The great American writer Alice Walker (The Colour Purple) thinks: ''Horses make a landscape look beautiful'', but yesterday at the Bungendore Showground the many gorgeous horses were beautifying an already very beautiful landscape.
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The horses are gathered there for a major Pony Club Association of NSW event (a week-long camp at which horse-riding children of all ages are taught equestrian skills) which coincides with, this Saturday, the International Mounted Games Exchange.
Yesterday the beautiful horses and their young riders on the emerald-green plain were set in a landscape made especially dramatic beneath a huge sky in which low clouds of excitingly threatening colours rampaged to and fro. Not that anyone out on the plain yesterday morning in the four busy rings where instruction was going on had time to admire the sky. Activity was intense.
In one of the rings one of the camp's younger groups, the ''Monkeys'' (children aged between six and eight) were being taught showjumping but what parents and instructors explained cheerfully was ''entry level showjumping''. This required the small children and their sometimes small ponies (two or three of the latter were only about the size of very large dogs) to guide their ponies over jumps not much higher than a log lying on the ground. But perhaps in 10 or 15 years, parents and instructors speculated (but good naturedly, and I was struck all morning by how much nicer horse-riding parents seem than tennis mums and dads who are usually intense, hatchet-faced people like Lleyton Hewitt's parents) these may be our ''Olympians'' perched on enormous steeds leaping over tall obstacles.
Of course small children like yesterday's ''Monkeys'' are innately cute anyway but there's something about a cute child on a cute pony that scores a 9.9 on the 10 point Temple Scale (named after Shirley Temple, the Hollywood child star). Some anonymous wit has written that ''People on horses look better than they are (and people in cars look worse than they are)'', and this is especially true of children. If there was a perfect 10 among the horse and rider Monkeys yesterday it was a child called Abby astride a horse whose name I didn't get.
''You see Abby, who's sitting above everybody else [on a taller pony]?'' parent Matt Green from Yass pointed out to me. (Not that Abby was his child and again one wonders if there is a tennis parent who would ever draw a journalist's attention to a child other than their own protege.) ''You just watch that horse she's on when it starts trotting. It's just got this lovely, slow, bounding trot.''
The very authentic-looking Green (resplendent in a Drizabone coat and an Akubra hat and looking like someone hired for this rural Aussie occasion from Central Casting) was right. ''Poetry in motion,'' I agreed after the horse had tangoed through its paces. One could have watched that horse all day. One yearned to ride it, thereby fulfilling John Steinbeck's famous observation that, ''a man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot''.
Just as one could watch that horse all day, one could listen all day to the voice of Jenny Gregg, 15, one of five members of the Great Britain team competing this Saturday at Bungendore in the International Mounted Games Exchange. She's from County Down in Northern Ireland and her voice is beautifully musical. And she rides splendidly too. She has already ridden for her country and now she's come here to ride for Britain.
To explain, because one doesn't usually associate international sporting events with bucolic Bungendore, the International Mounted Games Exchange is an annual tournament in which five-rider teams of young equestrians from Australia, Canada, the United States and Britain compete for one very intense, competitive day in a variety of equestrian events. It was Australia's turn this year and Bungendore's dynamic Di Cullen, president of the NSW Pony Club (and this zone's chief instructor) was put in charge of that (and of the camp) and knew that Bungendore's Showground was the perfect venue.
And, she explained, one of the joys of having the camp coincide with the grand international occasion is that the hundreds of children and parents here for the camp become a ''rentacrowd'' for Saturday's glamorous event.
Jenny Gregg is thrilled to be here and burbled (sounding like a melodious Irish harp) about what she's done and where she's been.
As the word exchange implies, the host nation gives its visitors more than just competition and Di Cullen, planning to show off Australia to all the competitors, made up her mind to give them all ''a bit of the coast, a bit of the mountains [including the Jenolan caves where each team spontaneously sang its national anthem in a cave with an excellent echo] and then a bit of the bush [Dubbo, where the young equestrians enjoyed the authentically Australian experience of mustering sheep from horseback] so that they get a bit of a picture of what Australia's all about''.
But the tourism and the play is mostly over now, and the earnestness of the weekend's competition is looming. One of Di Cullen's regrets is that it's never been possible, yet, to lure New Zealand into sending a team. ''They're probably frightened we'll beat them,'' she laughed yesterday.
In the olden days the young people from the visiting national teams might have had their form spoiled by terrible pangs of homesickness but of course, Jenny Gregg explained yesterday, she's in ready touch by phone with her family and, joy of joys: ''My granny's on Twitter.''