11 ANZAC DAY RACE DAY In reality the Australian war horse has been long celebrated and his sacrifices mourned in sculpture, poetry, newspaper articles, history books and memorials. In telling of the courage and endurance of the Walers, war correspondent Sir Henry (Harry) Gullett captured the imagination of Australians. His widely-read articles at the end of the war told of ‘thoroughbred triumphs’ and of the affection of the Light Horsemen towards their mounts. Charles Chauvel’s 1940 movie Forty Thousand Horsemen retold the story of the Australian cavalry charge in the 1917 Battle of Beersheba and was one of the most successful motion pictures of its time. Calling our war horses “Australian Walers” is a bit of a misnomer. Many were thoroughbreds. Not all Walers were war horses. Not all war horses were Walers. The term Waler was first applied to a variety of horses bred in New South Wales – not a distinct breed – and exported to British India in the 1840s as racehorses, work horses and military horses. The pedigrees were ambiguous. Different breeds and physical types served different purposes. Some were used by the military, others competed on the racetracks of Calcutta. The horse trade to India remained one of Australia’s significant export industries well into the twentieth century. In that tradition, “Waler” was used to describe Australian-bred horses sent to support our troops in the war, when mechanical transport was in its infancy. Another word was ‘remount’, a chilling, technical term to describe fresh horses replacing horses killed or injured in battle. Estimates of numbers exported from Australia for the war vary greatly. Some say 190,000. The Australian War Memorial estimate is 136,000. Only one returned, but it is not the case that all the rest had to be destroyed before their heart-broken soldier-riders came back to Australia. Too many tragically were, but others were sold locally to continue lives of peacetime service in the Middle East, France and England. ‘Every sort of remount has been represented,’ Harry Gullett wrote, ‘from the thoroughbred to the half draught and the Galloway. They brought us through by their swift sure hooves and their brave hearts…
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