By Tania Phillips
Allora Showground was a time tunnel to the past at the weekend, returning a record crowd to a time when horsepower meant real horses pulling ploughs, drays and helping to grind food (in this case smashing pumpkins for pig feed).
The trip down memory lane came via the Darling Downs Heavy Horse Association’s second annual Heavy Horse Festival which club secretary Clare Gorwyn said was bigger and better than the inaugural event and saw horses come from Bundaberg to well down in to NSW and right across Southern Queensland.
According to Clare the event grew out of the heavy horse and harness section at Warwick Show.
After a decade of running the show section, one night over a beer, the core group decided, to step up and go it alone with a stand-alone show.
“That’s how the heavy horse festival was born,” Clare laughed.
And she said, all things considered, last year’s inaugural event was “fabulous”.
“We still had Covid hanging over our heads, we had extreme weather events, but it was a really good event.
“It showed that people were wanting and itching to get back to attending events. We had our local shows, Stanthorpe, Allora cancelled because of the Covid requirements. So really ours was one of the first big events to happen in the Southern Downs and it went off with a bang.
“But this year was bigger and better. We had at least double the number of horses. We had more than a hundred heavy horses entered. We would have had at least double the number of people through the gate, we would have probably doubled the number of trade and food vendors there. Our public camping area was pretty much full.
“We can’t get much bigger, but we can get better.”
The association covers all breeds of heavy horses from the well-known Clydesdales and Shires through to Belgium Drafts but they also invited other breeds including the light horse, drum horses and cross breeds all of which featured in the ring. Outside of the ring there was more to see including some of the rarer breeds along with black smiths, highland cattle and less intimidating miniature animals for the kids.
“It was very much an extended show,” Clare admitted.
“We had the horses ploughing. Then we had demonstrations of the skills being lost because they are no longer needed – the wheelwrights, we had demonstrations of the horse works where the horse goes round and round driving a set of gears, in our case a pumpkin smasher. We had a couple of blacksmiths, a guy that hot shoes horses and we had a new display this year, a rope maker. And of course, we had a bullock team.”
And while for a moment, the organisers are taking a moment to put their feet up and rest a little on their laurels they are also already thinking of what to do for next year’s festival.
