Streets of Your Town goes to the outback Laura Races and meets Kate Baggerson from Everybody NOW! about the importance of creativity in our everyday lives
Hello Streets of Your Towners!
It’s a massive bumper double podcast edition from the Wandering Journo for your listening and reading pleasure this week. Hopefully it will give those of us still on school holidays some listening pleasure on our long drives around Oz.
Firstly, let’s head to the Laura Races!
Thanks to all the characters who I met at the Laura Races Rodeo and campdraft who you can hear on this episode of Streets of Your Town in this order:
Laura Racetrack caretaker Slick Davies and race caller Bluey Forsyth from 2:53
International professional bull rider Anthony Ryan from 13:59
Legendary campdraft and rodeo rider Shandell Hilditch 18:38
Cape York Weekly journo Chisa Hasegawa and editor Lyndon Keane from 24:25
Three hours drive from Cairns in the vast wilderness of Cape York in far-north Queensland, is a little town called Laura.
And for 128 years, this little town that is not much more than a roadhouse and a pub has hosted the annual Laura Amateur Turf Club Race meeting, attracting jockeys, horses and racegoers from all over the state.
Fans and competitors alike come from hundreds of kilometres around on the last weekend of June to take part in what has now grown into an internationally-known race, rodeo and campdraft, all surrounded by a huge bush camp thronging with 3000 fans gathering for the weekend’s festivities.
On this episode of Streets of Your Town, we meet some of the amazing bush characters and rodeo riders that keep this annual tradition alive.
Such as legendary 80 year old former jockey Slick Davies, who now acts as the caretaker all year round for the Laura racetrack. He was kind enough to speak to me just before the Laura Races, from the verandah of his house overlooking the track he takes so much pride in.
His lifetime of experience as a jockey and horse trainer has prepared him well for this chapter of his life, ensuring the Laura Racetrack is ready for its annual moment of race day glory.
“You’re in the furthest racecourse in Cape York Peninsula and it’s green. How does he do it?,” Slick said to me with a cheeky grin.
“Being a jockey and a horse trainer as well, it does help. You’ve got to get the texture, the vibes, and now you’ve got all these gentlemen with these barometers who put a bit of stick in the dirt and tell you what gauge it is.”
Living in a little house in the midst of Cape York wilderness would be a lonely existence to some, but for Slick, it’s ideal. He’s lived here for 26 years tending to the racetrack.
“I love being on me own. Well, most queer people do that eh?,” Slick said.
“I love the climate. I love it hot. I love it. Stinking hot. Yeah, I love it. And it’s quiet on your own. Peaceful in the bush, eh?"
He says the fact that the 3000 tickets for the Laura Races sold out this year shows the enduring popularity of country horse racing.
“It’s very good and very good for the club. You’re entertaining people. Look at the people from New South Wales, Victoria, they’re from everywhere and they love it. They keep coming back. They do,” he said.
“This club’s been racing for more than a hundred years and they just keep going and well look, isn’t it great entertainment for the country people as well. Yeah, no, it’s wonderful.”
Then of course there are the rodeo riders like Anthony Ryan who make this annual event such a spectacle. He’s from Warrnambool in Victoria and has now settled in Atherton in far-north Queensland, after travelling the world bull-riding. He started riding poddy calves when he was eight years old.
“My brother rode bulls and my uncle rode bulls and we grew up with a lot of, in a racing industry like horse racing. So always had horses and livestock around,” Anthony said.
“I got a bull called Fire and Ice tonight, and he is a pretty good honest bull. He always bucks good.
“About a week prior you put your entries in with the head office. It’s all done over the internet now. So then they’ll get all the people that enter that event’s name and then the stock contractor who owns the stock will send in the bulls names and they’re basically just an automatic, I don’t know, a computer system randomly draws them more or less.
“After you’ve been rodeoing for a while, you get to know a lot of the bulls. So not that you always should, but you can sort watch old videos of them or you sort of know what you’re in for a little bit.”
He said he’ll hang up his riding boots at the end of the year, but it’s the adrenaline rush that keeps bringing him back for more.
“When things go well, it’s like a smooth sort of dance almost, but sometimes it’s not,” he said.
“I love it. I’m on the back end of my career. I’ll probably hang them up at the end of the year. But yeah, I’ve seen a lot of nearly all of Australia, America, Canada. So it’s given me a lot.
“I think it’s the lifestyle. I grew up on the coast. I also grew up surfing and it’s nothing similar, but the lifestyle is the same. You go from place to place, chasing the next best wave or ride. You’re kind of like a celebrity and then you go again. I think it’s the lifestyle and the mates.”
Shandelle Hilditch has competed in campdraft and rodeo events on the circuit since she was a child, and now takes great pride in her children taking part as well.
“I’ve been attending the Laura Rodeo for quite some time since I was a junior. I’m now in my later thirties, so it’s been quite some years since my first Laura rodeo and I’ve been competing here since I was a junior competitor’,” Shandelle said.
“I started off just horse sporting here and then obviously eventuated to the rodeo events, so barrel racing, steering and decorating, breakaway roping. And my whole family competes so my husband, my son who’s 10 years old and my daughter who’s three.
"It’s so nice to see some of the same faces that were here all these years ago. It’s nice to see so many people and it’s obviously such a massive event and with the races, the rodeo, the campdraft, there’s so many different events that people can compete in and some do all of them, which is amazing.
“It’s such a family sport as well, seeing from your granddads and your grandmas right down to the toddlers, they’re all competing, everyone’s cheering each other on. We’re all family here.”
Spending the weekend at the Laura Races and Rodeo has shown me not only what a great event this is for bringing together locals from all around the far flung reaches of this remote stretch of far-north Queensland, but it’s also shown me the cultural importance of keeping this Australian tradition alive.
As shown by the presence of two reporters from the Cape York Weekly, the editor Lyndon Keane and journo Chisa Hasegawa, who I met while they took photos and reported extensively on the event.
Streets of Your Town listeners may remember my series 2 “The Journo Project” where I interviewed journalists about their work and practice and how they find stories—so it was great to revisit that project with these two gun journos who cover an enormous 150,000 square kilometre patch and manage to put out a print edition once a week in one of the most remote parts of Australia.
Editor Lyndon Keane says reporting from such an isolated part of Australia was its own reward, because they are such a vital part of the community.
“I think we are not just the community’s voice, we are part of the community and it’s a great way to be,” he said.
“Where else would you be able to be hanging over the fence at a rodeo with a camera in hand and people yelling hello at you and that. It’s just great fun.
“There’s that sense of familiarity and almost family where people know why we’re here, they know we’re doing the right thing here for them and helping tell their stories and yeah, it’s not a bad way to make a living.
“Our paper goes into a lot of Indigenous communities where connectivity can be an issue. So it’s always great when I’m in those communities and seeing the old fellas grabbing the paper from the council offices when they get off the plane and pointing to the faces they know, sharing it round it’s that reinforcing what we do why we do it. And as long as I can convince the beancounters down in Canberra to keep doing a print edition, we will.”
Journalist Chisa Hasegawa has loved the change from urban Melbourne life to far-north Queensland.
“I grew up in Cairns and I wanted to come back up to kind of start regionally. I got advice from a lot of journalists in the industry to start regionally and get a wide coverage of things. And I didn’t think I’d end up in Cape York, but I have. And yeah, I’ve loved learning about it over the last two years,” Chisa said.
“Having lived in Melbourne for six years, it’s really different to make that connection with people and you see them at different things and they remember you and there’s kind of a feel about a community mindedness that you don’t get in somewhere like Melbourne.
“I barely did anything related to print in uni and none of my internships were print. I never thought I’d be working in Cape York, which I originally knew nothing about and never thought I’d be working in print. I was always told in uni that that’s dead.”
It was great to revisit The Journo Project with Lyndon and Chisa. If you’d like me to interview more journos from far flung parts of Australia and the world then let me know by replying to this email!
And for our second podcast in this bumper edition, we meet Kate Baggerson the Executive Director of innovative arts organisation Everybody NOW!, which is celebrating its tenth anniversary.
There are some conversations that take you to places you never expected, and this one on the banks of the Brisbane River in Brisbane’s cultural precinct was certainly one of them.
This chat with Kate Baggerson, I hope will inspire you to be more creative in your everyday life. As it did for me.
To mark their anniversary year, Kate Baggerson tells us on Streets of Your Town, how Everybody NOW! is doing a year long programme of events, collaborating with artists, community members and organisations across the country, celebrating the power of art as a catalyst for social cohesion and to improve our wellbeing.
“We’re 10 years old—double figures—which doesn’t seem like much, but for a not-for-profit arts organisation to have found our way to establish ourselves and have been making art for the last 10 years is pretty cool. So we’re making a bit of a fuss about it this year,” Kate said.
“We make art with community. So we do all sorts of things. The founders, myself and my two colleagues, we are all theatre and performance people, but over the last decade we’ve moved into all sorts of art forms, writing big visual arts projects, music projects. But the thing that connects everything is community and artists coming together to create a kind of co-creation experience of whatever the art form is.
“It’s quite collaborative—artists and communities together and real stories are at the heart of it.”
While Everybody NOW! is Gold Coast based, the group travels all around Australia and now the world to help communities create art that reflects their lives.
“Our process was meeting those people, listening to their stories and then saying, `Hey, we are thinking of making a piece of theatre about real stories from this community. Would you like to come on this journey?’,” she said.
“And so through this kind of shared experience of making art together, we get to be with people who are different to us, and that’s how we make a better world I think.”
“So this year there’s a number of projects with different artists that are looking at what it means to belong or not belong. And one of the big projects that we’re working towards at the end of the year is with a UK artist called Morag Myerscough, and she’s a global design sensation. She makes big, massive temporary structures that are very bright and colourful and are quite often bring to the fore this conversation of belonging. So she’s coming over to Australia for a Queensland exclusive.
“Art has got to do a lot of things in the world and does serve a lot of things. And being subversive and speaking those truths that are hard to speak is sometimes the perfect thing for art to do. And sometimes that doesn’t make it popular with politicians or in certain sectors, but also that is what art needs to do. It needs to do both of those things. It needs to bring us together as well as make us question things of the past or how we want to be as a community, has got to ask the tough questions alongside those really optimistic and aspirational conversations.
“So please follow Everybody NOW! and yes, come to see a show, but also that innate creativity belongs inside all of us, and can be expressed in different ways. Sometimes you just need to shift your view from a portrait to a landscape to see what creativity means to you.”
Upcoming dates for Everybody NOW! productions in its tenth anniversary year 2025 include:
19 July: Ipswich Civic Centre 50th Anniversary concert event.
September: ‘Artist in Place’ Residency 2 creating immersive soundscapes with Kombumerri man Lann Levinge.
October: ‘Artist in Place’ Residency 3 Home Stories with award-winning puppeteer and theatre artist Ros Oades.
September - October: Artist-led workshop ‘Creative and Connected’ to generate social connection and wellbeing.
November: ‘A Place to Belong’, a new collaboration between Everybody NOW! and UK based global design sensation Morag Myerscough.
29 November: Art in the Park, Everybody NOW!’s annual, open and accessible Art in the Park event
Thanks for your enduring support my wonderful Wandering Journo tribe! I’ll be using your paid subscriptions to fill up the tank of Mildred the Cantankerous Kombi to head up to the peanut capital of Australia Kingaroy this week and bring you more of the rural stories you love.
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xx Nance