Winx: The authorised biography by Andrew Rule

Author:Andrew Rule
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
Published: 2018-09-07T16:00:00+00:00

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Most people who breed horses in New Zealand are farmers by origin or inclination. When New Zealand’s greatest thoroughbred breeder—the world-renowned Sir Patrick Hogan—was a child, before horses bewitched him, he used to memorise the pedigrees of Jersey cattle.

Hogan’s innovative ways of preparing and presenting young horses for market revolutionised the way yearlings were sold in New Zealand and Australia. Before Hogan’s era, half-handled yearlings would have the paddock mud brushed off them before being chivvied into the ring by farmhands in gumboots.

His innovations went back to his childhood, when he made a point of grooming and feeding and handling dairy calves better to compete with other farm children in the ‘Calf Club’ competitions of rural schools. He also fattened pigs to sell, always chasing an edge to produce animals better than the rest.

Even at the height of his fame—and considerable fortune—as an elite thoroughbred breeder, Sir Patrick still devoted some of his properties in the Waikato stud heartland to dairy farming. He never lost sight of the fact it was the land that raised the cattle and horses and supported the empire of chance he built. A generation later, Chris Waller sensed the same thing.

In New Zealand, perhaps the most truly agrarian western nation left, even more so than Ireland, the link between horse and land was still clear. Not many Kiwi farmers are far from a horse.

When Chris Waller waited for the school bus on weekday mornings at quarter to eight, he would see an old horse truck go past.

‘I’d wave to the driver, as you do in New Zealand,’ he recalls. One day he got to talk to the driver. ‘I said I’d like to come with him when he was taking horses to the beach. Then he advertised in a local shop window for part-time help, and I answered.

‘His name was Alister Good. He was a farmer and a semiprofessional trainer, ten minutes from home. I used to go there at weekends and holidays. He taught me to ride with a bit more confidence. He was a very good horseman, who loved his animals.

‘The day I turned fifteen I got a driver’s licence and drove his truck. I’d milk cows and work horses. I started riding trackwork, and learned everything I needed to know in a basic way.

‘I was starting to struggle a bit at school so I applied for my first full-time job. It was at Waverley with Bill Thurlow, whose parents had horses with Alister Good. He also had cows and horses on his farm.’

Waller had bought an old Honda Civic with money he had made from rearing some Murray Grey calves to sell as steers. He packed a few clothes and drove north to South Taranaki on the south-west coast of the North Island.

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