Is that Cocteau’s Horse? by Fiona Davies

First published in the ADSR Zine 2022

This is a reflective piece in response to my experience developing works as part of Carnivale Catastrophe - a site of installations, performances and public programs presented by MAPBM at Cementa22. Both organisations, Modern Art Projects Blue Mountains and Cementa22, are based in communities that were severely affected by the 2019-20 bushfires. The works and events shared here are situated in a post-disaster, emotional landscape, and explore ideas of uncertainty, of trying to find comfort, shelter, or a safer place, and trying to understand what happened. Carnivale Catastrophe provides a catalyst for conversations where voices from in these communities are able to share their experiences.

In 2021, when I first started talking to people in the Kandos region and surrounds about the 2019-20 fires, I became aware that many stories featured horses and that they played a big role in what locals wanted to talk to me about. Hearing about the strong bonds people had with their horses, I recalled my own longing to own a horse in early childhood. It may have been my ongoing fascination with this animal that focused my attention here, amplified through their many other concerns. Fragments of stories returned from my childhood to my memory;

‘As Black Beauty looked up, he saw a red light flickering on the wall. Then he heard a cry of ‘Fire! Fire!’ outside, and an old hosteler came in quickly and quietly. He was so calm that he did not scare the horses. He got one horse out of its stall and went to another. The next thing Black Beauty heard was the voice of James, quiet and cheery as it always was. “Come Beauty, on with your bridle, my boy, and we’ll soon be out of this smoke.” The bridle was on in no time, and then James took the scarf off his neck and tied it lightly over Black Beauty’s eyes. Patting and coaxing and speaking gently, he led Black beauty out of the stable. Safe in the yard he slipped the scarf off the horse’s eyes and shouted, “Here, somebody! Take this horse while I go back for the other.” A tall man took hold of Black Beauty’s bridle and James darted back into the stable. Black Beauty set up a shrill whinny as he saw him go. Ginger told him afterward that his whinnying was the best thing he could have done for her, for if she hadn’t heard him outside, she would never have had the courage to come out.’1

The very first story I was told about a horse in the 2019-20 fires was a second-hand rendition of a story told first to Kandos resident Ann Finnegan by one of the local bus drivers. In this retelling by me, the story may be so altered from the original that it is unrecognisable to the bus driver. I think - I was told - the bus driver was working with a group of locals at a fire ground, and they saw a pale or white horse running in a panic towards the flames. Somehow, they were able to stop the horse from going into the fire and being burnt, and in the end they managed to get it into a paddock at Running Stream. For quite some time nobody came forward to claim the horse and I still don’t know if anybody ever did. The horse may have run for miles and miles and miles.

In the stories I heard, the word apocalyptic was often used to describe the orange skies and dense smoke of Sydney that they’d all seen on the telly. They had been scared and used a word often brought in to describe the end of the world. They also used this word to describe feelings being out of control - being where they were, oppressed by the fires, that pursued both the animate and inanimate across the Blue Mountains and Central West of NSW. Some of those people who had dealt with the hands-on gruesomeness of burnt and dead animals, and their distraught owners, had initially agreed to talk to me and then as the time got closer, they faded away, apparently unwilling to relive these experiences.

In the Book of Revelation, the final book of the New Testament, it is told that as each of the first four seals of the scroll are broken, the four horses of the apocalypse appear. The fourth horse is the pale horse, ridden by death.. I wanted the grief and mourning that can result from the death of another, whether animate or inanimate, to be embodied in this work.

Later I was introduced to Bibi by one of my cousins who had worked as a vet in Mudgee some time ago. During the fires Bibi offered an unofficial ‘safer place’ for horses at her property. She had an extra ten or so horses on site for most of the four fire months. She kept saying that you have to be able to load your horses whenever you need to. She would say – “Don’t wait to practice until the smoke is swirling and the horses can feel that you’re stressed and scared. It won’t happen.” I could feel Bibi’s strong emotional attachment to her horses as she showed me a series of framed photographs on the wall: each horse had a name, she told me when she owned the horse, when they had died, and what their character was like.

As horse owners often report feelings of attachment comparable to those reported by owners of more ‘traditional’ companion animals like dogs or cats, they may be motivated to risk their lives to save their horses. In fact, horse owners have been singled out by emergency responders as particularly challenging to manage. This was thought to be not only because horse owners have a strong emotional bond with their horses, but more pragmatically, because of the challenges associated with evacuating horses. Weighing in at around half a tonne of sentient, decision-making animal, there are many practical challenges to consider when evacuating horses from the threat of a natural disaster.

During evacuations from emergencies such as bushfires, owners may need to choose which of their horses to try to save first, if at all. But not all horse owners have access to transportation. Horse-specific transport needs to be accessible and in working order. Most standard horse transport vehicles accommodate two horses, yet a large percentage of horse owners in Australia own multiple horses. A survey of 930 horse owners in Australia found that 89% owned more than two or more horses. This means that some horse owners may have to prioritise evacuating some horses over others or attempt multiple relocations.2

As Cementa22 got closer and closer, news hit of the extensive floods in Northern NSW. Somehow, we still managed to be surprised by the extent of the devastation. Then, the stories about horses started coming in. There seemed to be less willingness to remain quiet about the damage and destruction by the floods than by the fires. On a peaceful Saturday morning I read in the paper.

‘At daybreak [they set off in their boat to check on the horses. They discovered immediately their two small ponies had been washed away. They managed to rescue seven of the remaining horses and take them over six hours back to the bridge. “We lost one, an older stockhorse …. and I’m not sure I’ll ever get over the feeling that we could have done more. We lived on the bridge with the horses for a week, before the flood waters subsided enough for us to get them off, and I’m having nightmares to this day.’2

Ironically the flooded river which had taken so much away from them became their lifeline for those seven days. “We tapped into a water main .... and people delivered food by boat and jetski, and there were hay drops for the horses and cattle.”3

Later in the article the vet, Oliver Liyou says;

There absolutely should be compulsory registration and microchipping for all horses” … [Unlike other livestock, horses are not tagged.] “Hundreds of horses were swept away, and when their bodies were found, they were buried without any attempt to identify them, which has caused deep ongoing trauma.”4

Gathering these stories, I created Is that Cocteau’s Horse? I wanted to capture the strength of emotion that blurred the boundaries between horse and owner, overlaid by the grief and mourning that came from losing so many animals. I made works that might be theatrical costumes, fancy dress outfits, or rumbustious carnival costumes that combined the head and shoulders of a horse with a cape that either covered an absent two-legged body; or like when dandified stallions wore their capes theatrically swept back over their shoulders, exposing to view a two-legged body wearing evening gloves of satin and beading on their front limbs. The mares and foals seemed to wear their capes for warmth and protection, and eschewed satin and beading for ease of movement and escape.

My horses were hung inside a farm like shed from an oval steel rail, by a meat hook through the top of their heads. Also hanging on the rail - a rail that referenced the merry-go-round, the racetrack, and the abattoir (all sites where the power of the horse is subjugated) - was a delicately embroidered blouse that my mother used to wear. Very small dark blue horses still pranced with enjoyment down the front placket of the blouse.

On the last day of Cementa22, Sunday the 22nd May, I took some time off from the Carnivale Catastrophe exhibition site to race around to see as many of the other artworks that I could. One of those was In Perpetuity, a powerful work by Ivey Wawn. The title sets the scene for an eternal relationship of some sort from this time forward.

One of the two video works showed three horses/dancers performing a choreography of dressage, a ritualised competitive sport. The dance was made of sequences of prescriptive, synchronised, high stepping or ‘marching’ movements in time to the music, angling their turns and extending their legs to precisely follow the line of the movement in each routine. The dancers embodied the horse responding to the requirements and rhythms of another, the trainer. The dancers were not wearing horse costumes or fancy dress. The references were more subtle, with braided patterning on gymnasts’ costumes alluding to the plaiting of the mane of each horse in competition. The high cut of the body costumes emphasised the length of the dancers’ legs. The patterning continued down onto the dancers’ calves where tightly wrapped fabric was also patterned with braiding. Wawn describes the movements of the dance as referencing the mechanics of the capitalist system where some are trained to perform certain actions to a specific rhythm determined by another.

The beauty and character evident in Wawn’s work looped my mind back to thoughts of the first horse costume I’d seen, where I felt there was some coherence between the presence and stature of a horse, and the emotional impact of wearing a horse costume. It was the black horse costume designed by Janine Janet in Jean Cocteau’s film from 1960 The Testament of Orpheus or Do not ask me why! The actor wearing the costume breaks the shaky illusion of reality in the first few minutes by removing the head of the costume to stare at one of the other characters and then replacing the head. My work, as does Wawn’s, sits on that line between illusion and reality and holds both contradictory and conflicted thoughts in the one hand.

1. Sewell Anna, Black Beauty, Adapted by Eleanor Graham Vance, Random House, New York 1965 pages not numbered.

2. Kirrilly R.Thompson, Laura Haigh Bradley and P. Smith, Planned and ultimate actions of horse owners facing a bushfire threat: Implications for natural disaster preparedness and survivability International, Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, Volume 27, March 2018, Pages 490-498

3. Candida Baker, After Math Sydney Morning Herald May 7th 2022 p14

4. Ibid p15