I'm Andrew Rule, but this is not really Life and Crimes because recently, listeners, I've been doing a bit of moonlighting. I haven't been completely faithful to crime. I've been working here and there on the documentary film about the race horse called Winks. In fact, the documentary feature is called
a horse named Winks. And it so happens that because I wrote a book about Winks, I was approached by a filmmaker called Jeanine Hoskin two or three years ago who asked me if I could lend them a hand, and I agreed to. And today my producer and friend and interlocutor, mister John Burton is going to ask me some questions about how we made a film about a race horse.
Hello John, Hello Andrew.
Hello listeners. Let's start at the very beginning, because I have to admit that side of our sessions here I don't really follow or keep up with the goings on of the turf. So if you could perhaps remind our listeners of the story of Winks.
Well, there she was folding twenty eleven. She was sold for a relatively modest two hundred and thirty thousand dollars at the Magic Million Sales on the Gold Coast in twenty thirteen is a yeeling. She was bought by a consortium of pretty wealthy people, three different owners or groups of owners, two married couples, and a lovely old man called Richard Treweek, an old widower who's since left us. In fact, this film has been dedicated to his memory.
And he's the man, Richard Treweek, who named Winks Winks for reasons listeners that we won't go into here, but which he expands on in the film, which is a very funny moment, I have to say, because his fellow owners are not sure what he's going to say. Anyway, Winks was a reasonably undistinguished yeeling. She was tall, she was leggy, she was quiet. She's a bay. A bay is like a reddish brown color with dark points, dark legs,
and dark man and tail about. You know, seventy percent of thoroughbreds pretty well that color or roughly that brown or bay, and so she wouldn't really stand out in any gathering of thoroughbred horses anywhere. But she's breedy looking and she's reasonably tall as a yeeling. She was fairly light. She wasn't heavily built, but she was always athletic looking well, she got broken in and the nice man that broke her in the first one to ride it was an Indian guy called Amir.
Who has worked all over the world.
I think he's great grandfather worked for the Aga Khan, very interesting Indian horse family. He was the first man ever to ride Winks, a point he makes in the film. Very funny guy. And I asked him. I said me, now, you've handled several horses that fortnight or that month. Which ones did you really like? And he said, well, actually I liked the chestnut one better. I thought it was
more sparky than the one that became Winks. But of course the chestnut one went to Queensland and won two races or something, and the other one that he quite liked went somewhere else and won one race or whatever, and Winks, the one he wasn't mad about, she became Winks. So it just shows you that over and over that horses race horses are a complete genetic raffle, and that Winks there was nothing to show that she had the championship qualities that indeed she did have.
I remember we did an episode a long time ago, but listeners can still find. It was called The Winning Ways of Winks when I believe when your book was coming out, Oh, probably, and your interviewer at the time, a fine journalist, Chris Fernuccio. At the time, I think Winks was still running round or had just run its last race. Yes, true, and you had your manuscripts ready to go and were sort of hoping that all was going to work out. Fine.
I think you're right there. It got a bit tense there for a while, and the people in the publishing industry were very believed when she won third Coxplate because we'd already embarked on the book, and then massively relieved when she won her fourth Coxplate in four consecutive Coxplate's never been done before. I am here to say probably won't ever be done again. Probably very few horses are going to be able to maintain that level of ability
and soundness. There will be perhaps or sometime that is as fast as Winks over two thousand meters, but you know, to find one that can stay so doun and fit for four different years is just one in a million shot.
So what was the record in the end?
Well, Winks started out by winning three races as a two year old when she was very immature, skinny, not really filled out. She was the equivalent of sixteen year old netballer who hasn't finished growing yet.
That's what she was like.
But she had so much ability that she won her first three two year old races. Then she ran into a thing called first Seal, and first Seal was as happens with horses and people and every sort of mammal. First Seal was more mature. She was just she was bigger and stronger, and horses are a bit like that. Some grow faster than others and they've got an advantage over the rest for a little while. We've all seen it at school, where the strong guy in year nine
by year twelve is just a little guy. And First Seal flogged Winks several times in that two year old and early three year old season. Then Winks started to grow and fill out and get stronger, and Winks once she hit her straps, she was great and the first win of what we call the streak. Now I'm calling Winks the freak with the streak because she had a winning streak of thirty three races that began in Queensland in early in the autumn of twenty fifteen at the
Gold Coast, and she started in a race there. She was well in the betting. I think she might have been favorite, but she came out of the boxes fairly slowly. She's drawn pretty wide, she's had to go right around the field, and she's running at the back of the field.
I think she was running last. And the rest of the field starting to string out towards the finish, and the caller is calling the leading group very tently and saying, you know, this one's leading, and someone says running second, and he didn't even notice because he's looking at the leading group. He didn't notice this thing with the jockey wearing the blue colors going around the outside, right around the field, right around the pack, as fast as a dog rounding up a mob of sheep.
That's what it looked like. It looked like a kelpie.
Rounding up sheep. Winks went past them so fast they nearly got windburn. And the caller, bless his heart, didn't see her until she swept into his vision. As he's watching the leaders. Suddenly Winks goes past his binoculars and he goes, oh, and here's Winks from the clouds or whatever, you know, And it was a spectacular win. Two hundred meters out you would have said she couldn't win, and then at one point fifty meters you knew she was going to mow them down. Now, that day she was
ridden by the veteran jockey Larry Cassidy. Larry rode champions like Sunline. He rode other champions. I think he rode saintly maybe once, but he certainly rode the best horses in the past. And on his way home from the races that day, after this relatively minor race at the Gold Coast, he rings his wife on the car phone, as he does jockeys the dangerous lives, and they ring home and say, I'm okay, I didn't fall off and whatever, and I'm heading home now, you know, do you need a pint of milk?
Whatever? And she said, Larry, how was it today? But how did you go on? Wings? Oh? Yeah, I want.
In fact, I think she's the best horse I've ever ridden. And there's a bit of a silence because missus Cassidy's no fool. And she said, but Larry, you rode Sunlight. He said, I think she might be better than Sunline. Now this was a massive call, and Larry didn't go back on it. Larry repeated this to Hugh Bowman, the Sydney jockey, the very fine Sydney jockey who couldn't ride Winks in Queensland that day because he had other commitments down south in Sydney, which tells you where she was
in the pecking order. Then Bowman stayed in Sydney to ride other horses for Chris Waller and Larry, the local Queensland jockey rode, which just shows you where she was in the pecking order that is not that high. And Bowman rang Larry or Vicessa and said how to go? What happened and he repeated it. Larry said, I think she's the best I've ever ridden. And Bowman says, but you rode Sunline and he says, yeah, I still think she's the best I've ever ridden, and she could be
a champion. And Bowman and he interviewed about this in the film. It's a great interview, and he says, well, I couldn't really quite believe him, you know, I thought it was he said, I thought it was a very big call. And Bowman says to himself, well that's a
big call, but we'll see. So Bowman gets back on winks he's ridden her before in a loss or two, I think, and he rides in the Queensland Oaks and she wins the Queensland Oaks comprehensively, and then she wins another couple of races in Sydney which stamped the Oaks form, and then at about a fifth start after that, winning
Queensland that starts the streak. She comes to Melbourne for the twenty and fifteen Cox Plate and at that stage she was just this horse with Queensland form, trained by Chris Waller Young, not well known down here, but obviously
some respect. But you know, Cox plaits big deal. The previous year, the Coxplait had been won by an international raider called Adelaide, brought in here by the uber powerful racing family, the Magnia family from the Coolmore stud in Ireland, which is probably the world's most powerful stud and the
greatest trainers and all that stuff. And the Magnias had flown in a horse called Highland Reel now Highland Real had won a group race in Europe, in Ireland or England, and he'd flown to America and he'd won a race there. Everywhere he'd gone, he'd won races. He was a very good, tough international competitor who'd won.
Everywhere he'd been. Pretty well.
He's flown into Melbourne, Tom Magnia, he's walking around.
I saw him.
He's walking around the bedding ring backing Highland really had pocketfuls of money cash. He dropped them on the ground and I picked it up and gave it back to him, and he said, good of you. I should and he said, you'd be very honest. He wasn't used to people giving money back to him, and they were quite confident that they would win another Cox plate.
The cool more people.
But despite that fact, Winks on the basis of track work earlier in the Coxplate work the Tuesday morning before Coxplait, there is a thing called Breakfast with the Best. I think it's called and have a big Cox plate breakfast. Horses work one by one or in twos. And I saw this thing Winks from Interstate, and thought, my god, I like the look of her. I love the way she gallops or something. Something caught my eye about her. And she was in the betting. It's not as if
she was an outsider. She might have been a five or six dollars shot then, but Highland Reel was favorite. I'm going to say Winks would have been second or third in the betting. And I said to my boss at that stage, Peter Blunden, whose table I was on, I'm going to pack these thing Winks. And the day comes four days later, Coxplait day. She goes out and she put them to the sword. Now before the Coxplate, Chris Waller, her trainer, was interviewed, and he had two
horses in the coxplity. He had her, and he had a I think a cult called Kerma Deck or an entire called Kermed Deck, who probably had some ambitions to be a a stallion.
At start.
They were probably pretty keen to make him into a stallion and to get a Coxplate win. And when while I was interviewed before the race, they said, now, which of your two horses should win?
Do you think?
And he said, oh, Kerma Deck. So point being, Winks was by no means a shoe in, and not even her own stable thought she would necessarily win the Coxplate.
She just killed them.
Now Bowman rode a good race. She did get a bit of luck in running. She saved ground she was on the fence. Later on in her career she never did that day, went wide to stay out of trouble on her. But this time she was pretty well on the fence or close to the fence, and there's two or three horses in front of her, and of course you've got to get through that wall of rumps, that wall of bums, as they say, or else she can't get you run up the straight, very short straight at
Mooney Valley, smallest Group one racecourse in the world. I think it's a tiny racecourse with a very short straight. It's smaller than hanging rock or something, so very important to be able to get out and get some running room. And what happened was he was tracking that great Tasmanian cult horse called the Cleaner, and suddenly the Cleaner shied away from the fence. He shied away as if he
saw a snake or something. He just went sideways and opened up this massive gap, and Winks just grabbed the bit and went straight through the gap. She went through it again like a kelpie going past sheep, and she speared through and she she got five lengths on the others, and she won it so easily and by a big margin and in very good time, very good time, and that was what set her up. I mean it was her. It might have been a fifth straight win. I'm trying to think.
Fourth or fifth, but that really set her up as something to watch.
The parting of the horses, the parting of the horses, it was like the Red Sea, and that day it was great to see. You know, people say to you, what's her best wins? Well, there's a lot to choose from, and most of them are good and some of them are extra good. But that was the day I think she really stamped herself as champion material to win it twice,
as she did. She won the following year after a secret bone ship operation which was not known at the time, little bone ship, but they operated on her and they had to get it all recuperated and then get her up for her Grand Final. That is a second Coxpade, which she won and I think set a track or
race record which she subsequently broke herself. And third year she comes back and that was probably her greatest win because he took a very wide route around the field and wasted plenty of ground because he wanted to keep
her out of trouble. And that meant that a horse trained by Darren Weir, a horse called Humidoor ridden by Blake Shin, was able to save ground, save ground, saveground, come up the inside and then pull out and try and sneak the race, sneak past her and get up, didn't get past her, got to her girth, got right up near her shoulder and gave everybody a fright except I think Hugh Bowman. I think Hugh Bowman was confident
that the other horse could not get past her. He's got so much faith in Winks just producing that extra bit when it's needed, because in the end, I don't think she ever failed to produce extra when she had to. She was a freak in that respect. She could always find the extra yard when she had to. She never failed as a mature horse from four years on, never failed to find that extra few meters when she needed to.
And that bone ship. I'd heard that story before, and did that come out in your most excellent book? Was that what was first published?
It was in the book, and it's covered very nicely in the film. That bit because the film risks, of course, being a mash up of her wins. You know, ad music lots of winds, you know, good sports stuff. But the filmmaker, johnyne Hosking, is a professional, classy, expert filmmaker. She's not a horse person, she's not a sportsperson. She's just a good filmmaker. And I was able to translate the horse world for her a bit and to put her in touch with the right people and to organize her.
But she made the film, and she shot the film, and she did all that film stuff, and I was able to just sort of assist and to do some narration and to write some script for narration, and that helped get her over the line. But it's her film, not mine, to be totally honest and fair, and she's done a great job because she's found two things that were obstacles in Winks's rise and Rise and Rise, and one was the bonship, but the other one comes after. It's the fight after the fight, and that is Winks.
She wins her fourth coxplate, record breaking no one's ever won four coxplaits. She wins it in two thousand eighteen. The owners, the trainer, they go.
What do we do? Should we biscuit? Should we go over sous?
And in the end, I think vetts looked at her and they did X rays and they checked her all over and she was perfect. She was like brand new. She very very tough and sound. And Chris Waller said, well, there's no reason why she can't have one more preparation, one more autumn. That would give her four springs and four autumns. These are eight preparations against the best horses in Australasia and some inputs, right.
And so that's what they did.
They brought her back after her fourth Coxplate win when she had really nothing left to prove except to show that she could still do it, and they brought her back from the paddock and then got to fit again in for the Autumn Carnival and she went a clean sweep in Sydney of another I'm going to say another four wins, culminating that autumn in the Queen Elizabeth Stakes, which was her swan song.
That was it.
It was the final race and as we all know, she won it. It was marvelous to see her triumphant exit ranks in my mind with the greatest Australian sporting events of my lifetime now in my head, they are Milina Rose winning the World bantamweight title from fighting a rada at You know, he was ten to one against He was a kid.
From rural Victoria, from Druan.
He was nineteen. He goes to Japan to fight an absolute tough champion, a guy that was probably eight or ten years older, who was the real deal. And he wasn't supposed to He only got the fight at the last minute because somebody else pulled out and they thought this kid'll do and he went up there and beat him and it was wonderful. I can remember it clearly. I was about eleven and Lionel Rose was greeted much
like the Beatles were when they arrived in Australia. There was something like two hundred and fifty thousand people lining the streets of Melbourne to cheer him. I mean it was mind blowing. That was a big one. Shane Gould the female swimmer. She was a schoolgirl when she swam in the Munich Olympics and won a swag of medals. I think she won three golds in the silver. She
was fifteen or something. There was David Hooks, the late great David Hooks, who scored did he do five boundaries in the last five balls of the Big Test against England and was wonderful exhibition by basically a boy.
He was just a kid.
It had just been elevated to the Test side and he just brained it. And Winks. I think Winks fits into that suite of memories of great Australian sporting events, not the least of which, of course, Wasathy Freeman in the year two thousand winning at the Sydney Games when she won in the green suit. That was a standout thing that you would never forget. And each of those stories are so unlikely and so wonderful that any of them could sort of throw up an idea for a
film in a way. In fact, I did actually work with some guys doing a Lionel Rose book which was based on their mini series called Rose Against the Odds. You know, it did throw up something. And I'm sure there's been a lot of stuff done on Kathy Freeman, not so much on Shane Gould. I think she was very shy. But Winks is a valid subject for film. But the thing about racing and boxing is they are so inherently dramatic and so well done by the people and the horses that do it that you cannot hope
to be as good as the real thing. If you are using actors and stunt men and all the rest of it, nothing is as good as those who are the pros, the professional boxes, professional jockeys and race horses. And so if you want to make a film about Winks, don't go off looking for stand ins and looking for actors. You've got to make a feature documentary. And that is
what Janine Hosking has done. She's pulled together the real footage, the way that that fine filmmaker did with Edon Center the Formula one driver, and with Amy Winehouse, the late Amy Winehouse, the singer. To take all that real footage of actual events and all the interviews that have been done in the past and weave them together into a potent story that is better than some of its parts. That is what Janine Hosking has done with the Winks story.
She's pulled together all these elements. She's done really searching interviews with the main players, Chris Waller, the trainer, Hugh Bowman, the jockey, the owners and others, and she's woven it all together into a tapestry that is really good. It's a really strong biopic Some people cry when they see bits of it. Some people cheer when they see bits of it. It really is quite moving. There's a trajectory
to it. The stories I've told today are part of it, and that is, you know, will they beat the bone chip?
Yeah?
They did.
And the other one is how close she came to death. What the public didn't know in the year twenty twenty was how close Winks came to death. She had a stillborn fole. Her first file was stillborn, and that led to a complicated birth, and that led to her developing a form of colic. Horses often die of colic. Gutty is very complex and long, and it's easily upset, and they can get a twisted bowl on all sorts of different things and it can kill them. And she got
this complicated collage and it's often fatal. And they operated once and it didn't work or didn't take and it was so serious that Tom Magnia, the guy I mentioned before who dropped the money on the floor, he runs Coolmore startup in the Hunter Valley. So it's funny how the enemy is now the friend. Tom magniare rings the owners of Winks and said you better come down tonight. We don't think she's going to make it. And you could hear a pin drop in the film when he
says this. It's really grueling, and the owners all gather thinking this is it. Anyway, they operated again, this great team of vets at the Scone Equine Hospital and they all touched Wooden, cross their fingers and said their prayers backwards and she survived. Now she had the equivalent of five months in hospital. She was five months in probably a loose box not much bigger than this room than this studio, to stop her from moving around too much.
So it's about three by three mad something like that.
As she got better, they would lead her and all that, but they like compulsory bedrest. And she had a big bandage around her belly, massive bandage. Anyway, the day came when they took the bandage off and Tom Magney, the same guy, a great Irish voice. In an interview, he said, we knew, you know, she had the will to win, but she also had the will to live. Beautiful and it's just perfect. And that's one of the last scenes in the film, is that. But that's not the last thing.
I'll leave that for people who want to go and it's a really good film. Jeanine Husking has done a lovely job. I'm relieved that you know that we're able to get away with it so well, and that it's come up better than I expected it would, and I thoroughly endorse it. I think it's a good way to spend tight ass Tuesday somewhere. It opens in ninety cinemas around Australia in early September.
Fabulous and you are the narrator Greek chorus.
I am a narrator and I wrote script, which most of which I deliver myself.
So in cinemas probably by the time this goes to.
Where by the time this goes to where it will be opening all around the place and thousands of Australians will be flocking to enjoy it.
I hope. Thank you, John, Thank you Andrew.
Thanks for listening. Life and Crimes is a Sunday Herald Sun production for true crime Australia. Our producer is Johnny Burton. For my columns, features and more, go to Heroldsun dot com dot au, forward slash Andrew rule one word. For advertising inquiries, go to news Podcasts sold at news dot com dot Au that is all one word news podcasts sold. And if you want further information about this episode, links are in the description.