The mighty horse who gave a cart full of kids the ride of their lives

Horses were everything in the 1940s when my dad Jack and his cousin, my Extraordinary Aunty Joan, were growing up in rural New South Wales, Australia. They were work, transport and recreation, but of all the horses in their lives, none was finer than the legendary Papatata.

He was a New Zealand bred harness racer who spent his retirement as the special transport horse for Aunty May Byrne, Joan’s mother. She would drive him in a sulky – a small two-wheeled cart – the four miles from the farm at Burrangong to Young, for shopping and Sunday Mass. It was not always a sedate ride.

When the Spackman boys were staying – as they did every summer – the sulky was jammed for the journey with nine kids and two adults.

“Some of us would be nursed by the adults on the seat – which could hold three at a squeeze, while the rest of us crammed on the floor and almost onto the shafts,” Joan said.

Joan’s grandfather WJ Byrne with two of his daughters in a sulky, and a much more sedate horse. It’s hard to believe so many kids were crammed into something so small.

It was probably Jack who learned that all it took to get Papatata to set back his ears and run like the wind was a little click of the tongue. Dad said every trip in the sulky began with the stern admonishment to the kids in the back, “No clicking!”

He said the journey would begin quietly enough but, once on the Temora Road for home, someone in the tangle of kids would click and that would be it.

“One click and the mighty Papatata would be taking on all comers,” Jack said. “The wily old devil would simply crowd any horse off the road who looked like getting past him. Perhaps we should have learned more from that old horse.”

Papatata was dark bay in colour with one white sock on a front foot, and no marks on his face. “He was more than 15 hands high, which meant he was long legged – helping him fly over the ground,” Joan said.

“And fly he did.

“We were coming home from the Young Show with the whole crew on board – May and Doris (my grandmother) on the seat and Jack’s oldest brother Alf nursing two small children.

“The rest of us – six children – were well squashed in but two of us would have been partially on the shafts. In a luggage ruck at the back would have been a stroller, as well as a metal tucker box containing the remains of a profuse picnic lunch. Then there was a billy can rattling on one side, a water bag on the other – quite a load for the strongest carrier.

“There had been trotting races at the show and the boys clicked. Papatata was off – passing everything on the road, including the winners of the trotting races.

“I can still feel in my whole body the wild freedom of that ride.”

Joan says Papatata was a pacer, which means he moved his legs right front and right hind together, then left front and left hind.

“As a pacer, he made the sulky behind him rock from side to side and May was helpless to do anything about it,” she said.

“Papatata knew well the fastest way home and a night’s respite from a job well done at the end of it.”

It didn’t always take a click from a boy in the back to get Papatata racing. One day May and Doris had driven into Young for shopping when a fierce, dark storm came over the horizon and they knew they had to get home fast.

Papatata knew it too, and that is exactly what they did. They flew. Doris was terrified, telling her nieces later, “He was going so fast I thought I was going to fly out of the back of the sulky.”

On another occasion, when the circus was in town, May was on her grocery shopping trip when two large elephants lumbered across the street.

“Papatata took one look and quickly decided, “I’m outta here,” so he headed for home breaking all previous records,” Joan’s sister Rita said.

The stories of Papatata are part of family legend and every child of those many children of May and Doris grew up with them. Jack’s brother Alf said those journeys home along the Temora Road were great – better than any car.

The spelling of his name is subject to a delightful number of guesses among the kids who were on that wild ride. Jack would spell it Papatater, but I’ve seen it written every which way and I’m going with Joan’s version as the most reliable of my sources.

The one question no-one can answer is how Papatata came to spend his retirement at Burrangong. But I have a guess, coloured by wishful thinking and a yearning to tidy these threads of family stories into a neat narrative.

Jack’s dad, Charles Spackman, was a champion breeder of horses and a close friend of Bill Byrne’s, Joan’s father. Their wives were sisters and the two men shared a love of horses. At one point, before Charles died when Jack was only four years old, they co-owned a stallion and shared dreams of winning their fortune before those dreams were shattered, with the shattering of that horse’s legs.

My grandfather’s obituary. December 1937

My grandmother Doris met Charles, known to all as Jim, when he used to come around to play cards with her parents, Jack and Martha Fogarty. “Doris was needed to make up the fourth player at euchre,” Joan said.

“He was older than her and Jack Fogarty thought he would make a good husband for his daughter, in contrast with Bill Byrne who he thought was far too young to make a reliable husband for May.”

It must have been a joy for Doris and May, who were always very close, that their husbands were good mates. I like to think that Papatata was my Grandad’s horse and that Bill bought him for May when Jim died in 1937, to boost the legacy for Doris and her four small boys.

It’s a harmless enough conjecture and I’m surprised the possibility was never raised by my father, in all the stories he told me about that old horse. On my last visit to him, in California in 2002, he showed me a printer’s block that he’d rescued from the floor of the derelict old premises of the Grenfell Record.

My grandfather Charles Spackman.

“I was just poking around, like any old newspaperman would, when I kicked something in the dust,” Dad said. “When I picked it up, it was the block of the illustration for the harness racing section and I reckon my father’s name used to appear all the time under that logo, so I kept it.

“It’s the only thing I have to connect me with my father, and it’s pretty special to me that the link is a newspaper one.”

The printer’s block is lost, just another dust-gathering piece of nostalgia that did not make it into Your Girl Reporter’s care.

Memories, Dad said, are the only paradise from which a person cannot be expelled. And, he would add, that the heart of his paradise were the summers spent at Burrangong. The rest, he also said, was just nostalgia and its trimmings.

© Maria Spackman 2018

Further reading:

You can read more about Jack’s childhood summers at Burrangong with my Extraordinary Aunt Joan Byrne and her family here:

Dad’s childhood spent clinging to the sheep’s back

Jack and Joan were inspired to adventure far beyond Australian shores by the stories told to them by Joan’s grandfather WJ Byrne. You can read more about that, and the adventures of My Extraordinary Aunt, here:

My Extraordinary Aunt: London and a promise kept

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