11/10/2026
There was a bloke who came, I think about once a month.
After he left, the horses were so different. There was less biting when I saddled up, less pinned ears when I put rugs on, and they were just easier to ride.
I think he worked on muscles. I don't remember him doing chiropractic type maneuvers. That was nearly 50 years ago, and that was the beginning of my interest in body work.
Later on at the same job, we had a younger bloke come. I can still picture him, but I can't remember his name. I thought he was a magician, and he definitely did some chiropractic type maneuvers, but he did other things too. I don't remember him doing anything scary like reefing legs out sideways or upwards or anything like that. Memory is a funny thing, hey? He talked to me about biomechanics. He looked at my horse and told me things about the way my horse moved.
When my horse got burned really badly in the Ash Wednesday fires and was eventually euthanized, he was there. He came, he cared. I believe he cared about the horses, and I believe he cared about me too. That was a good feeling.
Back then I didn't want to learn it myself. When I was 18, we had another guy coming to work on the racehorses where I was working. He was a really generous bloke. I had a few hours off in the afternoons, and he sometimes used to pick me up and take me with him to hold horses for him, where either the owners weren't available or a lot of those owners raced standardbreds and they weren't really horse people and couldn't hold the horses properly for him, so he'd take me along.
He wanted to teach me then, but I said no. I remember my answer: "No, I ride them, you fix them."
Over the years, I've worked in many different areas of the horse industry in Australia and overseas.
I used to seek out who were the people that did—back then we used to call it all chiropractic—chiropractic work on the horses. Who did locals recommend? Probably just like you do now, you ask your friends, you ask your instructor or whoever. A lot of my employers weren't very keen on the idea of having this type of work done on their horses, but some of them listened.
Every time I saw changes in the horses, and sometimes I saw a person with a technique that did an amazing job. I saw a different person with the same technique, and it didn't seem to work very well. I saw techniques that seemed to work well for most people. I met people who just had their own ideas and didn't really want to share them. Along the way, there were some astonishingly good—I'm going to call them therapists, because they definitely weren't all chiropractors. Yep, there were a lot of chiropractors, but there were people out there rolling ligaments, shifting fascia, releasing muscle knots.
Just like me, I think a lot of those people did a combination of things.
Of course, we had no real saddle fit then, so the saddle was more about was it the right size for you? Did it sit on the horse in a stable manner? That was about it, really, as far as I can remember. Mostly, my employers had one or two saddles that they liked to ride in, and that went on all their horses from 14 to 18 hands. So the horses obviously needed a lot of therapy.
Years rolled by, and I found myself living in a country town called Seymour, renting small acreage, doing fitness work with some standardbreds and gallopers, starting the occasional horse for other people, and training some horses for myself to sell on.
I had a nanny working for me over the summer, helping with the children and in return for her horses' keep and riding lessons and training with the horses. She had a warmblood who had this odd off and on lameness. He also had some explosive unexpected behaviors. I thought the two might be related.
We took him to this magical new place called an equine vet clinic. It was the first one I ever went to. The vets there said, "We can see what you're talking about. If I remember, we still weren't doing saddle fit or bridle fit or bit fit.
They said, "We can't help you, but maybe this guy can." They gave me a business card for a vet called Dr Ian Bidstrup, who had gone to America and learned the Animal Options chiropractic method.
We made an appointment and put Lizzie's horse in the horse float and drove to Wangaratta and met Ian for the first time. We met him somewhere around the town because he was working as a vet in Wangaratta and he had a look at this horse and he had some ideas. Eventually, he couldn't fix him either. But putting that aside, I was extremely impressed by his knowledge, professional manner, and his care for the horse.
I asked Ian how many horses he would need to actually travel down to Seymour and work on horses instead of us going up there because I was thinking probably all my horses at home could use his help. He said 10. A few days later, I rang him back and said, "Okay, I've got 10 horses for you." I had quite a few contacts in the local horse industry, including in racing, so it was pretty easy to fill the spots.
Ian came down and worked on my horses. While he was there, he asked if he could work on my Great Dane, Duchess. She had been on medication for arthritis. She was not all that old, but she moved like a crotchety old lady. He worked on her, and I was able to take her off the arthritis medication because she had all her movement back. He said she had a really sore back, and that was common for Great Danes.
From then on, Dr Ian Bidstrup was the body worker of choice for my horses. He did, of course, learn acupuncture, and he added that to his toolkit. He learned about saddle fit and started teaching saddle fit courses for Bates. He learnt about barefoot, and he was the person who encouraged me to go barefoot with my horses, which I've never regretted, and I've never put shoes on since. That was more than 20 years ago.
Fast-forward a few years and I've moved to a different area. I'm back to having to float my horses to Ian for their sessions. It's quite a big drive, but it was always worth it.
Then I got badly injured. I broke seven ribs falling from a Clydesdale. Was definitely my fault. I was not listening to that horse on the day.
I'd already been thinking that as a professional rider, I was coming towards the end. As a professional rider, I was occasionally a little bit slow and occasionally wanting to hold the horse up instead of send it forward.
I knew I needed to reinvent myself, and I was having that conversation with Ian while I was waiting for my ribs to heal, and he said I should become a body worker. That's where my career as a body worker started.
At that point, Ian had lent me a couple of VCR tapes—oh yeah, that far back—on horse massage and stretching. I had come to realize that even horses that came to me to be started, they were already sore before I ever even put a saddle on them.
Now it makes perfect sense. They have paddock accidents. They have birth trauma. They quite often came to me already taught to lead and tie up. So of course, they probably had pullbacks. They might have had their legs roped, all sorts of things. But yeah, they were already sore when they came to me.
Anyway, Because it was such a long drive for me to take horses to see Ian, he had given me as much help as he could. He put as many tools as he could into my hands.
So that is how and why I became an equine body worker!
Pictured as a Speaker at Equine X in Canberra....many years ago
