Melissa Lucashenko

creamy colored gelding i think it was it was probably only a yearling or something and i managed to clamber on top of it as a bloody seven or eight year old and of course fell straight off again yeah if there was a horse riding past if there was a pony to be looked at if there was a picture of a horse i was just obsessed completely obsessed and i was thinking about this the other day and thinking

You know, when I think about my working life, the first paid job I had was detailing motorbikes in Moss Street and Slacks Creek at 15.

But really, the first job I got paid for was, I did it on the sly.

A kid in my class at school had this unrideable green horse.

Green means untrained.

And her parents found out that I was good with horses.

And so an invitation was offered to me that, you know, could I come and ride this unrideable horse for her for five bucks a pop?

What did your mum think about that proposal?

Mum thought it was the worst idea she'd ever had.

It absolutely forbade me from doing it.

So what I did was I jumped on my pony, rode my pony flat strapped to this girl's place, rode her horse, got the five bucks, galloped home and didn't tell mum that I was doing it.

So you had your own horse as well?

From 10, I had an old pony from up the road.

It was delivered to me probably, so I stopped climbing on all the unbroken horses in the neighbourhood.

Yeah, well, Mum could see very clearly that education was the way out of poverty.

Dad had more.

Dad went to State High.

I'm not sure if he graduated or not, but he certainly had more schooling than Mum as a Russian with white privilege.

You know, there were books with Cyrillic characters in the family home which were just sort of lying around dusty and unread, but the Russians certainly came with some kind of an educational background.

Yeah, but mum in particular.