After three months in the saddle riding through desert,
horse-breaking stone country and wild woodland, Anna Hingley, 24, a
veterinary nurse from Stourbridge, Worcestershire, is set to become the first
woman to traverse Australia on horseback a journey of more than 2000 miles.
Her journey began from the town of Broome on the coast of north
Western Australia on March 17. She expects to arrive in Cairns, on the
far north-eastern coast, in early August. By then she will have covered
2,000 miles and spent about 3½ months on wild horses that she and her
Australian boyfriend, “Croc” John Ostwald, broke in themselves.
He was the rugged Outback tour guide whom she met and fell in love
with shortly after she arrived in Australia for a year-long visit in
2004. “He just grabbed my interest because he was such a free spirit,”
she said.
The pair found that they shared a love of horses. Anna had ridden
since she was 6 years old while growing up in the West Midlands. John,
based at Mary River in the Northern Territory, has been around the wild
horses that roam the Outback — known as brumbies — since childhood.
He had long dreamed of crossing the country on horseback and asked
Anna to join him. While the early part of their route shadowed Outback
highways, they have turned on to bush roads, rough tracks and crossed
numerous rivers on their horses.
For Anna it has been the adventure of her life despite a few tough
weeks early on through the top of the Great Sandy Desert and on towards
the arid, stifling centre of Australia. “That was the hardest, mainly because it was very hot,” she said. “It
made it very uncomfortable. We got saddle sores and all that kind of
business.”
They found that their six horses needed to be rested about every nine
miles. A support truck travelling with the couple carries their spare
horses and gear. It is also equipped with water tanks. They have camped
out most nights or stayed on remote cattle stations on their route. They
have averaged about 25 miles a day.
Anna worried that she might become bored on the journey because she
envisaged the Outback as never changing. “But I’ve found that the Outback changes with every horse change. The
landscape changes, the vegetation changes and the terrain — that has
been the most amazing thing,” she said.
The couple decided to use their journey to raise funds for Angel
Flight, a charity that airlifts needy people in the Outback to larger
centres for medical treatment. Her boyfriend and Tom Guerrier, an Englishman making a documentary
about the journey, both said that they had been unable to find another
woman who has crossed Australia on horseback.
The early explorers — all men — travelled on horseback. The most
famous, Ludwig Leichhardt, a Prussian, made the first south-to-north
traverse of Australia, setting out in 1844. Four years later Leichhardt
set out for an east-west crossing. He and his party of six men, 30
horses and 50 cattle disappeared. Their remains have never been found.
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