NOW WE ARE EQUALS

WRITTEN BY HEATHER BROWN PASCOE

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to have your attention please.

Look around the Magic Millions auditorium. Can you see all the women sitting at the tables, the owners and the buyers, the trainers and the jockeys? Can you see the syndicate bosses, the shareholders, the risktakers and the dreamers?

Equals. We are fast becoming a sport of equals, and that’s bloody marvellous, especially for those of us who were here back when the world was flat and women were the sideshow in the Sport of Kings.

Back in 1989 - yup, that’s thirty-two years ago - I flew up from Sydney to write a story on the Magic Millions for The Weekend Australian Colour magazine.

My editor, Peter Blunden thought it would be thoroughly entertaining to cover all that Eighties glamour and take a light-hearted look at it. It was the 1980s era of glitz and glamour and Magic Millions were determined to show me a good time.

The night I arrived at my suite at the Marina Mirage I couldn’t see the bed for flowers. My shutters opened onto a dreamy moonlit beach and there were so many bottles of French champagne I thought about taking a bath in the stuff.

I had been invited to judge the fashions of the field and Magic Millions generosity knew no bounds. I was chauffeured to the track in the back seat of a pink Cadillac and the driver, a good old Queensland boy wearing a jaunty straw pork-pie, played the Best of Charlie Pride on the car stereo and sang along to Kiss an Angel Good Morning.

I was feeling pretty good about myself until I stepped out at the track.

The fashion was flash cash, all bright and glittering and I was pathetically underdressed.

This was not the place for simple dresses. My nails were too short, my heels were too low and my fascinator looked as if it had been torn from a mosquito net.

In the time-honoured tradition of Miss World, the contestants for Miss Magic Millions were going to be judged wearing swimsuits and bikinis. For one moment I did a double take and assumed it might have been a cultural tribute to Paula Stafford and the Meter Maid days.

I simply had no idea what it had to do with racing.

My story in the Weekend Australian was a howling success. The readers loved it. Peter Blunden and I still roll around with laughter when we talk about it.

Magic Millions sent me the largest bunch of thankyou flowers I’ve ever seen in my life. No publicity was bad publicity back in the Eighties. Money, sex and glamour ruled. The fearful, Covid-crippled world we now find ourselves in 2022 is dull by comparison.

It has been a long, hard haul for women to be taken seriously in the thoroughbred breeding and racing industry.

If you look back through history, you will understand it took a long time for women to be given the right to do most things. They had to chain themselves up in public places to get the right to vote, to get the right to drink, to get the right to control their own bodies.

Somebody always wanted to keep the ladies on the leash.

When I was a child, women were not even allowed to go to a public bar. You saw the yellow line painted on the floor and you watched your intelligent, stylish mother and her friends having to sit separately in the lounge to drink their shandy at a country hotel after the races. Then they had to stand outside and wait on the footpath for the men finishing a beer at the bar.

The little girls who witnessed that knew what it meant to be treated as a second-class citizen.

Thankfully, the wheel has turned. Those same girls grew up to became judges and doctors and CEOs and Chairperson of the Board, the women who wrote the front page, the women who stood for parliament, the women who made the movies, taught the children, told the stories.

They might show a bit of silver in the hair these days, but they still remember.

Which might explain why so many women who grew up in racing grew up angry. About the way they saw women being treated. About all the games they were forced to play.

We were given compensations for being nice. There was Fashions of the Field where you could sip champagne and twirl around. If you were Miss Australia - somebody pretty and important - you could sash the winner or present the trophy rugs. You were even allowed to work behind the bar pulling beers or serving scones and cream.

In the end, it was smarter to find yourself a man who went racing. Mrs Matrimonial somehow made you more legitimate.

Women were not allowed to train horses or ride in races. The more determined could own a share in a horse or own a mare and breed a foal. The administrators of racing often made exceptions for those who had enough money.

Career opportunities were strictly limited. Women were mostly relegated to being strappers and grooms. They could answer the telephone as chirpyvoiced receptionists and bring the morning tea into the board room for the gentlemen.

They were the rules. Don’t cause trouble. And put your lipstick on.

Eventually - at the same pathetically slow speed that dripping water makes a hole through sandstone - things began to change.

On a warm, nondescript Saturday afternoon in October 2021, the entire card at Toowoomba races was ridden by women. It made the newspapers, but it was no big deal. Except for the fact that it happened.

There are women breeders such as Jan Clark at Daandine Stud near Warwick who bred Written Tycoon, currently the Champion General Sire of Australia. If that wasn’t enough, then she also bred his son Capitalist, currently the Champion 2YO sire of Australia. That’s no big deal, either, except for the fact that it happened.

Heather Brown Pascoe comes from a cattle and sheep station family in North West Queensland who also bred and raced two Melbourne Cup winners. She has spent a lifetime racing and breeding horses. Along with her husband Dr David Pascoe, they operate a small high quality brood mare band at Plaintree Farms on the Darling Downs.

There are now hundreds of women trainers established all over Australia from Gai Waterhouse to the new kid on the block Annabel Neasham - old blood, new blood. There are also scores of emerging female pre-trainers, women syndicators, women track commentators, women form commentators.

For so long the industry has been built on the blood, sweat and tears of a virtual underclass of women strappers, stable hands, receptionists and cleaners.

They have mostly been poorly paid for their talent and their commitment and their selfless devotion dismissively referred to as ‘girls and their horses.’

There are still very few women at the pointy end of the totem pole in areas such as racing administration, stud management and in the major auction houses.

The question is this: where are all the leading women agents and auctioneers, anyway? Who said they lacked knowledge or that the female voice lacked authority?

Go tell that to all the leading auctioneers at the major art houses like Christies and Sotheby’s right around the world - auctioneers who also happen to be female - and they will laugh at you.

There are so many good reasons why our sport needs greater female participation.

For a start, women are intuitive. They have an instinctive bond with horses, simple as that. A horse can pick up a human heartbeat from a couple of metres away. They can smell fear and they can pick idiots from fifty paces.

The great American horseman Ray Hunt once said “The horse knows. He knows if you know. He also knows if you don’t know.”

So here’s another truth for you. While it’s always been a tough industry for women to be taken seriously, there’s a hunch that things changed for a couple of reasons.

Women have been determined and dogged and mostly, they made it on their own merits. There’s another reason that nobody talks about nearly enough.

All the good men out there - the fathers and brothers, husbands, partners, mentors - the men who genuinely love women, men who want to see them bloom. And these are the wonderful men who have stepped up and became our champions.

My beloved friend Darryl Gollan was not only a great trainer and horseman. His gift was nurturing the insecure and the fragile. He was a master of delicate, fractious two year olds - and he was a master of helping nervous young women jockeys develop their careers.

Darryl’s son Tony - the leading trainer in Queensland - is no different. His stable uses a fleet of female jockeys and women hold senior management roles throughout his stable.

Ultimately, there’s an inescapable economic reality facing the Australian breeding and racing industry - and that’s the desperate shortage of staff. This will force the greatest social change of all, exactly the same as what happened in World War Two when women were forced to step into exclusively male jobs in the factories.

SO HERE COME THE LADIES, FOLKS. HANDS AND HEELS.