8 minute read
Ned the Baby Brumby’s New Beginning
FEATURE
It was in the early days of the last decade when her life was suddenly changed forever, writes LOUISE BLAMPIED.
My mum and I started riding with Cochran Horse Treks in the Snowy Mountains in 2007, when I was only 14.
We loved it so much that every year we would go back and work for our keep, and I can still remember the exact date – the 6th of January 2010 – when Ned came into our lives.
We were on a New Year’s trek, riding out from Wares Yards campsite in Kosciuszko National Park. On the second last day of the trek we were skirting around a plain on our way home from Harvey’s Hut, the historic stockman’s shelter, when Peter Cochran, the trekking company’s owner, pointed out a lone Brumby foal on the far side of the plain. He told us that there were multiple reasons for abandonment: perhaps a new stallion had taken over the mob, and was eliminating any of the old stallion’s progeny; or maybe the foal’s mother had died during birth or shortly after from any number of causes – prolapse, retained placenta or perhaps there’d been a wild dog attack. It was even possible that the foal had been chased off by his own mother due to a still-suckling yearling foal, and the mare’s inability to feed both offspring. Whatever the reason, even at a distance, we could tell this foal would die without our help.
So Peter and I set off to investigate, leaving the other staff and guests under a shady tree. As we got closer, it didn’t look good. The foal had been bitten on his neck and over his eye. The neck wound was festering, and we were afraid that he must already be blind in the affected eye. Not only that, but he was a week old at the most, and very skinny. At the time I never doubted that he would make it, but looking back, I honestly can’t believe that he did. I was riding a grey Australian Stock Horse named Ash, and to both Peter’s and my surprise, the foal locked his sights on Ash, and followed us back to the group.
By the time we got back to where the others were waiting for us, we could see the foal was tiring quickly, and he kept wandering off. I wasn’t going to let that happen (nor was anyone else for that matter), so we rounded him up and set him back on course to follow the other horses, helped by my horse Ash giving him a few encouraging nips on the backside.
The Snowy Mountains are legendary for their afternoon summer storms, and what would this story be if we didn’t
LEFT: Ned the Brumby foal following Louise’s grey stock horse Ash. RIGHT: Swimming in Lake Eucumbene.
have to hurry off the plain to avoid being caught in a thunderstorm?
Peter decided that to get all the trekkers back safely we would take a shortcut across Boggy Plain, aptly named for the deep mud that encompasses most of that grassy, wet flatland. Our trusty mountain ponies jumped and stumbled through the deep mud and got us all across safely, until it was just the foal on the other side, unsure of how to navigate this dangerously deep terrain. Heartbreakingly he turned away from us and started to wander off in the other direction.
There was not a dry eye in the house, and Peter, I’m sure just to shut the crying women up, went back across the bog, and used the breast of his horse Caesar to push the foal through the mud. I truly believe that it was at this point that the foal must have begun to sense he was safe. We named the foal Ned Kelly because we had first spotted him on what we thought was Kelly’s Plain, and although this was later confirmed to be Little Boggy Plain, the name stuck anyway! track with his tail raised, nibbling at bits of grass, and whinnying out to the other horses. It was only a short ride back to camp from there, maybe half an hour, and it seemed as if he had already adopted us.
As we rode into Wares Yards camp- ground, Ned was the star of the show. It was just a few days after New Year’s Eve, so the site was unusually crowded, with everyone craning their necks to see the dishevelled little Brumby trotting through the camp.
As we approached our truck, we pretended it was business as usual while Peter and a couple of others cornered Ned on his blind side and wrestled him into the horse float, depositing him onto a pile of warm, dry horse rugs. on the bottle and was spoiled rotten by Judy, Peter’s wife!
Mum and I flew back home to WA after that trip, and I started my last year of high school. After Year 12, I worked on a cattle station in remote Northern Queensland, and was taught the basics of horse breaking, which I then put to use on Ned – not that he needed much to be gentled to saddle.
He proved to be a great horse. After we’d started him and after not even a day in the yards, Ned and I, Peter’s granddaughter Holly, and a mate went for a ride in the hills behind Yaouk, where Ned had to navigate skinny bush tracks, hills, creeks, had his first canter, and even jumped a log!
I was working for Cochran Horse Treks pretty much full time at that point, so I would take Ned out on any of the treks that I could. I’d ended up volunteering/ working for keep for three years, and then working for four seasons after I finished high school.
That January there was a lull in work, so I took the opportunity to work for an acclaimed Brumby trainer down near Tumbarumba, NSW. After a bad fall from one of his colts, I found myself in
LEFT: Bringing baby home across Boggy Plain. RIGHT: Louise and Ned on a seven-day trail ride to Corryong in 2014.
hospital with an acute kidney injury. I was beside myself with fear and pain, but I wasn’t ready to give up on Ned’s training, and with a little (or maybe big) dash of stubbornness, it was Ned who helped me ‘get back on the horse’.
That was the drill for the next couple of years through the wet and dry seasons – stock work in the winter, and horse trekking in the summer. In 2013 I was due to fly down from Cloncurry to join Cochran Horse Treks for their annual
160km, seven-day trek across state from Adaminaby NSW to Corryong in Victoria. The trek was timed to coincide with the
Man from Snowy River Festival – a fiveday stockman’s challenge and horselovers extravaganza. But tragically the owner and manager of the station I was working on passed away in a windmill accident, and not wanting to leave the crew short-handed, I cancelled my plans.
Ned and I had to wait until the next year to complete the seven-day trek, but complete it we did.
We’ve had so many adventures together, whether we were on a trek, or even just spending a lazy day at home in the Yaouk Valley, hanging out, and having a splash in the Murrumbidgee River.
I stopped working for Peter in January 2015, and worked in the mines in WA for the winter. Then in October 2015 I started working for another company in the same area called Reynella Rides. It was during the next winter while I was working for Reynella, and subsequently Bolaro Station, that I lived in Adaminaby and kept Ned in a paddock near town. The weekly agistment payments to Old Pete, the paddock’s owner, were immediately reimbursed through Pete’s creation of carrot sandwiches, a favourite treat for Ned and the other horses that lived there!
There are so many awesome memories from those years spent with Ned in the mountains, but some of my favourites include how much he loved to jump anything and everything – even when I didn’t want him to; mustering cattle on a friend’s property; a special Christmas trek with a friend, camping at Old Campsite, visiting Currango Homestead, and watching Brumbies running on Currango Plain; attempting to campdraft in the Adaminaby Draft; swimming bareback in Lake Eucumbene; double dinking bareback; attending the 2016 Save the Brumbies rally at Bullocks Hill; and mustering cattle at Bolaro Station in the middle of winter in temperatures of -10⁰C, with icicles hanging off Ned’s whiskers (he was not impressed!)
There was also the occasional disaster, like the day we competed in the Dalgety Team Penning and Stockman’s Challenge. I managed to wrap a sheepskin around Ned’s back legs before he took off through the crowd, bucking and knocking kids off their ponies left, right, and centre!
I don’t know much about life, but I know I bloody love that horse, and the stormy summer’s day he found us in 2010 changed the course of my life. Ned’s my mate, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
These days I’m living near Byron Bay doing horse rides on the beach and working as a farrier, but those mountain memories will never be replaced. And just by the by, all these years later Mum still works for Cochran Horse Treks!
