I was born at Murwillumbah in the north coast, New South Wales and we lived at Tweed Heads.
Well, my father first put me on his old horse, he called Ned, that he used to ride to the banana plantation,
and when he was coming home of an evening I would meet him up the road, see him coming and
have a ride back on Ned. He would put me up and that’s where I first rode, and I took a liking
to riding and I loved horses from there. And then there were some friends that lived out of town on
a dairy called Barrett’s and their sons were all riding ponies and they had quiet horses and I used
to get out there as often as I could to ride with them on their ponies and be double-dinked by
the older fellows and I would have to hang on. Well, that was great teaching. Well, right from
when I was 15 I used to go bush with some friends, plus my butcher friend, we used to go and help him
with the bullocks, and then these other people said, Well, you’d better come out and we’re going to mark
calves out Moruya down west of Bodalla, about 30 mile, and I said, I’d love to do that.
So I spent a week out there with them, with my pony Trixie, and of course that’s riding through
the bush and mustering cattle in the scrub. And then later I went out with these people when there’d be a few
renegades, like scrubber cattle, and we’d run them in and quieten them. But that was the greatest
thing in the world for me, going cross-country. I had no fear of galloping through the bush and
jumping logs and creeks ditches and what have you. So that was a great introduction to the
cross-country and three-day eventing. In 1955 I was lucky enough to buy a horse and I called him
Bennalong and the first year I won the twelfth stone novice hunt in Sydney’s Royal with him, and I’d only
had him less than six months. And then from there on I started to showjump him and the
next year at Easter they had the first three-day event ever held in Australia, and I was fortunate
enough to win that. Well, after winning the first three-day event I was really deadset then that
that’s what I wanted to do, was ride at the Olympic Games. So during the next six months after that
we went looking for horses with some friends all around New South Wales, but lo and behold when we
got to our last day at Cooma we found Mirrabooka. He was the type of horse that I was looking for
for a three-day event horse, a bit more robust than Bennelong and more maybe reliable. Bennelong was
a bit cunning sometimes and he would stop or run off, but I taught Mirabooka to jump and he was
such a kind horse and so easy to train. So that was 57, 58, 59, and 60 we made the team. Well, our coach
and trainer was Franz Mairinger who come from the Spanish riding school and he had seven years of
pupil there plus six years as an instructor and he was such a great instructor that he knew so
much about dressage and how to get your horses to perform well that it was unbelievable. And that was
something that really makes your horse much more pliable and supple for his jumping and all that
sort of thing, and one thing leads into another and makes it so much a better athlete in your
horse. And of course then when we got to England Australia didn’t have much of a reputation as
after the first team as being good dressage riders. So after three months in England we competed at
Badminton as a team, and lo and behold our team finished up first, second and fourth and ninth and
eleventh, so that was five riders. So that was a great shock to the Brits and the international
people, and they wrote up the next week in their Horse and Hound: The Australians had a lucky run
with their little ponies from Australia. We had four months before the Olympic Games and that was
a good time to school our horses more, and improve them, and they had a combined training event at
Great Auckland, an international event in England. And when it was run, about five or six weeks before the
Olympic Games, Mirabooka won that day, and one of the judges said, That horse will go close
to winning the dressage in the three-day event at Rome. Well, the story is, after that, a week or so
later, he jumped the steeplechase schooling brilliant and we decided that he was at his peak and we just
had to keep on his dressage, and lo and behold two or three days later we let him out of his box
and he was lame in a hind leg. So that was five weeks before the games, so that was a big shock,
and I had a reserve horse that did have a stop him, although he was brilliant, so we worked on from
there, but Mirabooka didn’t work, he was just let out every day and hosed his leg and halstered till
we left, went to Rome and we were over there a couple of weeks beforehand, two or three
weeks actually, and then we decided we had to ride him and start working him. And they said to
me then, when coming up to the last few days when we had to nominate the horse each rider was riding,
and they said, Now, which horse would you ride out of the two, Mirrabooka or Adelaide. And I said, Well,
Adelaide has a stop. Mirrabooka won’t stop. So I’ll stick with Mirrabooka. Well, they
Olympic Games when they opened we were able to go and march with the Australian team, which was very
exciting and we enjoyed that, and the dressage was on a few days later. So Mirrabooka was the second
of our horses to go, and because of the break that he had with his leg being crook, he stiffened
up and wasn’t near the supple a horse that he was before that happened, and he didn’t do too well
in the dressage, he was down pretty low on the score. But then when he went in a cross-country
we were up there with a pretty good chance. After walking the course, I was quite confident that Mirrabooka
could handle it and jump it well providing I didn’t run him too hard because of I had to nurse
him around to make sure he went clear. But when I was about to leave they come to me and said,
Look, Bill’s had a fall, Bill Roycroft on Solo, and they’ve taken him away in a helicopter to
hospital, so you’ve got to go clear. So I knew I had to nurse my horse in any case to get clear and
I just rode him accordingly. And as I was riding in, at the finish of the cross-country, they announced
he was the first clear horse on the course so far out of – he was number 27 to go – so that was a great
thrill. As the course went on, the jumps were very big jumps and there were some I think a little bit too
treacherous really, because a lot of horses didn’t get home. As a matter of fact I will say that there
were 38 horses that started in the showjumping the last day out of 70 odd horses in the beginning.
So that gives you an idea of how tough it was and Bill had the fall at these pipes on top of the hill,
about the fourth or fifth last fence, and when you’re approaching them you were looking straight
through the pipes, away down the hill, and yet momentarily you didn’t gauge the distance they
were away from you because of that image. Mirrabooka touched them behind but he cleared it
quite well and apart from that, but Bill crashed on it. And that’s how that sort of put our team
in a precarious position. After the cross-country the Australian team was in front quite a long way,
which I didn’t add earlier, then come Mirrabooka showjumping and he jumped quite a nice clear round.
And then Laurie Morgan came out from Salad Days and he had one fence down which didn’t make a lot
of difference, but it still left us well in front as a team, and it also left Laurie in front with
an individual gold, and myself with the individual silver. We were so elated about winning gold, and
two gold medals, mind you, and the silver medal for Australia. It was unbelievable the excitement that
went around the arena at that particular moment. Then came the presentations and the thing that
really set me was when the Australian flags were going up and that was something that we could
reward to Australia, that we’d won those medals. Those flags just told the story. Well, this is the
jacket that I wore in the dressage and the showjumping in the Olympic Games, and there’s not many
people that have the Australian flag on their jacket, unless you’ve competed for the country.
The gold medal that we received at Rome was only one single medal for the team, so the Equestrian
Federation had the team gold medal reprinted for each member of the team again, so we got one
each, and that’s how that come to be here. So that was fantastic really. You had something now to show
people when they say, Where’s your medals? That’s lovely. The silver medal, I’m very proud of it
because that was just my individual medal and it’s so great to have it. The saddle that I
used for the Olympic Games was bought for me, the pony club at Moruya did, to buy a saddle for myself
when I got to England. So I bought this saddle, it’s called a periani, an Italian saddle, jumping
saddle, and it was such a good saddle to ride in that it wore out eventually and the tree got broken one,
thing and another, and I got another replica of exactly the same saddle from the company in Italy
that made the other one and this one’s the same, they made and sent it to me. And I’m still riding
in it, such a great saddle. Well, after the Olympic Games I started to train a few racehorses. So we
went looking and we found a horse we call Whiskey Road. So it wasn’t too long after he got stock on
the ground that one turned out to be Just a Dash, who won a Melbourne Cup, and the other one
that turned out to be Strawberry Road. He won the Derby, he won the Cox Plate and he was an
international horse, they took him overseas and he won great races. He won in Germany, he won
in Great Britain, I think, and also in America, and that’s where he finished up being a stallion. So
that was a great lift. On top of that I was able to breed a few racehorses from the mares I had
from Whiskey Road and that enabled me now to be able to train a couple of racehorses of our own
that we’ve bred and that’s what we enjoy doing at the moment. Well, apart from training racehorses
some friends that invited me to go for a ride in the mountains for a pack ride, so riding in
the mountains took over then, for the last 20 years, and it’s been a great thrill to go up there once a
year, and sometimes twice a year, with these friends and rough it and have a great time. The thing is
about all the riding that I’ve done and I’ll always put it back to the fact that I rode in the bush
and become fearless in the bush and that really stuck with me, and still does when I’m riding.
Schooling of horses, it’s a slow process and it’s a very interesting process and
it doesn’t happen overnight. Pace them slowly. Then you’ve got a horse for life.