (sometimes in partnership with Bianca Gillanders) is natural horse-person training.

‘When we're teaching horse psychology, words can only do so much. In just an hour of observing the behaviour of horses in the wild, people can learn far more. For themselves they learn to identify the leader—and that's usually an alpha mare—from how she directs the group, how they are looking to her all the time,' says Steve. From the backs of their domesticated kin is the best way to observe the brumbies, say the Bairds.

In this way you can discover for yourself the language of horses. Tail swishes, ear flicking, nuzzling, the cautious turning and looking in a new direction—this communication is all directed at helping group dynamics and ensuring the herd is safe. You watch the leader and see how she corrects the other horses only until the lesson is learned and then stops immediately, and you begin to empathise with the weight of responsibility upon her. For your own horses to be happy, and for you to be safe, you need to become as much like her as a human can.

If you had asked Kath and Steve many years ago why their business was successful they would have given you the wrong answer: their intelligent, educated horses, insights into horse psychology, the revival of the packhorse tradition, teamwork, adventure, their unique access to remote parts of the High Country, Kath's terrific provisioning. They weren't to realise for many years that the one aspect of the business which they hadn't carefully planned was the essential one.

‘When we looked back through our Visitors Book we saw the comments were things like, “A wonderful week with the Bairds”,' says Steve. ‘We realised then that it was time with us that people valued most. It was the family tradition that my mother, Pat, began in our family and that had been part of Kath's family, of having an open door, of letting people into the heart of the family, of the kinds of conversations that happen around our table.'

In 2003 the Bogong High Plains were struck by lightning and caught fire: two-and-a-half-million hectares burned and smouldered for weeks. What remained was snow-gum skeletons and burned ground, a far cry from the bushy, grassy heathland. The bookings for that season had to be cancelled. Steve's work away became more important in terms of financial survival. This situation was repeated after another serious fire in 2006.

In the absence of the men she loved Kath worked her way through a new level of anxiety. By now her sons were overseas in dangerous environments on horseback. Spring, summer and autumn she busied herself still more with her horses, the many trainees that came to learn horses and hospitality, her visitors and her welcoming: using her skills drawn from the theatre to turn the passing moment into a celebration for her guests. She and Steve took increasing pride in their ability to strengthen and create bonds among their guests: re-teaching the art of conversation, the love of shared adventure and the practice of empathy (not just with horses but with people, too) that lies at the heart of their own lives.

Every year she and Steve together would contribute their expertise in the packhorse tradition (which they had done so much to restore) at festivals like The Man from Snowy River Bush Festival. Winters were always without Steve. Outside her window the snow would be falling and Kath would quell her anxiety and send loving thoughts to him in the desert and to her boys in the mountains far away in South America.

On his travels across country on his horse or as he drives, far away from the distractions of small talk and ‘fluff', Steve is always busy with the mental discipline of puzzling out the story behind the landscapes he sees, of building lasting impressions in his mind, and thinking about the words and the lines that will best hold it on the page. These are times of intense concentration.

‘When I see a landscape I want to know the geological narrative—how the place was formed—as well as the human narrative. What happened here?' he says.

Steve found time to open his old notebooks and to be surprised by how much they conveyed of how land is marked and changed, of the story of what happened. He began to elaborate on his sketches. The resulting pieces of art quickly found a market. In his art, as in his storytelling, Steve aims to teach people how to read the Australian landscape and recognise in that landscape both our history and our future.