SEATBELTS SOLD SEPARATELY

Becky Klingenberg riding out on Rose. (Photographer © Sarah Duguid.)

The fearless, daredevil world of the trick rider is something to behold, writes CANDIDA BAKER

All riders have a dream, don’t they? They may change over time, but I’m sure most of us can still remember what initiated our passion for horses.

However, I have to say, that I’ve always been what you might call a saddle, or at least a bareback-bound rider. I’ve never really experienced a massive desire to stand on a galloping horse, or fling myself off my equine friend at high speed in the appropriately named suicide drag, but I sure do admire those that can trick-ride. It’s fast, furious and fun to watch, and those that do it love nothing better than the thrill of a well-practiced trick on a well-trained horse, as two of Australia’s best trick riders, Hollie Shiels and Becky (Beck) Klingenberg explain.

Gold Coast-based Hollie Shiels is one of the original members of ‘Girls, Girls, Girls,’ the team put together by trainer Heath Harris that started the whole trick-riding craze in Australia.

“I was 15 at the time,” she says, “and I’d actually gone there for a jumping lesson with Krissy Harris. I’d known Heath and Krissy since I was born, because my mum knew Heath as a teenager. Heath watched me ride, and asked me if I wanted to join the team. I’d never even heard of it, let alone seen it, but I went, ‘ok’. They were still new at training horses for trick riding then, but then over the next few years there we were – performing at Sydney Royal, at Equitana, at the Ekka in Brisbane, we were in the Outriders TV series. It was all massive, and great fun.”

But even though Hollie didn’t start her trick riding until she was a teenager – relatively late these days – she came from a perfect background to immerse herself in the world of horses. Her mother managed a large riding school at Ingleside in Sydney’s Northern Suburbs, and Hollie was riding from an early age.

“Mum bought me a black Welsh Mountain pony when I was six,” she says. “He’s still going today. He went on to our neighbour, but he’s been in our extended family for 28 years, so he’s at least 31 now – and that’s if he was only three when we got him.”

I get a wonderfully misty-eyed vision of a little girl and her black pony, but when I mention it Hollie laughs. “Actually, he was quite a little turd,” she says cheerfully. “He wasn’t very nice at all!”

Back to the trick-riding, and it wasn’t long before Tony Jablonski, the Horse Master for the nightly dinner shows at Movie World on the Gold Coast, who knew Hollie’s mother well, asked if Hollie would be interested in doing the shows.

At the time, Hollie wasn’t sure. “I didn’t want to leave where we were living, or leave my trick riding horse from Heath’s behind. I just couldn’t see myself doing it, but then he rang again a year later, and suggested that we just meet up. I agreed, along with a friend

Top: Becky Klingenberg (left) and Hollie Shiels (right) riding together in the Northern Territory. Bottom: Hollie and Daquiri Loredo Moon. of mine, and we were the first two outsiders to be hired.”

The move brought Hollie to her own business. She started off with trick riding lessons in 2015, but now – like mother like daughter – runs a riding school, although she tries to keep as many lessons as possible as oneon-one coaching. These days, she no longer trick-rides but she trains her HLS trick riding team, and helps them train their horses.

“We do different shows,” she says, “and I’m very choosy as to who I invite. I really want to see that level of passionate commitment you need to do this sport. You can have someone who shows talent and comes along for a few lessons but they don’t give it their all. Then you can get a student who may not have that much money behind them, but they are obsessed with it – they watch Youtube videos, they read about it, they come back and back, they live and breathe it, and those are the ones you know will make it.”

I don’t like to ask about accidents, but the question hangs there in the air, because after all, trick riding at the very least, looks dangerous.

Hollie laughs. “Well, the thing about trick- riding is that it actually isn’t as dangerous as it looks, the gradual progression of the horse and rider learning the trick means that by the time they do it there is total trust between them, but yes, it’s true there is the occasional stack, strangely enough not nearly as often as in general riding as a rule though, because the horses are so welltrained and safe. You’ve got to know that when a stack happens, it’s a one-off incident and not something that’s going to happen again because of a failing in the training.”

Mind you, Hollie has had her fair share of injuries, from a damaged coccyx to a badly broken arm, and pain, she says, is part of the stuntwoman’s life.

“You get used to being sore. Many years ago, I hurt my tailbone. I was doing what is called Hippodrome at Canter’ and I fell off, landing right on my tailbone. It was agonising but no permanent damage,” she says cheerfully. Another time – not connected with trick riding, she was double-barrelled by a horse that kicked out with both its hind legs – and it shattered her elbow, resulting in nine

weeks off a horse, and 12 months away from trick riding. But still, in general, she says, there is no more danger with trick riding than in any other equestrian discipline.

These days Hollie’s business is a family affair. She’s been with her partner James since 2012, and they have two children, five-yearold Zaidon and two-year-old Addison. At five, Zaidon is already rising to the trot, and strutting his stuff at Toowoomba Royal, no less, in the lead-line classes. He’s also joining in on the practice barrel.

“I can’t see any point in pushing them,” she says. “If he loves it he’ll find his way to it. Addison’s been on a horse, and even though she’s only two she’s confident on the ground. James, my partner, is a truck driver, and he’s not a rider, but he’s confident around horses.”

A later quiver to her bow, quite literally, is teaching beginner archery lessons. “I learnt archery from Outback Equine,” she says, “and my show horse is an awesome archery horse. These days I have five horses that are able to do mounted archery.”

For Hollie, life is about achieving goals, and at the age of 34, there’s much that’s she already done. “My biggest goal initially is to get a trick riding team to Equitana and to the Royals. This year we made it to the Ekka, and our name is becoming known out there. But also, I have another discipline I love, and that’s showing my five-year-old paint and pinto registered stallion, Daiquiri Loredo Moon. He’s also ANSA registered, and we’ve started to travel to some of the much bigger shows. He’s pretty close to being a finished horse, and he’s so quiet I can even use him for lessons.”

Goals are something that Hollie believes everybody should strive for. “I like to systematically kick goals and I don’t stop until I get there,” she says. “But I make my goals within limits. When we decided we had to buy our own property, I had to sell my best horse to buy it. These days Mum lives with us, she helps with feeding, and the kids, and she has a granny flat. We both ride Loredo at the shows – which I love. She’s 61 and going strong.” Carrying the flag in the Australian desert (Photographer © Sarah Duguid).

Becky Klingenberg

Sometimes, just when the universe seems at its most unkind, it offers us an unexpected opportunity.

For 27-year-old trick rider Becky Klingenberg, who is based in Katherine in the Northern Territory, it was the combination of a terrible injury to both herself and to her beautiful trick riding mare, Rose, a legend in trick riding circles, that in the end opened up the possibility for something even bigger than the already-huge life Becky has carved out for herself in a state that is a long, long way from her hometown of Melbourne.

“My parents aren’t horsey at all,” she says, of her city background. “My dad’s a truck driver – he’s touring with Jimmy Barnes at the moment, but my uncle was a steeplechaser, and my grandparents had a hobby farm, so Nan would send the retired horses to the farm. Us grandkids got into the horses, and every school holidays I would go there, eat and sleep with the horses, then I’d be miserable when I got home.”

So miserable in fact, that Becky joined Pony Club even though she didn’t have a horse.

Becky Klingenberg and Rose perform the Suicide Drag. (Photographer © Sarah Duguid)

“I used to ride my bike to the pony club grounds,” she laughs, “I’d wear my jodphurs, and leave the bike at the gate, and then just watch everything going on. The woman running it asked me if I wanted to be put on the waiting list, and I said that I would. When they rang my mother sometime later to say there was a spot for me, my mum said, ‘But she doesn’t have a horse!’ I was seven or eight at the time, and my parents had no idea I was so obsessed.”

The horse-obsessed child grew up into a “naughty” teenager. Something Becky understands looking back. “I was really good at sports, but if I wasn’t playing sports I just wasn’t interested, and I couldn’t explain it to my parents, who felt that I should just focus on my school work, but it was impossible,” she says. “All I wanted to do was go to the country, it was like a driving force inside me, so I ran away from home and went to live with my grandparents for a year. Netball became my connection to the community, and for a year I just worked on farms in any capacity I could. After I got my driving license I applied for a job in the Territory, and my Dad said that if I would go home, he’d take me there. So he did, and I’ve never left.”

It was a late entry into trick riding for Becky – with lessons from Hollie when she was in the Northern Territory – but once she discovered it, that was it. “I suddenly knew what my purpose was,” she says.

By 2016 Becky had already interned twice in the US with the Riata Ranch Cowboy Girls, before she chose to move to Kununurra in 2017. “I wanted to work as a stunt rider, and I was also working in Child Protection,” she says. “But then unfortunately in July 2018 I got my knee injury playing netball, and so I moved to Katherine to teach and train horses while I was recovering.” She was still in Kunnunarra on December 2018 Rose was injured badly in a freak accident, and Becky was devasted.

You can still hear the pain in her voice as she describes what happened. “Rose had become an icon up here – any kid could sit on her, she was such an engaging horse, but on this day I was training a girl in Kununurra who was already doing bull-riding, and I said I’d take my horses down,” she explains. “Rose is quite a dominant, sassy mare, and we get on like a house on fire, but she tried to back out of the float before the tail-gate was quite down, and I tapped her politely on the butt to warn her – I’ll never know what went on for her, because she just suddenly got a fright, and my heart aches because of it. She kicked back at the tail-gate, and wouldn’t stop until finally she did because of the pain, and by then she was in a terrible state. I’ve thought and thought about it, and I think what happened is that I always closed the back of the car before I took the horses off, and on that occasion I hadn’t closed it.

...they read about it, they come back and back, they live and breathe it, and those are the ones you know will make it.

Hollie Shiels’ HLS Trick Riding Team

I think perhaps she didn’t realise it was me behind her.”

With no equine vet nearby, Becky and the local bovine vet did their best, but within just a short time it was obvious something was wrong, and the leg was very swollen. “I took her straight to Darwin where the vet told me she had an infection in the bone, and I should put her down. I said to him, ‘no way, there has to be another solution.’ He said he’d put a case together, and I went and sat in a café for an hour.”

Becky sat there trying to make sense of it all. Her knee operation had personally cost her $18,500 because she wanted to have it done quickly, and now she knew she was facing a vet bill of thousands to save Rose.

“But what I thought was that Rose had earned me every cent I’d made trick-riding, that I am who I am because of her, and I thought that I had to try,” she says.

When the vet put the care package together for Becky, she was facing down the barrel of a $12,000 bill, but when her mother, who is an admin on her Facebook page, went to write the terrible news, Facebook prompted her to create a fundraiser, and her mother encouraged Becky to go ahead. “That really didn’t sit well with me,” says Becky. “But mum said that people would want to help her, and she was right! People donated over half the amount, and sent all these beautiful messages about how their child had met Rose, or they’d been to see us ride. It was amazing – there she was, a brumby straight off a station, and now she was famous around the world.”

At first it seemed as if everything would be sweet, but then there was a major setback in the form of another infection. This time Becky was determined to pay for everything herself. “In the end the vet bills were over $26,500,” she says, “but I don’t regret a single cent. She’s a bit wonky on that leg, but she’s recovered, she gets around, she’s happy, and she’s such a funny horse, and every day I’m so grateful.”

And in the strange way of the world, Rose’s retirement is what’s allowed Becky to make the decision to go to the US for as long as she needs with her hearing in March this year that she’d been awarded a scholarship to go to the US to work with the Mississippi Trixie Chicks,

“Every time I go there I get better and better. I’m so happy my career has been so successful with Rose, it took me eight months to realise the purpose. I’d be crying inside asking why it happened, when we were both so fit and healthy. They say it takes five years to make a great trick rider, and that would have been this year – and what the hell happened? I didn’t hurt my knee trick riding and she didn’t hurt herself in a trick ride – she hurt it going 3k’s down the road to help someone out! Hooley Dooley.”

But Rose’s retirement is looking good. She’s in a lush paddock on a friend’s station, where, in return for keeping Rose, she’s lent their daughter a trick saddle.

For everything that’s happened in her relatively short life, Becky has developed a remarkably optimistic philosophy.

“I don’t like to hear limiting words from anyone,” she says. “Parents should give their kids positive feedback. Being supportive, mentoring your kids, finding them mentors – these things are important. Also for kids to learn that even if they don’t have what they want they can save towards it, work towards their goal and get there in the end. That’s what I want to teach. Prepare yourself the best you can. Fight through your set-backs. Hope things go your way. And if they do be thankful and be grateful for your blessing.”