These men left a legacy of true grit. We must honour it
RM Williams and my great-grandfather Tom Quilty set out to prove that grit and determination can overcome even the toughest challenge. God only knows what they’d make of young people today, writes Lucy Carne.
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Two sun-leathered bushmen sit in a bar and over their beers lament the lack of grit in young people.
Why don’t they have the stamina and will to ride 100 miles through the bush in one day, like they themselves did in their youth, they pondered.
These good mates were a swagman turned boot maker by the name of RM Williams and the cattle baron and bush poet Tom Quilty, my great-grandfather.
Williams wanted to do something about it, to make a statement about the need to honour endurance, hard work and motivation.
And so, with 1000 pounds pitched in from my great-grandfather, they started the Tom Quilty Cup — a gruelling race of 160km in 24 hours through rugged forest.
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The Cup is now, 53 years later, the biggest professional endurance ride in the Southern Hemisphere and famed as one of the toughest horse races in the world.
From midnight this Friday until midnight Saturday in the Sunshine Coast’s Imbil State Forest, more than 300 riders will set off in the pitch black with just the stars and their equine friends for company.
This isn’t a race where jockeys whip their animals around a track. It is a race that honours the physical and emotional bond and intuition between a rider and a horse.
While competition is intense, the Cup embodies the motto “to complete is to win”.
Competitors have registered from across Australia as well as Japan, the US, Canada and Estonia.
But what is staggering is the age of the riders. There’s a 77-year-old from Murrumbateman and, incredibly, 29 juniors, including three 12-year-olds, three 13-year-olds and five 14-year-olds.
“There is a great camaraderie, a peer support group among the young riders,” Tom Quilty Gold Cup managing committee chairwoman Kim Moir says.
“When we ask them what will they do if their parent or riding partner pulls out, they tell us ‘I’ll go on without them’.”
Bob Sample, 78, of the Sunshine Coast Hinterland competed with his son Brook when he was 12. This year Brook will compete with his 12-year-old son Zac and 15-year-old son Matty.
“I’ve developed an obsession in my family,” Bob tells me.
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These young riders represent my great-grandfather’s indefatigable spirit for adventure.
Born in Normanton, in the remote Gulf country of north Queensland to an Irish immigrant family with six children, he grew up on stations until he was sent to boarding school at Nudgee College in Brisbane.
There he clashed with the Brothers and struggled to conform to the strict Catholic discipline, longing for his childhood chasing wild horses and cattle through the scrub.
Less than two years later he was back on the family station.
His skill was in the saddle and he honed his famous horsemanship riding with the Forest Devils — a band of reckless young stockmen.
Williams was said to have called Quilty one of Australia’s greatest horsemen and credited him with keeping the bootmaker “humble” as his fortunes grew.
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Quilty was ambitious and energetic and was known for being a “menace” with little patience for laziness or apathy.
God only knows what my great-grandad would have made of the unemployed clowns gluing themselves to zebra crossings or children who spend all day sitting in front of screens.
While he wrote a book of poems The Drover’s Cook and Other Verses to raise money for the Royal Flying Doctors’ Service, he was no angel.
Quilty had to divorce his first wife Lillian and marry Olive, the teenage daughter of the neighbouring property owner, with whom he had an affair. They remained together until he died after a number of strokes in 1979.
But despite his flaws, Quilty was undeniably one of Queensland’s iconic characters — as outback as the smell of a leather saddle in the sun, a camp fire smouldering in the dust at dawn, a swag covered in prickle seeds.
There is the common and ignorant refrain that we have no culture. Yet, we do.
It flows through the stories of outback legends like my grandfather and RM Williams and in events like the Tom Quilty Cup, the Birdsville races, Brophy’s boxing tent, the campdrafts and stockman challenges across our great state.
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They are the calloused hand of our heritage that we must not let go of.
They link us to the time when our country’s survival depended on people and their horses.
And they remind us that determination can overcome the toughest of challenges.
As the young riders set off this weekend, my great-grandfather will be looking down from his cattle station in the sky, content in the knowledge that his true grit lives on.
Lucy Carne is editor of RendezView.com.au
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