Bestselling author, Geraldine Brooks, started riding at the age of 53 but quickly became a devotee. The sudden death of her husband opened an abyss from which Brooks had to crawl to finish Horse, a novel infused with love, loss and shared history
as a cadet journalist in 1981, Geraldine Brooks was just ahead and already a dashing role model. While I measured up photographs with a ruler and pencil for the next day’s newspaper, she was paddling a raft down the Franklin River with the Australian Democrats’ leader, Don Chipp, and filing news stories that would help save the Tasmanian wilderness from a hydroelectric dam.
Geraldine Brooks during her reporting days at The Sydney Morning Herald: “You had to be very accurate, so it was very good training.”in 1979 was recording details of horses’ performances at Sydney racecourses. As well as enduring a “fiesta” of bum-pinching in the office, she got by on little sleep as she went on Fridays from the gallops to the trots to “the last refuge of the desperate punter, the dogs” and back on Saturday.“It wasn’t reporting,” she says.
“The next day I went with this gorgeous Cherokee guide on a gorgeous horse on a ride through the arroyos of New Mexico, and the horse was so sure-footed, we were cantering along cliff edges and it seemed completely unremarkable to me. It was an exquisite experience.” Donald Trump’s presidency brought racial inequality to the fore, fuelling the Black Lives Matter movement. Trump is not named in the novel but Brooks says: “The thumping noise of the times really influenced the writing of the book – it had to, I think. We had eight years of Obama and then we had Trump. It’s just like we had Reconstruction and then we had Jim Crow [a racist theatre character].