Riders like Natalie Blundell make the world of eventing such a wonderful place to be. There is something distinctively Australian about Nat, like the smell of gum leaves, like the sound of a magpie, like the harshly beautiful landscape of the country where she lives, just past Yass.
This is no ritzy training centre, no plaything of the mega-rich. Nat and her partner, Brad, own 40 acres, divided into well fenced paddocks, and a shed. To water the horses, the four wheel drive loads up at the dam, and then replenishes the water in each paddock. It wasn’t entirely surprising that Natalie was recently made ‘groomless’ when the girl who was doing the job, snatched it, complaining that the watering process was too much for her. So when we arrived, Nat was being helped tack up by her Thai student, Namchok ‘Mat’ Jantakad.
Recently, Nat and Brad purchased the 40 acres next door, and with that a cute farm cottage, so they can at least now live on the property. It is one of the most beautiful locations imaginable, it will be a truly gorgeous place… but like most things in Natalie Blundell’s life, it is going to take some serious hard work.
Nat likes the rugged appeal of her place: “We try hard to keep the feel of the property. My horses like living like this, outdoors, that’s why mine are a bit hairier than everyone else’s. Once our stables are finished, I’ll feel a bit more comfortable clipping them up and stabling them on occasions, but it will still be out in the paddock most of the time. I’ve worked Algebra from the paddock for years, and he is happy and he is sound, and that’s the main thing. Once they are used to being out and having fun, they don’t tend to injure themselves.”
“Algebra never misses a beat, he is such a tough animal, a very sturdy little horse, and being out there free in the paddock, you’ve got the circulation going all the time, they never get swollen legs from standing around.”
How did you end up with Algebra?
“I first saw Algebra with another rider on him, and I thought, he’s a nice little horse – he jumped a metre forty in a bareback high jump competition. A few month later I was teaching at a Pony Club camp, and I was approached by Julia McLean who owns Alegebra, she told me that Lizzie Roberts who had been riding him, was going to uni. ‘Could I train him up to sell?’ That won’t be a problem, I’ve seen the horse before.”
“I had him for about a month, and there had been a few calls from people who’d seen him advertised, a couple of kids had come and ridden him and he’d pretty much jumped them out of the saddle. One was okay on him, and they were umming and aahing, and may have even made an offer. But Julia’s husband, John Glenn said ‘I like the way Natalie rides him, can we do something?’ And that is pretty much how it started. She asked me if I wanted the horse to ride, and I thought, I really want him but at the same time he is tricky. He is very full of beans, and I didn’t know if I was going to be able to ‘nail’ the horse. He certainly had a lot of talent, but was I going to be able to do a dressage test on him?”
“He wasn’t going so well on the flat, but I felt that after a bit, I was going to be able to at least do something with him. At the time I didn’t have a nice horse – I’d bred some nice ones but I needed money so I’d sold them. Algebra had done a couple of one stars. I noticed looking at his papers that he had had a few runoffs – he wasn’t necessarily a dishonest horse, he just wasn’t very straight and he put his head up in front of the fences so he wasn’t all that easy to control… he still does that. When I took him to Sydney 3DE in the one star, I think we were second out of eight in the dressage and he was fantastic. We were going cross country and it was all good, and choof – he ran off a stupid little fence in the water jump! It has always been in him, the better he is going almost the more I’ve got to stop trusting him.”
The affection for the little grey shines through. Nat is laughing as she recalls:
“He is amazing though, after all these years, three star is starting to feel like pre-novice, it doesn’t, it doesn’t feel hard and he can canter round really nicely but that is when I’ve got to not trust that he’ll jump every single fence… I’ve been riding him for seven years now.”
Did you think you’d end up riding four star with him?
“I guess that was the aim. I try to think big. I thought London and the Games was the aim for this horse. It was pretty amazing that it actually almost happened. We were really happy to be on that campaign, and having everyone become involved and help me train, and helped with fundraising so I could go off and help the horse. When he makes a mistake, it’s not through the want of trying from him, it is just that he gets really tense. The trick is trying to get him relaxed enough to do a dressage test. Then there is the showjumping. He wants to jump but he gets a bit tense even in the showjumping – so at our first four-star we had a few rails. We’ve been slowly improving that every year since.”
The aim now is Caen and the WEG next year?
“Definitely. I want to go to the WEG. I think now that I didn’t make London, I am more ambitious still. I think I know a bit more what I need to get, I think with this new selection system, it gives me a more clear idea of what I have to do to get there. I haven’t been to Europe and I really want to get there, and right now setting up a property, I don’t have the finances to go there willy nilly, I’d like to get there on the team, so I am going to spend these next twelve months working my butt off to get there.”
Natalie and Billy Barthgate riding for Australia in Taupo, New Zealand
You burst on the eventing scene with a bang – how old were you when you came out starring on Billy Barthgate?
“I was nineteen, I won the four star at Adelaide. I left school after my HSC, and I was very lucky that I met Phil and Mary Hockney who bought me Billy Barthgate. They saw a talented young person in Harden and they wanted to help. They had no idea about horses at the time and I was lucky I had a very good mentor in Jo Brady, and she actually found Billy for me.”
“When the Hockneys bought him for me, Billy had done up to two star. He wasn’t overly successful. He’d been through a lot of people. Niki Bishop, Sammi McLeod, Tim Boland, pretty much everyone had a crack at Billy. I don’t know why it didn’t work with them. He wasn’t the most careful jumper. He had very nice movement but he was pretty tricky on the flat. I think Nikki had his dressage going really well, and at the end, Sam Lyall had him when we bought him, and he had him showjumping quite well. Sam said, I quite like this horse… and me, I’d ridden pre-novice! I’d never had the horse up to then, everything I’d ridden I’d trained off the track. I’d got to State and National Pony Club on these off-the-track horses. I wasn’t that I couldn’t ride, I’d just never had the opportunity.”
“So Jo Brady said, we’ve got you this horse, now we’ll send you up to Heath and Rozzie Ryan, because Jo had come through Lochinvar with Heath and Rozzie. I was kind of like a fairy tale, it almost happened too quickly. I went back to pre-novice and Heath wouldn’t let me go up to the next level, until I was ready. Finally we got to the two-star at Berrima, and that was my first three-day event. I was fourth there – then the following year I broke my leg and was out for six months. Then I did the three-star at Adelaide the following year, and we were fifth.”
“I remember standing up in the presentations at Adelaide and Heath said, well done, and I went, oh yeah, but I didn’t win. I was so naïf.” Nat is roaring with laughter at the memory… “Later Jo was asking me, who was the judge? I don’t know, some guy in a bowler hat. I was really naïf – I had no idea, I just thought oh yeah, whatever.”
“From there I went to the Trans Tasman in Taupo. I think I was 11th there, it wasn’t too bad, but it was what kick started my learning. This is what I’ve got to do, and this is serious. The next big one was winning Adelaide, and that was another big fairy tale and it was all good, but the fairy tale in eventing comes crashing down pretty quickly… the horse did have little issues, with what I know now perhaps they would have been handled better, but then again I might not have bought him because he wasn’t overly careful.”
“Suddenly it was all cut off. No more horse, we just couldn’t get him back right. It was very sad. Since then I’ve had horses, Good Timing was around three-star, and I think Heath thought that I could do with him what I’d done with Billy, and at times I did get him going well at one thing or another, but he didn’t have the same brain as Billy. Billy was really calm and relaxed where as with Good Timing, he was quite scared of things. We thought we could turn him into a pretty good horse, then we had a bit of a fall at Goondiwindi and I thought, I don’t think this horse is going to take me where I want to go.”
“Between then and now, I’ve had horses up to two-star, and you think you’ve got a really good one and it just hasn’t gone to the next level, or there have been soundness issues. A lot of the nice ones I’ve bred, I’ve sold, to do things like put a shed on my place. Then Algebra came along and I think the difference between the horses I own, and this horse owned by Julia and John is that there is no constraint on where I can go and compete, or go and train. Whereas with your own horses, you are like, I can’t afford to go to SIEC this week on this horse… for me with Algebra it was perfect because they said I could run him wherever and go to the good competitions. They have put a lot into him over the years and I am hoping I can repay them.”
Have you had horses since you were a kid?
“My dad used to ride, droving cattle around. His Pop was a drover as well. When I remember Pop he was driving a horse and sulky around, he would never drive a car. Horses were in the family. Mum loved horses but she grew up in Canberra and never had the opportunity to have anything to do with them, she met Dad and he was just a bushy, and they moved to Harden. So I guess from day one I had ponies. Mum taught herself, and then taught me, and luckily I ran into the right people in the right circles. With Sue Walker in Young, then Bonnie Holstein, and from that Jo Brady when I was a teenager.”
“When I was about fifteen I started doing work experience at some racing stables, then once I was old enough I started riding trackwork in the mornings, just a couple of horses before school. I wasn’t like we’d do track every day, we’d be riding around our property every day and going to the track twice a week. I did become an amateur jockey and I rode in a couple of races, that was fun. I think it gave me the ability to manage horses like that, when Algebra does his little jumping up and down act, I’m like, that’s nothing. I can be quite relaxed on a horse that is a bit naughty, whereas I am probably not so good on horses that I have to push around. I quite like that sporty type of horse.”
You like Thoroughbred blood?
“I do like a lot of Thoroughbred. The ones I am trying to breed have got a lot of Thoroughbred blood, and my original Palomino mare was Thoroughbred cross Arab, she is really hot and sensitive, and her foals are a little similar, sensitive but sensible. I like that sensitivity… I have used the Thoroughbred stallion, Cool Cat a couple of times and then bred my Cool Cat mare to the Warmblood, Metallic, and I think that is a very nice mix. The mare is a really nice type, and I think that is so important in eventing, they have to have really good feet, and good straight legs. I’ve been caught in the past compromising on conformation, and sure they might get there, but I just remember the hearbreak of Billy Barthgate breaking down – he wasn’t so well conformed, he had one bad back leg, and he went unsound in one of his front legs.”
“My original Palomino mare is a tough sort of pony and she had a lot of heart, and I am hoping to pass that down the line. You want the heart and the sensitivity, but you still have to be able to ride them in a test.”
Who have been your influences in your riding?
“Jo Brady has been and still is, a mentor – she was there again, helping me before Adelaide last year. Heath and Rozzie Ryan were a big start for me to get into that real professional feel. A lot of kids these days don’t get that these days, but you have got to work hard to get where you get – everything I have here now is from what I have achieved and done, and I’ve worked to get it without the money that some of the other guys might have. That’s the work ethic that Heath drives into people. Now I have a lot of help from Ben Nettlefold, he is just down the road, the showjumping is probably my weakest phase and he has been helping me a lot over the last couple of years to get Algebra from a wild little upside-down pony to having jumped a clear round at Sydney. I’m a bit of a gung ho rider, and so is the horse, and to ask both of us to go in and do a nice soft, quiet round, that’s a big mental effort as well. Ben helps me jump but he also helps keep my head in gear as well.”
The final challenge is to get the dressage test – what is the strategy there?
“Before I went to Warwick, I went up and had some lessons with Prue Barrett. I’ve had lots of dressage lessons with different people but the thing with Algebra is that he is a Thoroughbred, he is an eventer… I can have lots of dressage lessons on him but they just don’t quite understand him. Prue helps so much, we went from getting 50s, to Albury where we got a 46, that was a big improvement. She was pretty tough on him, not letting him dancing around – no, you’ve just got to have him under your thumb a bit more. Sure people have told me that, but yeah, you try and do it. I’m going up there again, but I am also going to have some lessons with Heath again. Heath is a bit the same, I understand the Heath method, that’s why I went to Prue and Jo Brady, they both came through the same system – I get on quite well with Brett Parbery, and the other guys, it is not that I don’t like them, it is just this is how I was trained, and my horse needs that adrenalin pushed through him a bit more. It doesn’t quite work, ‘let’s be nice and quiet, there’s a good boy’.”
“I think it is a lot just me learning how to get the test nailed. At Sydney it was one of our better tests, but watching it afterwards, I was thinking, the halts weren’t square, our rein back wasn’t great, there were so many little things – now I can see the light, I probably can score in the low forties. I not kidding myself, he’s not an 80% horse but if I can get the score in the low forties and finish on that, then I am pretty competitive. If I had gone under time on the cross country at Sydney this year, then I would have probably won!”
The fire still burns?
“Oh yeah, I think more so because I am so close, and I really want to do it. My poor partner, he’s not horsey at all, I kind of feel sorry for him because I’m always going off somewhere, and they don’t quite understand why we are so driven with horses. It’s just how it is. I see Heath, I don’t know if I’ll still be doing it at his age, I think I’ll probably be judging or I like coaching, but hopefully that is still a fair way off, and there is another big win to be had.”
