At Home with Emma O’Shea

This article is from the December 2020 Horse Deals magazine.

Article: Rachel Clayfield.

Life on the farm, ten kilometres out of cootamundra, NSW, is simple and rewarding for Emma O’Shea. This incredible horsewoman works hard; breaking and training horses with her partner Morgan Webb, while balancing two young children and contract mustering trips up North. Between work and family commitments, Emma competes in a range of events, the most prevalent being her success in stockmen’s challenges. Name one of Australia’s biggest challenges, and Emma has won it, including six successive wins at the Man From Snowy River challenge, held as part of the popular Corryong festival.

Despite a jam-packed schedule, Emma has a laid back attitude and is truly grateful for her lifestyle. Recently back from Tamworth campdraft, Horse Deals caught up with Emma to chat about horse versatility, training, and her partnership with a special Stock Horse called Dude.

How’s your day been so far? I’ve just been riding horses, pretty much only outside horses. I’ve got six to ride, which is more than enough for me to handle with the kids. Some of them are breakers and some of them are trainers, some of them have been broken in here and are back for their second time. That keeps me busy by the time I’ve got through six for the day. My horses get put on the backburner a little bit when I’ve got client horses.

How did you first get involved in horses? I grew up on a cattle property in Far North Queensland so horses are a part of everyday life up there, with the job of mustering. My mum never rode horses, but my dad used them for work and that’s where it all started; just using the horses for work at home. They’ve been a passion of mine ever since I can remember.

When did you start competing? I didn’t start competing until later in life. Probably because of being out on the property and not having parents that competed. I did do a few horse sports and such when I was still at school, but I didn’t really start campdrafting or anything like that until I left school and got my own wheels. Then I started doing the challenges and campdrafting.

How did you meet your partner Morgan? I actually met him at Normanton Campdraft and Rodeo. He was up there working for Ben Hall and riding in the rodeo and I was in the pickup competition. He was riding a bronc and I picked him up, well actually I dropped him, and the rest is history.

Over the years, what has been your bread and butter? Earlier it was just contract mustering, but the last six years have been a little bit of mustering when we go up North, but mostly breaking in horses. The bulk of the horses are breakers but we are getting more and more coming back just to be trained and a few to put through the challenges and different things. When we purchased the 120-acre property here, it just had the house and the boundary fence so we’re slowly getting it to how we want it. We’ve now got an arena and stables, we’re getting there slowly.

You’re the Queen of Challenges, what have been the highlights? I don’t know, I thoroughly enjoy the whole lot of it!

No wins that are at the top of the list? The first time I won the Coonamble Under Five (horses under five years old) challenge was a pretty big highlight for me. Especially because I was on one of my own homebred horses, One Night Stan. That was pretty cool. I had done really well on him the whole year and ended up winning the Classic Challenge Horse of the Year.

The challenges down here in NSW are a little different to the Northern challenges. The ones here like Man From Snowy River are an open challenge, it doesn’t matter what age horse you’re riding as long as it’s the same one for the whole event. In the North, challenges like Cloncurry, Conamble, and Horse of the North, are split into the open and classic challenge and the classic challenge is for horses that haven’t turned five yet. Some take horses as three-year-olds but it is generally four-year- olds. So we set up our young horses for that. When we break them in we have certain horses that we are aiming to take to those challenges.

For someone who’s not familiar with challenges, what does an open competition like Man From Snowy River involve? They are all different. There’s shoeing; you have to put a front and back shoe on and you’ve got a set time to do it, normally 35 minutes. There’s whip cracking, so you’ve got to be pretty handy with your whips. They set up targets and the targets are worth different amounts of points depending on the difficulty of them, and then you get to do a freestyle as well. There’s a bareback obstacle course. You never really know what you are going to get hit with for that, they just set something up and you don’t know what it is until you get there. So in your practice for that you don’t leave any stone unturned. There’s stock handling and pack saddle. The stock handling is generally three head of cattle — and in some of the challenges you use a dog, some you don’t — and they’ll set up a course out on the arena and you’ll put the three head around the course. For pack saddle, you have to pack your competition horse and put it through a course. And the cross country, which is normally the last event of the preliminary events. You normally know how well you’ve gone and whether you will make the finals on Sunday. The finals, for the open is a poley buckjump and a brumby catch, and the ladies is generally just the brumby catch.

With challenges you get a bit more of a chance. Campdrafting, you can put all the time and effort into your horse and your horse can be going great and then you get 40 seconds to do something and you might get the (judge’s) whip in the yard and get to do nothing. Whereas challenging, you’ve got so many different areas that you can make up a bit of ground here and there as long as you don’t flop out too bad in one of them.

What are your strengths in a challenge? I generally always do well in the shoeing and I don’t know really, why. I guess I’ve just had to shoe all my horses for a very long time and you know, if they fall off, you’ve gotta put them back on. And the cross country is pretty stock standard, everyone usually does pretty well in that. And the bareback, I usually do fairly well in that as well.

What other horse sports have you dabbled in? I’ve done a bit of barrel racing, a bit of two-handed cutting, campdrafting, a little bit of picking up after I did a pick up school. I thoroughly enjoyed picking up, but it’s hard to go campdrafting and try to get to rodeos to do that, and I prefer the campdrafting. Oh and polocrosse. I started last year, playing my first carnival of polocrosse (Morgan has played before). We got to another carnival this year before they got cancelled. So I quite enjoy doing that too.

Tell us about your incredible horse, Dude. Dude is loving this virus! He hasn’t been ridden since King of the Ranges in February. I don’t see the sense in riding him since he probably knows more than me. It’s just a matter of getting him fit when I’ve got one of the challenges coming up. He is definitely something special, you don’t get one like that often. He is very versatile; I barrel raced him, challenged him, picked up, a bit of breakaway roping, I’ve done everything on him. I bought him as a yearling from Queensland and I didn’t really ever have the intention of keeping him as a stallion but he grew and broke in so nice.

Your bridleless work with Dude is a true display of horsemanship. is that a part of challenges? In the bareback, you get time to do a freestyle as well and mine is usually taking the bridle off. I’ll do some fl ying changes and some rollbacks or spins bareback and bridleless. I do wonder if I’ll ever get another horse that I can do that on because I’ve seen other people do it at challenges and it ends very badly. When I take the bridle off him, I fully trust that he is not going to do anything wrong and there are not a lot of horses that you can do that with. I think he knows the challenges now. I’m sure he knows what he’s in for in each event.

How have you schooled such accurate aids bridleless? He was just such a nice horse to break in, I guess we just really clicked and I don’t know, he’s just a clever horse. We’ve been a partnership for so long that I know his buttons. He doesn’t take a lot of fi ne tuning as such now, before the challenges, it’s more just getting him fit. He is 15 now, so he knows what he knows.

I am thinking about doing the Australia’s Greatest Horsewoman Challenge which is being held down in Victoria next year. That has a reining section which would be a new one for Dude. We’ll give it a go! It sounds like fun.

What’s the biggest issue you see in other horse’s training? I reckon for most people and horses it’s not enough riding and time in the saddle, and too much feed. Horses are not an easy thing to get going and get up to a high standard of competition. The way you get them to be an A grade competition horse is hours in the saddle. Not necessarily tough work either. We ride our horses out of the arena a lot, to keep them enjoying what they are doing rather than doing the same repetition every day. All the horses that come here get ridden and trained exactly like our young horses do. We try to keep them interested. If they are doing something nicely, we don’t go back and do that same thing again tomorrow. You’ve got to make it fun for them as well.

Have you got any exciting up and coming horses you can tell us about? I’ve got heaps of them that need riding a lot more! I’ve got quite a few young ones by Dude, one that I’m setting up to start challenging next year and then I’ve got a couple of really nice geldings that I am hopefully going to set up for the Man From Snowy River Challenge. I’ve just been so spoiled with Dude, that I haven’t really bothered setting anything else up. It’s getting the time too, when you are riding everyone else’s horses. So yeah, there’s nothing stand out, but I sure have a lot of nice young horses.

With the horses you school, do you ever get frustrated with the more polished horses returning to their homes, only to be replaced with horses back at square one? No, not really, that doesn’t bother me. Every now and then you’ll get a really nice horse and you think God, I’d love to keep going on with that horse, but no, it keeps you fresh in your job, getting a new batch of horses all the time. Don’t get me wrong, sometimes it feels like you’ve got a whole lot of horses that aren’t very blessed with a brain and other times you feel like you have a crew of horses that make you love your job. We get all sorts of horses but we don’t turn anyone away.

At the king of the Ranges, you and Morgan took out the Ladies and open Champions, what’s it like to share your passion with your partner? It’s really good. People think that we check our scores to see who beat who, but we are not like that at all. We just hope we both do well and encourage one another along. It’s good sharing the passion with someone, especially for me as it can get hard with the kids and everything. Morgan’s always there to spur me along when I have got mine to ride at the end of the day and I think oh I couldn’t be bothered to ride another one, I’m just buggered. He’ll encourage me to keep going and keep riding them. We probably work way too hard but it’s good, we feed off one another.

And your kids Connor and Lucy, how have they changed life? I reckon it’s gotten ten times busier with kids, I’m sure of that. It’s defi nitely great, we wouldn’t swap them for the world. It does get a bit hard sometimes, doing everything with the housework and the kids. My sanity is to go out and ride horses, so I always try to have my couple of outside horses to work. It can get tough, as everyone knows with kids, sometimes they need you more than other times. But we work around it.

I’m very lucky, I have two very good kids that can entertain themselves well. I just put them with toys out in the middle of the arena in the sand, and I ride horses while they play there. It works pretty well.

Are they interested in the horses? Yeah they both love them. Lucy is only a baby but when she gets on one she loves sitting up there. Connor, well he’d ride ten times a day if you let him. I try to take him riding a couple of times a week. He does like his horses but he also likes tractors and trucks too, so who knows which road he’ll go down.

What have you been up to during the lull in competitions? Just working. We’ve still been as busy as any other time. Before the border closed in July, we went up to Queensland and did our run of breaking in up there that we do and a bit of mustering up at my brother’s place (Spring Valley, where we grew up).

What’s involved in your breaking in run? When we go to Queensland, we go up to my brother’s place and we get breakers from a few of the big companies like AA Company and Stanbroke. We take their breakers back to Spring Valley, base ourselves there and break them in. We’ve got a couple of other clients there that have breakers every year so we just do them there. Morgan will then also break in at St George, Rockhampton and Dirranbandi or Bollon. That’s when we get to take our young horses up mustering and it’s good, it’s our little bit of timeout, I guess.

What advice would you give an 18-yearold Emma O’Shea? Gee, I don’t know. I was campdrafting and working at 18. I left school and went straight to work contract mustering. I worked for a contract team first, for a couple of years. Then I got my first car and gooseneck and then I started day working just by myself, going around to each property. I think it was the best lifestyle, I don’t regret a minute of it. I actually hope that my kids get to experience that, that’s why we love taking them back up there every year. It’s a totally different lifestyle, living out on a cattle property, to being down here. I love it here, don’t get me wrong, but it’s a good way to grow up, up there. And 99% of the time up there, you’re not in phone service; it’s good.

What are your plans for the next 12 months? Hopefully, we get to do some drafts and challenges, for sure. We are just breaking and training and then the campdraft and challenge season will start and we’ll head back up to Queensland again in April, providing everything is on. No big plans doing anything different, just doing what we do.

Where would you like to be in five years time? I’d like to be a millionaire! But I think I’d be a millionaire but still doing what I’m doing. We do what we do because we enjoy it. I’d like to think that we could maybe buy a little more country down here, but five years will go pretty quick.

I love that you don’t want too much to change, you sound very happy. Yeah, I am very happy and I think we are very lucky that we’ve got our place here, we’ve got a good client base and we get to go to Queensland over winter for the run of drafting and do the breaking in and mustering. I don’t think you could get much better of a lifestyle, really.

Quickfire Questions

What did you last watch on TV? Bluey with Connor and Lucy. I don’t get to watch much TV and the TV is always on ABC Kids.

What’s your signature dish? Steak and veg.

What inspires you? When you take out a horse of your own, do really well on it and it goes nicely, it just inspires you to go home and get the next one going. It’s pretty exciting to see how far you can go training your own horses. You know, you aren’t buying something that’s premade, you’re starting it from scratch.

What music are you listening to? Country music. And actually, I really like Nickleback.

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