Linda Huddy has taken to her new role as a director in the Queensland Thoroughbred Owners Association with a passion that has underscored her life in the racing industry.
By Ross Prowd
Linda Huddy did not grow up in a racing home but came to racing through a pattern familiar to many.
Linda was born in Adelaide to parents John and Jean Bannister. John worked for Trans Australia Airlines (TAA), the domestic government airline of the day. He was transferred around every four years and the family moved regularly between Adelaide, Alice Springs and Darwin.
Linda remains proud of her South Australian heritage. While not having an active interest in racing at school, she remembers the impact of Bart Cummings’ success on the state.
“When Rain Lover won the Cup, I was only at school. He won in 1968 and ‘69, and that was a pretty big thing for a South Australian horse to win two Melbourne Cups. And Bart had Galilee, Light Fingers and Red Handed by then,” Linda said.
Her mother Jean was born in England and had trained as a lawyer but did not enjoy practicing and was to become an air hostess for ANA (Australian National Airlines).
When Linda left school, Jean told her that she would probably be wasting her time going to university, and instead suggested that Linda write to a few studs to see if she could get a job at one of those.
Her first position was as a nanny at Glen Acres Stud outside Adelaide which stood the Melbourne Cup winner, Rain Lover. It was there that Linda learnt how to ride and it wasn’t long before she had moved from the homestead to working with the horses. As Linda said, “I didn’t know much about horses, but I learnt”.
“They sold the property and shifted to the Bylong Valley, which is the next valley over from Widden in NSW. It was sort of in the middle of nowhere, so I stayed for a year but came back to Adelaide and worked for Bart Cummings for a couple of years when he still had the stables at Glenelg,” Linda said.
“Bart had the good horses in Lord Dudley, Gold And Black and Think Big. I got a photo taken with Think Big once. We used to get his sales catalogues out of the bin when he would throw them away and they would have all the notes he would write—things like the age of the mare because he never liked older mares.”
When Linda’s father retired, the family bought 40 acres in the Barossa Valley.
“We shifted up there and I went to work for Lindsay Park,” Linda said.
“By the beginning of 1981, I had done 10 years of strapping and riding. You get a bit sick of that side of it I guess, so CS (Hayes) told me if I learned how to be an office girl, he would give me a job in the office.”
To start there, Linda needed to do an office course that would not start until later in the year. With a few months to fill, Linda decided she would visit a friend in Mount Isa.
A young aspiring jockey by the name of Denise Williams had started at Lindsay Park around the same time, and Linda was eventually to be a bridesmaid at the wedding of Denise and another Mount Isa jockey, Keith Ballard.
“I said to Peter Hayes ‘I'm going to go to Mount Isa, and I'm going to come back and do this course. I need a reference because I need to work while I am away’. He said ‘You won't come back. You will meet and marry a miner.’ He was pretty right. He wasn't a miner, but he was an earthmover,” Linda said.
Linda met Graham Huddy, who at that stage had a small earthmoving business.
“When I met Graham, he had one dozer and one grader and when we sold the business, we had about 220 people working for us. We did not have much time to do anything but raise the kids and run the business,” Linda said.
The couple have two boys who are now both in their 30s, Phillip and Lachlan. The close friendship with the Ballard family meant racing was never far away from discussions, and Linda started to become interested in racehorse ownership.
“My favourite horse in Mount Isa was King Wells,” Linda said.
“He won 18 races for me all around in places like Julia Creek and Winton. We even took him to Townsville for the Cleveland Bay,” Linda said.
“Danny Ballard was down at the Gold Coast at the time, and he told us about this horse that John Wallace had that was going to the Magic Millions monthly sale. I sent Lachie to the sale, who knew nothing about horses then. I said to him, ‘Now I don't want any small horses. Stand beside him and tell me where the wither comes to on you’. ‘No problems Mum’, he said, ‘what's the wither again?’.
“You had a week after the sale to find out if it has any issues. By the time we got him to Mount Isa it was over a week. As soon as he got off the truck it was straight to the fence, and he started windsucking but there was nothing we could do about it. But there you go, it's lucky we didn't give him back.”
The Huddys sold their business in 2008 and decided to expand their racing interests.
“We had equine influenza (EI) in ‘07, so no horses could move around. Inglis didn't have their sale at Easter, so Magic Millions put a sale on and the catalogue was huge. It went for four or five days, and we could only go for the first two,” Linda said.
“We nearly gave Paul Knight a heart attack. He was a finance controller at the time, but no one had heard of us and here we are buying horses. We bought four in all, two by Exceed And Excel, a Show A Heart and a High Chaparral.
“I thought we needed a QRIS horse, as they were then, because of the extra prizemoney. High Chaparral had winners in the northern hemisphere, and I thought ‘that's not bad for a horse by Sadler’s Wells’. He was QRIS because Neville Stewart at Oaklands had bought the mare in foal, so he was born in Queensland.
“I said no one will want him and he will be cheap. We looked at him and he was all right, and he happened to be in those first two days. The dearest we bought was an Exceed And Excel and he retired with prizemoney of $500 and cost $260,000. The High Chaparral colt retired with earnings of $3.2 million and cost $15,000.”
The High Chaparral colt turned out to be Shoot Out and was originally trained by Col Williamson in Toowoomba. The Huddys’ son Lachlan was dating jockey Renee Hinricks, who was apprenticed to the trainer and as Linda says, “At least we thought Renee would be able to ride him.”
The Huddys then had the opportunity to purchase Peachester Lodge and Col Williamson moved there to manage the property. Shoot Out went to John Wallace on the Gold Coast.
“His first start was in a QRIS maiden at the Gold Coast in the May of his 2YO season. I was in Cloncurry and I can remember watching it on TV and he won by five lengths. At the second start he won the Sires Produce at Eagle Farm,” Linda said.
“Wayne Wilson was the racecaller and we had some TAB meetings in Mount Isa through EI and he had come up and called a few so I knew him pretty well. During his call he said ‘I hope Graham and Linda are here today’. He won the AJC Derby, the Randwick Guineas, two Chipping Nortons and a George Main.”
The public bar at Mount Isa Race Club now proudly carries the Shoot Out name. Renee and Lachlan have since married and now manage the Peachester property where the Huddys live.
Linda has a strong interest in thoroughbred welfare, and this is one of her main goals in agreeing to join the new Thoroughbred Owner’s Association as a director.
“The Association needed a new injection of enthusiasm and Racing Queensland advised that a new body would be better. That happened only this year. One of the biggest issues facing racing is rehoming horses and life after racing,” Linda said.
“I think the Owners Association has to take a proactive stance on that. It's very difficult because there's a lot of horses, but we have to do the best we can. All of our horses we retire go to a young lady called Gemma Creighton, who is a show jumper. She starts them off jumping and if they can't jump or aren’t suitable, she will find another home.”
With mares in Australia and New Zealand, shares in stallions including Preferment in New Zealand who the Huddys raced in partnership, and horses with leading trainers across the country in Tony Gollan, John O’Shea, Tony McEvoy and Peter Moody, the Huddy thoroughbred empire will play an important role in racing into the future.