8 minute read
HORSE HERBALIST ANGELA DAVISON
FEATURE
Gypsy Lore to Flying Jockey to Horse Herbalist
Angela Davison has worked all her life with horses writes JANE CAMENS, of the woman who now runs a unique hair assessment business and was the third fully licensed female jockey in Australia.
In the north of England where I lived we had gypsies camp every year on the village green,” Angela recalls. “We were told not to talk to them but they fascinated me. I used to follow the old women who went early in the morning to the ditches and hedgerows to select herbs and flowers. They’d make them up into a brew and give them to horses they bought for dogging money at the sales. After a few weeks of brew the horses were transformed, put back through the sales and sold for a high price. That’s how they made money and clearly that’s when the seeds of herbal medicine were planted in me.”
Angela went to work at a breaking and training stable for show jumpers while she was still at school. “I was mucking out 20 boxes before breakfast,” she says. “They threw me on every kind of horse, and that was a huge learning curve. I rode many difficult horses plus we were out on the jump circuit. It was a fabulous experience for over four years. I loved it.”
Later, Angela enrolled as a working pupil - “slave labour” as she describes it - at a dressage academy. That wasn’t such a good experience she says. “I was allowed to bring my own talented JA jump pony, Charles, with me, but he was no dressage horse. ‘Captain M’, the principal, taught all his lessons on a poor mare who had an enormous split in her front hoof. At one point she was very sore, so Captain M decided to give me a dressage lesson on Charles.”
But Captain M found it difficult to give Angela a dressage lesson on the fiery Charles. “He dragged me off my pony and got on him himself. He was on the ground in under six seconds!” That saw Charles banished to the stable, and not even allowed to be led out for over a week. Angela wasn’t supposed to be allowed off the property but one night she sneaked out and called her old teacher at the jumping stable to come and get her.
“I went and tied hessian bags around Charlie’s hooves and at two in the morning we sneaked out never to return. Good riddance to Captain M,” she says firmly. But on her return to the jump circuit she unfortunately got badly kicked. While she was convalescing, she came to Australia to see her father and to have a look around. She laughs: “I came with a small bag, but I packed 12 cans of hairspray into it. I thought Australia couldn’t possibly have hairspray!” She expected to see kangaroos in the street, she says, laughing her own ignorance. “All I knew for sure was that it was hot and you wore shorts. I was a bit disappointed on flying into Sydney seeing all the industrial area, not a
The Horse Herbalist, Angela Davison talking to a friend.
kangaroo in sight and initially I only met ‘Poms!’”
After working in the music industry in Australia and in New Zealand for a couple of years , the horses started to call her back. Says Angela: “I had to get my backside in the saddle again.” She found work managing Heath and Ivana Harris’s Bloodwood Park while they went on location doing film or TV work.
While she was working at Harris’s place, she went into Randwick with her friend Stephen Jeffries, who was working for John Drennan, the late, great Tommy J Smith’s breaker. “As soon as I got out of the car the breaker said ‘Look at the size of you! Have you got any boots?’”
Angela, who measures barely 152 cms high and at that point weighed around 55 kilos, took the offered job of riding work six mornings a week. “It was an honour to work under the guidance of such a brilliant connected horseman as John Drennan, even though I was ‘autumn leaves’ for some time,” she says, explaining to this unseasoned writer that the term is racing jargon for riders who fall off all the time. “It was all so different. In the first six weeks, I lost around nine kilos! I was determined to be able to take a horse out on the track and follow instructions doing the correct pace and times perfectly. After about 18 months someone asked me if I was a Lady Jockey.”
This was in the mid 1970s, just before women were allowed to ride with men. At that time, there were ‘ladies’ races. “I think I only had about 10 rides in ladies races,” Angela says. ‘I’d have a scotch before and then fly around the country race meetings. It was good fun though not very professional I have to say.”
New Zealand jockey Linda Jones who had been refused an apprentice jockey’s licence in 1976 on the grounds that she was “too old, married and not strong enough”, rode with a licence she had obtained through a legal loophole
in New Zealand. When she came to Australia in 1978, she became the first woman to win a race against male professional jockeys in Australia, riding Pay The Purple to win the Labour Day Cup at Doomben in 1979.
“That really put the cat among the pigeons. She trail-blazed the way for the rest of us,” says Angela. “I instantly wanted to know what you had to do to get a full license.”
By that time Angela had been riding her share of champions, including the great Kingston Town. She remembers going to the AJC to find out what she had to do to get her full license.
“I was wearing red velvet jeans and Ugg boots – I didn’t expect to be presented to the AJC committee who happened to be meeting that day,” she recalls. She found out she had to ride and get clearances in10 official trials at Randwick or Warwick Farm. The official trials at Randwick and Warwick Farm were run just once a month, Angela was already riding at Randwick but the rules made it extremely difficult for country girls to get a ride. Also she had to be a registered work rider for a trainer, not a breaker.
Angela had to leave Drennans and went to ride for trainer Neville Begg. After three months of trials, without Angela’s name on the lists, she walked out of Begg’s stables and went to TJ, who gave her two rides in the trials a few days later.
“I was so nervous and I was shaking so badly I couldn’t do my joddies up after I’d put on the horses colours,” she says. “One of TJ’s foremen, known as ‘the black rat’, delighted in giving me a hand. Luckily the horse trialling was an old pal called Sweet Turn. “He really looked after me and helped me settle.”
After racking up 10 clearances in 10 trials Angela was offered a stable jockey’s job in Rockhampton where she was given her license. She went on to hold a full license for nearly eight years.
“Needless to say I had plenty of thrills and spills and a break or two. I had an excellent chiropractor who also gave me herbs and my recovery rate was brilliant,” she says.
As time went on Angela became more and more aware of just how many horses, regardless of good veterinary care had varying problems which couldn’t be fixed. “They would become known as ratbags, and were often destined to become dog food or to simply fade away in a paddock. I decided it was time for me to find more tools and to give something back to the horses.”
She was 36 when she rode in her last race, and by then she was already enrolled in Dorothy Hall’s College of Herbal Medicine in Sydney.
Not content to only treat the symptoms, Angela has since, after decades of study and practice, pioneered a unique technique that allows her to delve as
deeply as she needs to go into the entire body and mind of the horse to find the problem. She does this, she explains: “by tapping into the very thing that connects every living organism – energy. It took me seven years before I had my system set up well enough to actually use it as a tool in my herbal medicine practice. That was 22 years ago, and still I learn from the horses every day. I work with horse’s hair energetically and by asking the right questions I am then guided by spirit and the individual’s higher self to come up with a treatment plan plus advice.”
These days she runs an unique equine hair assessment business that brings together her knowledge of horses and numerous areas of complementary medicine, featuring classical herbal medicine, flower remedies, iridology, both craniosacral and Equine Muscle Release (Bowen) therapy, and more.
Angela’s passion has stayed with her, she says, to help horses, whether they are ponies in the paddock or international competitors, to be as healthy, balanced and happy as they can be so they can comfortably enjoy reaching their full potential. These days she has clients all over Australia and has assessed horses in NZ, England, Ireland and Hong Kong. Her book ‘Flower Remedies for Horses, Pets and People’ was published in 2015.
For more about Angela Davison’s practice see her website: thehorseherbalist.com
