Shine Awards 2021: Horse trainer Tamara Coakley nominated

This Kyneton horse trainer lost nearly everything in a horror car crash, but was determined her ability to ride would not be one of them.

Horse trainer Tamara Coakley with her horses on her farm near Kyneton. Picture: Zoe Phillips

After the traumatic road accident 10 years ago that crushed her spine, femur, lungs and ribs, fractured her skull and left her seven-year-old nephew dead, Tamara Coakley was told she might not survive, and would certainly never walk again.

“That was the prognosis,” said the talented horse trainer from Kyneton, whose life was torn apart on a highway in northern Victoria in 2010, when the car she and her sister, and her sister’s children, were travelling in was hit by a truck.

“That accident was life shattering and altering for our entire family. It was a pretty hard journey.”

She lost a lot that day, but was determined that riding horses would not be one of those things.

“I never in my mind allowed myself to think that I wasn’t going to get out of that wheelchair,” she said. “I just didn’t believe that would happen. Maybe I was a little delusional.”

Shine Awards nominee Tamara Coakley. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Tamara fought through a year of rehab to finally be able to sit on a horse again.

Improved mobility came slowly, and painfully, but finally in 2015 she returned to her passion – teaching classical horsemanship skills to others.

“I do this because I really love horses, but I also care about people.”

On a mission to help riders develop a strong connection with their horses, and understand what she calls “the language of the horse”, Tamara runs clinics across the nation, from Western Australia to NSW’s Hunter Valley, the south coast to Tasmania.

“Losing my physicality completely changed my experience with horses,” Tamara said.

With chronic pain in her spine, which is fused with rods and screws, she has to put conscious thought into every movement and has modified much of her training routine.

“My eye is very trained to see imbalance and restriction of movement because I’ve experienced so much myself,” she said. “When you go through something that really does blow your entire life apart and you lose people and lose the sense of who you are and everything that made you capable, you have to recreate it all.

With a talent for connecting with both horses and riders, Tamara’s approach can be boiled down to the phrase: “Don’t get stuck in the story”.

“That is exactly what I feel with horses and with people in the work I do. It is very easy to get stuck in the process. Horses are very much in the present and staying present can be a huge issue for us as humans.”

Tamara’s past sits with her every day, but she hopes she can show riders that it doesn’t have to define their relationship with their horse.

“Initially it is so incredibly painful to think about what you have lost,” she said. “As you work through things, although it never goes away, you learn to carry it in a different way. You tuck it in your pocket and carry it along.

“That is what I help people recognise. They can move forward from that story and start something new.”

Tamara is a nominee in The Weekly Times Shine Awards, supported by Harvey Norman. The campaign celebrates rural women in six categories: belief, courage, dedication, grace, passion and spirit. Nominate a rural woman who deserves to be recognised in the form below: