It’s a bitter-sweet task to catalogue a dying trade. And it involves many emotions – from the excitement of unearthing fresh stories, connections, and facts long buried, to the sensation of living in a nostalgia bubble, as you spend days, weeks, months ploughing through texts from an era that’s faded from view.

When Melbourne horse fanatic and property investor Michael Drapac called me out of the blue one day in 2015 to ask if I’d write the history of the Australian Stock Saddle as part of a museum project he had planned, suffice to say, he was preaching to the converted.