Goodbye, Carol - I hope the horses, dogs, cats, family, and friends were there to greet you.

 My aunt, Carol Cavanagh, was born on 18/11/32 and passed away last week on 28/9/21. She lived her life for horses and gave me a life-long love for them. Carol had no children of her own but considered my brother and myself as better than having her own - all the fun and none of the responsibility. She was an inspirational woman ahead of her times who was an important role model in the lives of many young riders.

The video of photos from her life, set to the tune 'Run For the Roses' by Dan Fogelberg.

I chose four horse-themed songs for her service, beginning  with 'Wildfire' by Michael Martin Murphy, 'Run for the Roses' for the photos of her life, 'I Am Pegasus' by Ross Ryan for the closing of the curtain (which brought everyone to tears), and 'Horses' by Keith Urban for the final song.

The eulogy I delivered at her funeral in case you'd like to learn more about her life. 

Carol had two older brothers, my father David who died in 1988 and Warren who died in 1949. She had no children of her own but was a wonderful auntie to my brother Graeme and me. We spent most of our holidays and weekends with Carol during our school years and she gave us both a deep love of horses.

 

She learned to ride at age 5 by coaxing her father's Clydesdales under the cherry tree on their farm near Wallington outside Geelong, dropping onto a horse's back and cantering up to the house and repeating. Eventually, to save his horses, her father bought her a horse of her own.

 

Carol went to school at The Hermitage and became friends with many other great horse women of her era, including Garryowen riders and judges such as Erica Russell and Joan Wilson. As a teenager, she was an A grade tennis player and an excellent horse rider.

 

Carol had a brief marriage to fellow tennis player Lindsay Nelson but divorced a few years later, and remained single for the rest of her life. She only fell in love once, with a high-country cattleman she met when she and Dr Robbie used to take their horses up into the Victorian Alps, and I hope he was waiting for her last week.

 

Carol was a triple certificate nurse, though she always considered nursing as a way to fund her horses. In 1965 she started Reinwood Riding School at Moolap near Geelong. Many top riders learned to ride there and thousands of people developed a life-long love of horses because of her influence. She also scared a lot of people – one of my school friends married a man who remembers riding his motorbike past Reinwood when he was a teenager and he says he still has nightmares about Carol running out and abusing him in her aristocratic voice.

 

Carol and her good friend Dr. Joe Robinson helped start the Geelong Riding Club in the late 1960s, and it still operates today. Graeme and I have many happy memories of Carol and Joe planning the day-long trail rides through the Otways weeks before the event. They'd load their two horses and Graeme's and mine onto the floats and head into the bush. Dr Robbie would tie bits of environmentally-friendly toilet paper to trees to mark the way, and by the day of the ride they had all washed off so the trail rides became famous for us all becoming lost numerous times.

 

During the late 60s and 70s, Carol won numerous endurance rides on her horse Smoke, hunted on her buckskin mare Jess, competed in dressage, showing, polocrosse, and jumping, and also trained two Flemington winners for Roger Burt. She was one of the first in Australia to start doing horse riding for the disabled, closing Reinwood one day a week so the children of the Shannon Park Spastic Centre could come and ride the ponies.

 

Through her love of horses, she became friends with many interesting people. She became close friends with Eric and Billy Lange. Eric managed Ford Australia and returned to the U.S. to help run Ford there. When back in Michigan, he  helped design the DeLorean - the car used in Back to the Future – and he and his wife continued to write to Carol for decades. She was close friends with Warrick Cozens who rode at the Spanish Riding School and helped him start his famous Clifton Court Warmblood Stud – he would like to be here today but he’s in Victoria.  

 

A keen environmentalist, Carol campaigned to save old growth trees at Bannockburn outside Geelong and made the newspapers for chaining herself to the trees. She was involved in Landcare for many years, and planted many thousands of trees in Victoria and Queensland.

 

Carol worked as a nurse in aged care for a number of years and always made me promise I'd never 'put her in a home'. Thanks to the wonderful home care system, for most of the last decade, Carol lived in a cottage on our farm and Carinity Home Care came in for an hour each day to help her have a good quality of life at home. For the past few years, she has been increasingly frail but still very happy living on her own terms. Her dog of 18 years, Scruffy, died early this year, joining the many dogs Carol has loved through her life - Nobby, Shiloh, Rebel, Gucci, Campbell, and others will no doubt be wagging their tails at her side today.

 

Carol led a remarkable life and inspired many people – and scared a few others. In many ways, she was a woman ahead of her times. This isn’t a time to be sad, but to be glad for a life lived on her own terms – marching, dancing, and riding to her own music.