Brett Cavanough admits there were points in his life when he could have gone down the road of drugs and booze instead of training racehorses.
“I could have been a loser,” he tells The Straight, recalling heroin-addicted roommates and binge-fuelled weekends that didn’t stop on Sundays.
“But I chose differently, so I understand these kids. I get what they go through and I kind of bleed with them.”
The ‘kids’ he talks about are the jockeys that come through his stables.
Cavanough has become an unlikely Theo Green of country racing. His Scone yard is something of an apprentice school to the likes of Nick Palmer, just 17 and last week passed to begin riding competitively. Cavanough has had Jess Eaton, Kody Nestor, Jarrod Woodhouse and Brent Evans at various times, to name a few.
“They all come with stories behind the scenes,” he says. “Some have two aliases. They don’t know where their dad is or their mum has died and the dad is a wasted druggo. I’ve got others who have parents that wait on them hand and foot, coming to work in their own car, their mum’s car or their dad’s car.
“But there is no difference between them all when they’re in their work boots in my yard. I treat them all as equal and when they make mistakes, I get it. I’ve been there too so I don’t try to rectify it. I just help them through it.”
Cavanough, a multiple premiership-winning trainer, is 61 years old; his days working for TJ Smith on Doncaster Avenue are a long time ago. But when living in Sydney for the first time, just a boy from the bush, he moved into a house with “a heroin addict and a speed freak and I was just 17 or 18. I had that many forks in the road I didn’t know where I was”.
Later, Cavanough went shearing. He was so good at it that in 1997, in the Widgiewa district west of Wagga, he set a world record of 427 crossbred lambs in eight hours, a record that stood for five years.
“But it was a bloody tough life,” he says. “There were fights, alcohol, drugs and parties, and you’re sleeping out with no power, eating mutton seven days a week. It was a different life, but it was a life that set me up for this one. There aren’t too many that have lived one like it.”
Cavanough grew up in the hard-knock Australian bush, but as a young man he found the city more savage. Cocaine, weed and speed were everywhere. Working for TJ Smith, and later Neville Begg, he saw what the straight-and-narrow looked like.
“I was looking for something in life,” he says. “TJ used to roll up every afternoon in a Rolls Royce and we used to see that and see how smart he dressed, and so we started to dress smart. We were bush kids but we wanted to be successful and we wanted to be competitive.”
At some point during those early years, Cavanough was at a crossroads, that cliché of taking one road for this result, or another road that would have delivered a different life. He chose a path away from addiction, though he had every excuse not to, given his background.
Cavanough was raised by a couple he had gone through childhood believing were his parents, but in early adulthood he discovered they were his grandparents. He admits it led to internal conflicts about identity and familyhood, something he worked through with counselling and communication.
To that end, there isn’t much he won’t talk about.
“A lot of people don’t open up about these aspects of their life, the hard stuff,” he says, but the trainer has rarely struggled with that. Cavanough was taught to take his crises and create positive results.
“I was told that the best thing I could do with my story was start my own dynasty. Just rear a family and be happy, and that’s what I did. I’m largely at peace with it (the past), although there are times when it comes back to you.”
In September, the trainer was a guest speaker at the Tulloch Club in Cairns, invited by Queensland media legend Bart Sinclair. Some 190 people sat in the audience mute as Cavanough imparted the details of his personal battles.
“You could have heard a pin drop for 45 minutes when I was up there,” he says. “That’s happened to me on a couple of occasions when you tell people where you’re from, how you were brought up and what steps you’ve had in life. I think it gives me self-satisfaction to express myself too, to get it out there.”
According to Sinclair, Cavanough was perfect for the Far North Queensland audience. The Tulloch Club has, in the past, hosted Peter Moody and Clarry Conners, each of these characters with a Queensland connection, like country boys come good.
“Brett isn’t just a good horseman; he’s a true-blue Queenslander who has made a great success of himself,” Sinclair tells The Straight. “He was a great storyteller that day, just perfect for that audience. I’ve known Brett a long time and he’s known nothing but hard work all his life. He’s a great example.”
Though Cavanough can speak in front of 190 strangers and feel good, feel cleansed almost, back at the yard he was finding familiar demons in his staff. Apprentices were coming to him from broken homes, broken identities and youth bitten by drugs and alcohol. They were going one way or the other, just like he had.
“I get this kid from a split marriage and his stepfather has done a good job on him, and his father is in the background making a bit of noise, and I’m trying to manage a kid who’s got anger management issues but is just a beautiful person and can’t express himself,” the trainer says.
“He doesn’t trust anyone because he’s seen what his father has done to his mother,”
Cavanough has dealt with issues of bulimia and suicide, domestic violence and substance abuse.
“There were fights, alcohol, drugs and parties, and you’re sleeping out with no power, eating mutton seven days a week. It was a different life, but it was a life that set me up for this one. There aren’t too many that have lived one like it.” - Brett Cavanough on his life as a shearer
He runs into young men in the pub who gave up their careers for drink, telling him to get f**ked as they walked out of his yard.
Cavanough remembers the staff who slipped through his fingers, but also the plenty who can thank him for their success.
“I find that a lot of people unlock around me,” he says. “If I can be there for them, if I can help them make decisions that I made, it could change their lives.”
Cavanough, who is just shy of 1100 total winners and is missing just that Group 1 horse, isn’t ruling out a move to Randwick one day. People ask him when he will do it because the big numbers demanded of city trainers these days don’t bother him.
“I worked 87 horses this morning,” he says. “Numbers and volume don’t scare me. When I was shearing, it was all about volume.
“People tell me I’ll go broke if I come to Sydney. ‘You’ll go broke’, they say, but I can tell you, I’ve never been broke before.”
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