Written in the Stars - ‘What else would I do if I wasn’t doing this?’ - Age won’t stop the remarkable Shirley Batten

Most people retire when they move to the Gold Coast, but Shirley Batten’s career as a horsewoman is still going strong at 93, 30 years after her relocation north. Jessica Owers spoke to Shirley about a lifetime spent in the company of horses.   

When racehorse trainer Shirley Batten was born, in 1932 outside Yan Yean in country Victoria, the Harbour Bridge had just opened in Sydney and Phar Lap had just died in California. It was, according to author Gerald Stone, “the year that changed a nation”.

“I don’t know about that,” Shirley says, speaking to The Straight, “but I know a lot of things did happen. The big one, of course, was Phar Lap, who had gone to America and died there.”

Shirley Batten is 93. If headlines are to be believed, she is Australia’s oldest racehorse trainer.

“I try not to think about that,” she says, “and I try not to think about being 93. If I do, I might drop dead.”

The world’s oldest anything is usually a headline affair. Some years ago, Kiwi trainer Barbara Blackie was, at age 100, acknowledged as the world’s oldest active trainer. ‘Mrs B’, as she was known, died just months after reaching her centenary.

In the US, trainer Jerry Bozzo was still training when he died aged 98, and in England, Mick Easterby, at 94, is that country’s oldest active racehorse trainer and longest-serving licence holder.

Shirley says, “I don’t get tired of people asking me when I’m going to retire, but I always tell them the same thing: what else would I do if I wasn’t doing this?”

Shirley is based at the Gold Coast today, on stables around the corner from Magic Millions. She has been there since 1995 and it’s a three-horse yard, which is about all she can manage. Every morning, she heads in just past 4am, ambling around with a walker which, regrettably she says, she needs. Then she heads home late morning before returning for the afternoon shift.

“I can still do a bit,” she says. “The last time I rode I was about 63. It was a horse called Copper Dane, who came up here with us to Queensland, one of the three horses we brought with us.”

Shirley will tell you she doesn’t remember much about the past, but she can whip a horse’s name from 40 years ago out of thin air. Ashking and Seymour were the two horses that went to Queensland with Copper Dane.

Ahead of that move in 1995, Shirley lived outside Yan Yean, north-east of Melbourne, on rural property with pigs and dairy cows, which was also how she had grown up. The Batten household wasn’t in racing, but it was in horses.

As a youngster, Shirley says she was “pretty quiet”, but her tearaway courage in the saddle had her first riding over hunt courses with the Findon Harriers Hunt Club, and then in point-to-point events around Yarra Glen. Somewhere in the middle was a Depression and a Second World War.

“I went for my trainer’s licence when I was in my late twenties because I had bought a jumper,” she says. “He was a terrific horse but he got killed at Caulfield when he was getting ready for the Australian Steeple. He ran through a gate and broke his hip.

“In those days, we used to ride over post and rail fences. There was no such thing as brush fences like they have now.”

The Batten family, though competing in shows and point-to-points, wasn’t wealthy. Shirley recalls a childhood without electricity, when owning a pony was more important because the pony could get her to school. She remembers days when the cows would get out and she would drape her coat over barbed wire to jump her pony into paddocks to collect the strays.

By 1952 she was married, on her way to five children. She was still farming, though she was training in her spare time, mostly jumps horses and the occasional galloper. She gave riding lessons and did a little work at the old Mornmoot Stud, which was nearby at Whittlesea.

It was during these decades that she trained a game gelding called King’s Gamble to win a steeplechase at Moonee Valley, in the winter of 1975. Shirley’s memory is fading, she admits, but she won’t forget Kings Gamble.

“He’s the best horse I’ve had and he did a lot for us, but it’s hard to say who the best horse I’ve ever seen is because you’d have to think of the best horse of that time,” she says. “It’s not necessarily just the best horse.”

Shirley was alive through the Bernborough years of the forties, the Tulloch years of the fifties and sixties, the Gunsynd years of the seventies, the Kingston Town years of the eighties, and so on to Black Caviar who, she says, might be the best ever.

“I was there in England when she won and I saw a lot of her races. I thought she was a marvellous horse. Winx never turned me on as much as she did, even though Winx won more races.

“Black Caviar was undefeated, and she was so sick that day at Royal Ascot. You could see when she went on to the track that there was something radically wrong with her. It was just amazing that she was good enough to win.”

In 1993, the death of Shirley’s husband was the catalyst for her departure from Victoria. She sold the farm, including its heritage-listed home and its livestock, and joined two of her adult children on the Gold Coast. Quietly, she poked along with a horse or two to keep herself young.

The Shirley Batten string of racehorses today, numbering three, are the gelding Eagle’s Fire and the mares Top Bird and Coco Jewel. All are from the Chateau Istana mare Eagle’s Nest, who belonged to the Batten family, who raced in its colours and who died just two years ago from aggressive colic.

Eagle’s Fire, a four-year-old by Dracarys, has recently found a patch of form, winning at Casino on August 18 and running second at Aquis Park less than a fortnight later. None of the three horses will alter the record books, but Shirley is fine with that.

“They’re like family. They’re our babies,” she says.

Alongside her, son David could be mistaken for the horses’ trainer. He picks up where his mother leaves off, which is more obvious the older she gets, but he isn’t stepping on his mother’s toes. He is, he says, the stable strapper and has no intention of being anything more.

It was David who first noticed Eagle’s Nest. He had a side gig driving for Sydney Racehorse Transport in Queensland, and Eagle’s Nest was part of a shipment one day to a Magic Millions monthly Friday sale. The Battens were between horses, and David called his mum to tell her he was looking at a “very nice three-year-old filly, already named”.

“She was from a well-bred mare called Conte Partiro, which was a song that had a bit to do with suicide,” David tells The Straight. “It was about a love story, sort of like Hitler and Eva Braun, and Hitler’s place was called the ‘Eagle’s Nest’. And the filly’s nickname forever became Eva.”

Con Te Partirò, in Italian, means ‘with you I will leave’ and is the Andrea Bocelli song Time To Say Goodbye. The ‘Eagle’s Nest’ was Hitler’s chalet in the mountains overlooking Bavaria. Few horses have been better named.

Eagle’s Nest was bought by the Battens for a song and won four races from 36 starts before retiring to Neville Stewart’s Oaklands Stud, from where she had initially come.

“We are very loyal to her,” David says. “We’ve got the two fillies and we’ll try to keep the line going. Top Bird won’t breed as she’s too little, but Coco Bird probably will. Coco has her mother’s personality. Eagle’s Nest was quite an aggressive horse herself.”

Shirley doesn’t travel with the horses anymore. In March she went to Warwick to watch Eagle’s Fire run third, “which was a trip and a half, I can tell you”. The most that racegoers usually see of her is at Aquis Park, where she is a friendly local and a respected dame.

Shirley doesn’t spend much time looking backwards. Despite over 70 years training, she doesn’t wax about the woes of the modern sport, and when pressed will admit only that today’s ballot system is frustrating. Today, she says, it seems like the rules don’t care if it proves impossible to find your horse a run.

Overall, though, she might be one of the industry’s happiest participants, grateful to still be training at 93, and grateful for the excuse to get out of bed.

“It’s good that she’s still having success, and it’s good that she’s still getting recognised,” David says, although Shirley admits she doesn’t need the attention.

“I’m getting tired. I’m definitely slowing down and my balance is bad. I have to use my walker all the time down at the stables now, but the horses don’t seem to mind.”

It’s a rare nod by Shirley to her age, begging the question, how old would she be if we didn’t know how old she already was?