Scott Brodie and Mel Baker stand in the middle of the indoor training ring on a horse farm in the New South Wales southern highlands. A magnificent black gelding and former racehorse, Treble Clef, canters around the rails, stopping now and then, pricking its ears and regarding them quizzically.
Brodie, a 60-year-old former horse trainer and chief riding instructor with the NSW mounted police, speaks softly to both the animal and Baker, a medically discharged former Royal Australian Navy chaplain.
“Don’t look back,” Brodie implores her. “He’ll follow you, I promise you. And if you feel like he’s going to turn and you don’t want him to, just hold that whip up and he’ll stop. Definitely.”
Baker smiles and nods. She does as Brodie suggests. And the eight-year-old Treble Clef follows her when she wants. Stops when she raises the whip. A sense of calm control pervades the ring as Brodie brokers a relationship between Baker, who was traumatised by her military service, and the gelding who is, like many former racehorses, damaged by years of track work.
Soon Treble Clef is nuzzling Baker’s shoulder as they pose for the camera. The horse dips its head towards her knee-brace in acknowledgement, she says, of her pain. The swift, acute emotional connection between woman and horse, their sharing of some unspoken human-equine language, is poignant and intriguing.
“When you’re talking about your stuff in [psychological] therapy you have to relive what trauma you’ve lived through,” the 52-year-old says. “But when I’m with the horses I don’t care about that. Whatever stress or anxiety I’m holding I’ve got to just let that fall to the ground.
“I can’t hold on to that because, if I do, then the horse is not going to talk to me. So, to create this partnership – this dual heartbeat, as I call it – between both of us I just need to let it all go and allow the horse to tell me what’s going on.”
The mutual benefits of bringing together traumatised veterans and damaged former racehorses might not seem immediately apparent to outsiders. But Brodie, who found himself at times somewhat lost after being medically discharged from the police force in 2001, has seen hundreds of veterans and thousands of horses therapeutically benefit from this human-animal emotional alchemy. He and a former royal marine, Adrian Talbot, began running residential courses for traumatised homeless former service personnel and damaged horses in Kangaroo Valley in 2015. Their Thoroughbred and Veteran Welfare Alliance was an extension of Talbot’s Homes for Heroes initiative that aimed to house shelter-less and traumatised veterans, an estimated nearly 6,000 of whom have slept rough in Australia in the past year. At the time Brodie was retraining ex-racers for Racing NSW. Their organisation has now become the registered charity, Horse Aid.
The use of equine therapy – whereby well-adjusted horses are brought together with people suffering anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder or depression – is well established. But Horse Aid is novel for its pairing of thoroughbred ex-racehorses needing to be retrained and damaged veterans.
Brodie, Baker and a number of other veterans and first responders with PTSD are the focus of a deeply affecting, award-winning documentary, aptly titled The Healing, that is screening in Australian cinemas through November and will be available digitally after that. It is a heart-rending depiction of how damaged veterans (most, like Mel Baker, were suicidal upon discharge) are shown a potential path to recovery through connecting to the damaged horses.
The Healing has its genesis in the childhood contact with a damaged horse – and family war service – of the documentary’s director/producer Nick Barkla. His grandfather Leonard Hugh (“Bill”) Barkla was a war-wounded Royal Australian Air Force pilot who crash-landed in the Middle East, while his great-uncle, John, died of war injuries from his navy service. Nick Barkla’s great-grandfather Leonard William Barkla died in 1920 of injuries sustained in the first world war.
When Barkla was a child in country Victoria, a deeply troubled ex-racehorse was agisted on his family’s property.
“We were told to stay away from it because it was ‘crazy’ … I always felt sorry for the lonely, panicked looking horse in our bottom paddock.”
Barkla said his grandfather “Uppa” only once spoke about his war service.
“When I encountered the veterans in my film, they didn’t want to talk about their ‘war stories’ either. But they understood the stories were important to help an audience understand what they’d been through.
“I felt like I was honouring all veterans when I made this film, especially those that didn’t, or couldn’t, talk about their trauma. I dedicated the movie to Uppa, his brother and father, because they sacrificed an enormous amount for our country. I sometimes felt like Uppa was looking over my shoulder, encouraging me to make something honest and powerful.”
Brodie and Baker, who became the documentary’s associate producer, say that during the residential course, few veterans want to share their “war stories”. Yet they do in the documentary.
Baker recounts her severe bullying (including having her life threatened) by a superior while on operational navy deployment. When she complained, her integrity was questioned – which “is what killed me inside more than anything else”, she says. She was later sexually assaulted by a sailor. She became suicidal, was eventually forced to accept medical discharge and, consequently, became homeless.
Another former sailor, Georgie, recounts her sexual assault-related trauma. A former Australian federal police officer, Max, speaks of his haunting service in Timor-Leste where he had to find space in a makeshift morgue, already overcrowded with bodies and its refrigeration faulty, for a dead baby. Sam, ex-army, recounts through tears how he ended up living in a creek bed when his family disintegrated due to the pressures of his service.
Brodie is a warm, enigmatic and inspiring person for the veterans. Their gravitation towards him is evident as he speaks to them around the campfire at night and recites lines from AB “Banjo”– Paterson’s moving poem about soldiers and their horses, The Last Parade.
While Brodie says it’s easier to work with damaged horses than traumatised people, the symbiosis between animal and human is remarkable.
He talks of traumatised ex-personnel as “un-soldiering” in his programs and of the horses as “un-racing” – a symbiotic process of mutual deinstitutionalisation.
“Horses can easily sense self-doubt in people,” he says. “They are herd animals. They want to be led … Often when they come off the track they’ve got no social skills, so if you put them into the paddock with [well-adjusted] horses they will be kicked and bitten. They’ve never really learnt to be horses because from the time they’re separated from their mothers they’re in stables or yards by themselves, and trained to race, and not know how to interact in a social way.
“So if we can give them confident leadership, well, this is when they can start their un-racing, which is just like un-soldiering. And this is great for the veterans because they have lost their confidence too. And when that communication happens … we are starting on some serious recovery.”
Brodie says countless veterans have insisted his program has helped save their lives. Instructively, both Brodie and Baker have given evidence to the continuing royal commission into defence and veteran suicide. Barkla’s The Healing was screened for commissioners and support staff last March. Brodie and Baker later took part in a two-hour Q&A session with them.
“I gave evidence [to the royal commission] about the program … we have had talks with Defence [the federal department] about the benefits of the program, given that so many veterans have said it helped save their lives,” Brodie says. “But we have received no [government] funding.”
Horse Aid relies on corporate funding and public donations.
Baker says alternative therapy programs such as Horse Aid should be formally adopted to help injured and traumatised defence personnel to stay in the services through rehabilitation – instead of forcing their medical discharge. This would also reduce the extraordinary rate of veteran homelessness, she says.
“If we could just get Scott’s program to be accepted by Defence, so that it could be [formally] offered to veterans who need and want it, it would help good people to stay in the services,” she says.
“I loved my work as a navy chaplain. I loved being in defence and I just kept fighting for my job. And I kept telling them I’m going to be homeless if you discharge me now because DVA [Department of Veterans Affairs] hasn’t covered anything.”
But she was discharged and subsequently “lost my family and everything I knew about my life”.
“But this,” she gestures to the training ring and Treble Clef, “saved my life.”
She puts her face next to the horse’s. She closes her eyes and smiles serenely.
Help for veterans and their families is available 24 hours a day from Open Arms on 1800 011 046 or www.openarms.gov.au and Safe Zone Support on 1800 142 072 or https://www.openarms.gov.au/safe-zone-support. The crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
The Healing is screening now in selected cinemas across Australia
