Freelance: Saying Goodbye to Bibaringa...

Fenella rang this morning.  She's coming to collect Freelance on Monday, and that day will represent the very last day I have a horse at the property we always knew as Bibaringa, although it's now formerly called the Stromlo Equestrian Centre.  Freelance is going to stay, under Fenella's watchful eye, at the place of her birth.  It is a largish property called Wyndarra, on the King's Highway, 10km outside of the little town that Fenella and Evan live in called Bungendore.

So both for my benefit, and hopefully for yours, here are a few memories of the last few years at Bibaringa.  There are many more, but they are stored on negatives, and on hard drives, which are in various states of packing...  Greg, my lovely friend, I will email you my favourite headshot of Freelance, having finally found the folder in question.  Maxie has used the excuse of me sitting down at my computer to curl up and fall fast asleep on my lap.  He's going to have to get up soon though, because the boxes call, yet again.

Freelance will stay at Wyndarra while I find a place for her to live close to me on the Peninsula, before she too steps on that horse truck bound for the Final Leg to Melbourne....

I can't apologise for the fact that I am not the sort of person who just wants to live through their children, and who has no real other interests other than them.  I'm also not the sort of person who was content to just work in an office job of no real significance or importance.  Perhaps being a photographer might not be viewed as the most important of jobs by some people.  However I think that the creation of important and beautiful imagery that reflects in people's eyes and minds, and preserves events for the public memory, is an important job.  I like to believe I have made a difference..

Meanwhile, back to my boxes...

Only ever aloowed to play on the pipelines during Winter..  Brown snakes live in there..

 

Canberra..  a godforsaken place in the winter...  Rain I can handle, but the icey cold as well...

 

At the end of a very hot summer, and dolled up for a photoshoot.  It's the same bridle that I photographed the Famous Pony in.  Gerard Whateley liked the images so much he ran a big one in his new illustrated edition.  I had put the pearly browband on by then.  We girls like jewels..

 

Baby Freelance.  I took this when she was a day old, never guessing she'd become my horse, because she was Fenella's pride and joy.  This is Wyndarra, where she'll spend the next couple of months.

Impatient for her dinner, and getting cross about the photos..

My mum's best friend Viv took this image for me.  I hadn't had Freelance look, I was beaming with pride though.  Viv died a few years ago, and we miss her terribly.  She always took such an interest in my kids, and my work, and my horses.  She loved that I got Freelance, and this is at our first Edgar Litchwark Dressage Clinic.  Viv came to watch my lesson.

The great horse, the Famous Pony Black Caviar, wearing Freelance's bridle.  I love this image.  This image and photoshoot, on 20 August 2011 (during my August trip to Melbourne when I met my now very good friends Marg, Peter and Kendall Clarke for the very first time) firmly proved to me that I could always rely on being distracted by a horse to get me through a personal crisis!!!

Freelance and I in the very early days, yes, out at Wyndarra.  Getting my new horse, that I treasured, caused me a lot of grief.  I used to get up at 5am to drive almost an hour to Bungendore to work her before I started work at CSIRO.

Greg Ambrose, lovely friend that he is, composed this image from 2 different images of my kids riding my treasured mare on the lunge in the Indoor Arena in June this year at Bibaringa.