Thank a horse!

Horse teams at work at Waranga Reservoir in northern Victoria 1924. From the collection of the State Library of Victoria.

​As you next fly down the road in your car, gliding over smooth wide roads, with your air conditioning on and your headlights burning bright, spare a thought for early Australian settlers, who knew none of the ease of travel that we enjoy today. For centuries before, and up until around 80 years ago, the humble horse was king.

A sure sign of prosperity in the early colony of Australia was to have a stable of well-bred horses, working horses, not racehorses. In the early days of Victoria’s colonial settlement, the front pages of the local newspapers were littered with adverts offering new breeding opportunities with the best new horse bloodlines to arrive in the colony.
 
Horses who had survived the sailing passage from the northern hemisphere became a bankable commodity, and through the breeding process, early settlers developed the ideal horse for Australian working conditions.
 
Every aspect of the successful establishment of the state that became Victoria was made so much easier by horsepower, from everyday transport to farm work and land clearing. No doubt there was lots of work in those days for blacksmiths and saddlers in keeping the horses in shoes, harnesses, saddles and yokes.

Bourke Street on the morning of the horse sales 1879.
David Syme & Co. Out of copyright. from the collection of the State Library of Victoria.

Ken and Les Yeaman riding to school at Echuca West, Victoria,
​around 1926. © All rights reserved. From the collection of Roger Kenith Yeaman.

Children too, grew into expert horse handlers after a lifetime spent tending and riding horses, often as the only viable way to get to school. Imagine the shocked faces if one was to do the school run these days with your finest filly!
 
The same way we now race cars, at local community fairs across Victoria, local men drove their teams of horses or bullocks in competition to see who could claim the crown of the district’s finest team. Being proclaimed a winner brought with it, not just the prestige of fine horsemanship, but undoubtedly offers of work from local farmers and local construction projects. Most early farm clearing across the state was undertaken with teams of horses and bullocks doing the heaviest of work. There was also all manner of products to deliver to markets in Melbourne from inland farms.
 
By the 1850s there was a boom in carting work conveying thousands of people and their goods to and from the goldfields across Victoria. It was in this pursuit, that my own Yeaman ancestors are thought to have worked for a time.  Running a carting business would have offered a secure income compared to the backbreaking and sometimes fruitless pursuit of mining.
 
Horses were also everywhere to be seen in the city, and in 1869 there were even horse drawn trams in the Melbourne streets.[i] Horses carried water, blocks of stone to build the city buildings, and pulled shovels. By the 1870s, the roads of northern Victoria were frequented by whole families moving all their goods with the help of those trusty horses, as they made the journey further inland during the times of land selection. Drays carried household goods, building materials and people, and all the while horses were both witness and participants in every aspect of daily life.
 
Those early roads were rock hard and dusty in summer, and could easily turn treacherous and impassable in rain. Another of my ancestors William Heppell lost his life after becoming bogged in a rainstorm, as he strained his heart trying to free his dray from the mud, near Echuca in Victoria. 

A typical early colonial buggy with two horses, in northern Victoria. Driver unknown, Out of copyright.

A variety of buggies, gigs, carts and drays, some imported, and some built locally, provided the means to transport people and goods across large distances.  Buggies, like the one shown in this picture had four wheels and were usually pulled by one to two horses. Spring carts had just two wheels, and drays were usually low sided in order to allow all manner of goods to be carried upon them, including wheat bags, wool bales and other goods. Before the arrival of the train, the nation was built using just horse-drawn transport, and later, the paddlesteamer trade.
 
Outside most public buildings and stores of the 19th and early 20th century, water troughs provided sustenance to the army of horses that fuelled society’s every whim. When the First World War began, Australian troops were accompanied by around 130,000, mainly ‘Waler’ horses, who were distinct to the country.[2]
​Those horses fought and died alongside our soldiers.
 
Whether it was delivering your goods to market, large scale engineering works, plowing of fields, making of roads, or simply visiting family, in those early times there was a horse ever present.
​
Now a century later, we once again stand on the edge of yet another transport revolution with electric vehicles and driverless cars.  One can love their car, and maybe even give it a name, but our personal connection to our form of transport in the modern age holds little of the historic bond between man and the horse. The horse may have faded from public consciousness for all but a select group of people, but we should all remember, that the world we live in today, still owes so much to this beautiful and noble animal.
 
 
SOURCES:
[1] State Library of Victoria, Blog by Paul, Victoria’s early Horse Trams, https://blogs.slv.vic.gov.au/such-was-life/victorias-early-horse-trams/
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-04-25/australian-wwi-war-horse-breed-waler-still-being-bred/5412402