Kimberley Moonbeam the Fourth
Melinda Tankard Reist

Surely every young girl should be given the chance to learn to ride on a horse called Kimberley Moonbeam the Fourth. That was the name of the Welsh Mountain pony who taught me to ride, though mostly we called her Kim.
I had loved horses for as long as I could remember. This love was fed by my father’s stories of his Shetland pony Topsy.  Topsy had been given to my grandfather by his father. Dad rode her to school every day and when Topsy had a foal they were even allowed into the house. She lived till her 30s. Dad also spoke with affection of the family Clydesdale, Roanie, who worked the family property in rural Victoria and I could picture this magnificent white and pink creature tilling the soil which had sustained five generations of Tankards.  My horse love developed with a picture book of sweet-faced Shetlands, palominos, piebalds, Spanish dancing horses, dressage horses and English hacks; novels like My Friend Flicka, Thunderhead, Green Grass of Wyoming, and Summer at World’s End about children who had run away from their cruel home to live on an abandoned farm and care for horses they rescued from the knackery; and the Marlboro Man horses in my grandmother’s Women’s Weeklies, treasured finds for my scrap book.
Kim belonged to Lee. Well, she got him from a bloke in Donald for a lend—a lend that lasted years. I met Lee through a friend of my mother. They were racing people. Lee was about eleven, I was a year older. I rode my bike to their place. When we met it was like resuming an old friendship. She was tall and weedy, her defining feature the mass of blonde hair which fell all the way down her back. Lee introduced me to a world of racehorses: Rapeed, Naretha, Argos, Maranina. I still have hair from their tails in a matchbox.
Kim was a bag of bones when Lee got her but she soon fattened up. It was only later we realised that it was more than good chaff and molasses—not to mention candy canes, lollies and the sweet biscuits she so enjoyed—that caused her to swell so rapidly.
Kim loved to ‘ride work’ with the racehorses. She didn’t seem to realise she was a third their size. Lee would take Kim out on the circuit with strapper Jan and one of the racehorses; they’d come back, take out another horse, and Kim would go back again with them. She never seemed to tire.
But one day Kim seemed particularly stubborn. We could not get her to move in the yard and we were keen to ride. Lee wanted to work on my cantering technique. The afternoon was planned. Despite much kicking and harsh words, she stood firm. Something was wrong but we were too foolish to realise.
The next morning, Lee found a white colt with a black head and white blaze, fully formed but stillborn, in the paddock. We were devastated.
Time passed then one magical day my dad gave me Rajah, a 14 hands-high three-quarter thoroughbred chestnut gelding we found in the newspaper. Dad got me a new saddle, orange saddle blanket, blue-and-yellow-striped girth, a woven two-toned leather bridle, brushes and saddle soap. He made a tack shed out of an old water tank where we kept lucerne hay and chaff and all the horse gear.
In the summer Lee and Kim would meet us at six a.m. and we’d take off through the scrub along the Murray river, galloping madly, jumping fallen gum trees. We’d leap off our horses into the river in our underwear then dry off in the sun while our horses munched grass on the river bank. Then back home where we hosed the sweat and foam from our mounts and refreshed ourselves with homemade iced coffee full of sugar and icecream. Our horses were freedom for us, young girls disappearing all day and nobody ever worried.
I rang Lee last week. It was the first time we’d spoken in twenty years. She’d become a jockey, riding at Flemington in Melbourne, interstate and overseas. She’d strapped for Ark Regal who won $600,000 then flopped at stud. A two-year-old, 17 hands-high colt reared on Lee in the starting gates at Flemington. Another horse she was riding crashed through the running rails. These accidents left her with fourteen broken bones, a twice-broken nose which was now caved in, a punctured lung, a plate in her cheekbone to hold her face together, a stuffed shoulder and a scar under her left eye. I could not imagine her face so damaged.
‘I had to learn how to get on a horse again,’ she told me. ‘I knew there was no way I was staying on the ground cleaning out stalls…’ They’re an addiction, race horses. But Lee’s suffering went much deeper than physical injury caused by horses. Twin baby boys, born too early, buried too soon.
I thought of the dead foal. For so many years I felt responsible for his death. ‘Lee, it was our fault Kim’s foal died. I’ve never forgotten and we were to blame that her lovely colt lay dead. She was pregnant and we rode her anyway.’
‘No,’ said Lee. ‘We did not know she was pregnant. No one knew. We We wouldn’t have ridden her if we’d have known the foal was due. The foal was out of season… there was something wrong.’
‘But I thought…’
‘No Mel. We didn’t know.’
Kim lived to a good age. A three-year-old child was riding on her back not long before she died.

Melinda Tankard Reist is author of Defiant Birth: Women Who Resist Medical Eugenics (2006) and Giving Sorrow Words: Women’s Stories of Grief after Abortion. She has been a contributor to China for Women: Travel and Culture, Cat Tales, A Girl’s Best Friend, and HorseDreams.

From: HorseDreams: The Meaning of Horses in Women’s Lives
Eds. Jan Fook, Susan Hawthorne and Renate Klein
pp 38-39

Website: http://www.spinifexpress.com.au