It Gets In Your Blood

‘Come for a ride with me, and see what I see, down in the dirt and sweat and horseshit, right in the belly of the work of a racing stable. These are my real people, and this is the life I would lead if I hadn’t been looking out for my father, a child of the Depression. Be a teacher, he said, or a nurse, people always want those people. I only just started riding work when he was lying in a coma. Could I tell him how much I would love to be a jockey? I could not.’

In 2015, Marty Smith set out to immerse herself in the world of thoroughbred horse racing—to spend time in the stables and training grounds of the Hawke’s Bay racecourse, and talk to people in every role. The project turned out to be harder—and more surprising, funny and drawn out—than she’d ever expected. Over ten years, the lives of the racecourse opened up, and the book became a portrait of a changing industry and the people within it. This is a life of hard work and constant risk, as well as community and love. And horses.

Marty Smith (Taranaki Tūturu, Te Āti Awa) has been in racing for years; if not as a rider or an owner/breeder, then putting on a fiver here and there. She thanks the TAB for some nice dresses. She spent her teaching life at Taradale High School, loving the school family. Her poetry collection Horse with Hat won the NZSA Jessie Mackay Best First Book Award for Poetry in 2014. In 2015 she won an arts grant to take half a year’s grace to write this book. Ten years later, she thanks those generous people more than they can know.

Cover photo: Florence Charvin Photography
Cover design: Todd Atticus