Former Royal Australian Navy chaplain Mel Baker with retired racehorse Treble Clef at Horse Aid’s indoor training ring in the NSW southern highlands. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardiancott Brodie and Mel Baker stand in the middle of the indoor training ring on a horse farm in the New South Wales southern highlands. A magnificent black gelding and former racehorse, Treble Clef, canters around the rails, stopping now and then, pricking its ears and regarding them quizzically.
Baker smiles and nods. She does as Brodie suggests. And the eight-year-old Treble Clef follows her when she wants. Stops when she raises the whip. A sense of calm control pervades the ring as Brodie brokers a relationship between Baker, who was traumatised by her military service, and the gelding who is, like many former racehorses, damaged by years of track work.Soon Treble Clef is nuzzling Baker’s shoulder as they pose for the camera.
The use of equine therapy – whereby well-adjusted horses are brought together with people suffering anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder or depression – is well established. But Horse Aid is novel for its pairing of thoroughbred ex-racehorses needing to be retrained and damaged veterans.
Brodie and Baker, who became the documentary’s associate producer, say that during the residential course, few veterans want to share their “war stories”. Yet they do in the documentary. He talks of traumatised ex-personnel as “un-soldiering” in his programs and of the horses as “un-racing” – a symbiotic process of mutual deinstitutionalisation.
“So if we can give them confident leadership, well, this is when they can start their un-racing, which is just like un-soldiering. And this is great for the veterans because they have lost their confidence too. And when that communication happens … we are starting on some serious recovery.”
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