Guy McLean: Becoming the Man from Snowy River

From eight years of age till now (and beyond, I’m certain) my favourite movie of all time has been ‘The Man from Snowy River’, and to say that I’ve watched it a hundred times may be a little understated. I could recite all parts off by heart, and I would enthusiastically hum the theme music as I ran my ponies (and later, my horses) up and down every dam wall and steep embankment on the property, cracking my stockwhip with my back and head leant back towards my horses tail.

My dear sister Skye can remember me saying to her (when I was about 15)‚“I’m going to do that one day” (chase the wild bush horses down the mountainside), to which she vividly remembered saying (in only a way that a younger sister can) “dream on brother, that’s never gonna happen,” and dream on I did. This past April the dream came true, as my dear sister watched in person, with tears running down her face, as she recalled the moment from almost four decades before.

This year would be the 7th time that I would perform at the world-renowned ‘Man From Snowy River Bush Festival’ in Corryong, Victoria. Although in the past, my only involvement in the reenactment was to recite the poem and then narrate the wild horse chase (with a small cameo when needed to keep the horses on track), this year, I and my good six-year-old ASH buckskin gelding Dreaming of Big Bucks (Bucky), had the incredible honour of becoming Jim Craig and Denny.

Although I feel that all of my performance horses have the education and athletic ability to do the job at hand, I have worked Bucky the last couple of years (when I am home to do so) with this specific job in mind. From chasing my liberty horses and yearlings in the pasture, to galloping through the bush at my dear Dad‘s property, I was doing my utmost best to prepare him for the run down the side of the mountain in the Corryong ranges.

Now, this hill that they use for this major part of the festival is not quite as steep or as daring as the one in the film, but the wombat holes, the flint stones and the rugged terrain were all worthy of the ride, and even though Bucky had never allowed me to get to the bottom of him on any of our training rides in Queensland, he most certainly had his fuel tank hovering on E, by the end of our Thursday run through where we run the horses several times, up and down the steep slope. True to his courageous Stock Horse breeding, though, come Friday morning, he was dancing on his toes, just like dear Denny did, and the chase was on.

I have felt very blessed to perform in some of the finest arenas across the world with my beloved horses, but my favourite one to date was on a mountainside in front of 6,000 people (who all drove out to a local cattleman’s property). The ground was tough, gnarly and dry, just like the men who ride there.

Bucky was a good gelding before we ever rode at top speed together in the mountains, but during and now since this great ride, he has most definitely jumped up in my books and proven himself to be one of the greats (like I always hoped he would). He is still very young in the mind and has a lot of growth ahead of him, but if the contract we wrote with one of the organisers in the form of a firm handshake is as true as I believe it to be, we will be back to do it all again next year, and my dear Bucky can continue to write a story of legend, all of his own.

Although this is a story of one man on one horse, there was no way that one man was going to control this mob in open country, with a roaring crowd that acted as an opposing magnet each time the horses approached the catch yard, and although not one of us riders had a designated position as such, we all worked as one and got to where we were needed when we needed to get there. It reminded me of my AFL football days, playing in a team (even though, as a footballer, I made a much better Horseman).

Although you can’t see it in this pic (above image), I was mic’d up the entire time and was giving the crowd a blow-by-blow account of the ride from the man himself (so to speak), and though a lot of it was done with tongue firmly in cheek, I was riding with the heart of a proud Queensland boy who felt just as much at home in the high country as he does on the flat, and in that very moment there was nowhere else in the world I would rather have been.

There was a lot of steeper riding on the day than these pictures display, but on flatter ground like the image above, was where the talented photographers did most of their work, and although I wasn’t on set when they did the movie (I was only eight remember) I am sure there would have been a few ‘cuts’ and several extra ’takes’ at times whilst filming the epic moving picture, but as this was a live show, it required us all to make our first take be our best, as it was to be our only, and although a lot of people remarked that it didn’t go exactly to script (like it did in rehearsals) the script was pretty open, with the main goal being that horses and riders returned safe and sound and that the audience had a great time, so all in all, we nailed the script, as best we could.

As the horses had given us a little bit of a run around, and we did our darndest to keep them in view of the audience (for no matter how pretty the scenery was, no one had spent their hard-earned cash to watch a vacant mountainside as we rode off into the highlands in pursuit of the mob) it took the entire team to bring them to the yards as they ducked and dived, and I said to the crowd on the microphone, “now, just like you did in the movie, please just ignore the outriders who are helping and focus only on me, as though I’m doing all of the work myself.“ One of my favourite parts of watching the film as a kid was counting the riders (on the edge of the screen) running the supposedly ’free at will’ wild horses, as well as pointing out the frequent horse changes for the same actor from scene to scene, but as mentioned before, I still consider it to be the greatest movie ever made and love those bits just as much as the rest (a little bit like ’Where‘s Wally’ but for horse kids).

As I removed my hat and took in the moment in front of a capacity crowd that stood almost 50 deep along a stock fenceline now covered in people, when only yesterday it was purely covered in grass, cows and cow patty’s, I did all that I could to take in this small but precious space in time, as I thought of my dear Dad Norm and how I dedicated that ride to his memory, and hope that he was watching from the Longyard in the sky, as his fifth son lived out his childhood dream.