Echuca-Moama horse trainer Gwenda Johnstone has received the Victorian Country Achiever Award — the first woman to be given one of racing’s most prestigious awards.
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At Flemington on Saturday there will be a race named in her honour at the track’s annual Provincial and Country race day and she will be a guest of Racing Victoria at a function to celebrate her success.
The typically reserved trainer said she not only could not, she would not believe she had received such an industry tribute.
“I got so shocked I had to ask them if they had the right person,” Johnstone said.
But once she realised it really was all about her, she did admit she might find a nice horse in her race and have a little flutter on it.
Starting as a 14-year-old casual stablehand at Joe Harrington’s Echuca stables — she was soon getting up before dawn to ride trackwork before heading to school — she had her owner/trainer licence at 20 and an open licence at 22.
A consistent winner, Johnstone really hit the headlines in 2008 when Shadoways — a horse bred in Moama by Rob McKenzie which she took on as a foal — streeted 19 other horses to win the Group 1 Goodwood Handicap in Adelaide.
It was one of the horse’s six career wins – and its last.
Gwenda Johnstone has, on more than one occasion, been seen almost running to avoid the best efforts of media to pin her down for an interview after landing yet another winner.
It can be her home track at Echuca or the hallowed grounds of Flemington. It doesn’t matter where she is, so long as she is nowhere near any media.
Gwenda prefers to leave all the talking to husband Mick Johnstone, if you think you’re going to get Gwenda on the phone, to stand still for an interview, or smile for the cameras, you’d be well and truly backing the wrong horse.
Even Gwenda’s website delivers the message, listing Mick with many responsibilities, from his days when he rode 150 of his 462 career winners for Gwenda to “Mick … takes on a range of responsibilities around the stable and handles all public relations”.
Gwenda and Mick go way, way, back — so he has had plenty of practice being the stable spokesman.
He started his career in racing as an apprentice jockey with Kel Chapman at Caulfield and when he was 18 he was sent on loan to work with trainer Joe Harrington in Echuca at 18 years of age – where he met Gwenda, who had been working at the Harrington stables since she was 14.
Australian Trainers Association chief executive Andrew Nicholl said “country race clubs showcase some of the most dedicated and passionate people in the business”.
“Such as Gwenda Johnstone, this year’s recipient of the Country Achiever Award,” Nicholl said.
“The Australian Trainers’ Association, Country Racing Victoria and Victoria Racing Club are proud to honour her during our 2022 Country Achiever on Provincial and Country Race day at Flemington.
“This award recognises the career and broader industry contributions by a country-based trainer, and it includes a race named after Gwenda at Flemington tomorrow.
“Country racing embodies not only the spirit of the sport, but also the history and the people of our great industry.
“With 66 country racing clubs across Victoria, conducting 450 meetings a year, generating more than $750 million for the Victorian economy annually, every club offers its own landscape, history and local attractions.”
Even the announcement of this major career milestone wasn’t enough to make Gwenda spill out her life story, but in one of those rare moments in sport, she agreed to tell a little bit about her lifelong love affair with racehorses — and Mick.
Gwenda is one of five children, including twin sister Susan, who grew up in Echuca, where she lives to this day. And where her destiny may well have been decided very early as the family lived just 2km from Echuca racecourse, and Susan’s pony Starlet ended up being Gwenda’s responsibility.
A horse, a track nearby and an opportunity to start working in Harrington’s stable.
Two years later, the now 16-year-old quit school and joined Harrington full-time doing trackwork, the stables and anything else needed — she was even waking long before the sun was up to get over to the track to ride trackwork before heading off for another day in school.
It was 1983 and Gwenda was on her way to running her own stables. In 1987 she obtained her owner-trainer licence and went into the juggling business as she split her week between training her own way and working for Harrington stable.
But in 1989 her entire world was turned upside down with the sudden and unexpected death of Harrington.
It left her with an incredible sense of loss, and also created a dilemma for the young trainer — she was still a fledgling trainer with several of her own horses and Joe had a stable of 20 as well.
She wasn’t sure what she should do.
But if she didn’t know the answer, Bill Stutt, who at the time, was one of Harrington’s owners and also the Moonee Valley Racing Club chairman, certainly did.
After making no secret of the potential he could see in Gwenda, it was agreed Stutt would support her application for an open permit to train. And at 22 she got it, and has never looked back.
Gwenda said if she had her time over, she wouldn’t change a thing — for her. But as for other young wannabe trainers, she would insist they stay at school until they had finished, before striking out in the world.
That includes her new apprentice Rose Hammond, who has been working with Gwenda for the past three years but only started her formal apprenticeship earlier this year at 19 — after she finished school (and the setback of a broken leg from a 2020 trackwork accident).
“I’ll just keep training, the way I always have,” Gwenda said.
“I don’t think the award is going to change anything I do, or the way I do it”.
“And yes, I guess they’ll want to drag me up to say a few words at Flemington tomorrow, which I will do, but I’ve always been happy to be in the background, I’ve always been a bit shy.
“The real challenge I face now, I guess trainers always face that, is to find the next really good horse.”
She’s had a few of those over the years, including include Pinerate (14 wins), Maest (11 wins), and Shadowmaker (10 wins), which also won a highly sought-after Golden Topaz at Swan Hill.
But in Gwenda’s mind none of those compared with Shadoways.
He only had six wins in his 36 starts for her — but five of those were in metro class and he would make $700,000 in his career.
And in 2008, in Adelaide, on April 12, Shadoways blew away a field of 19 other class sprinters to take out the Group 1 Goodwood Handicap over 1200m.
It would be the highlight of Gwenda’s career and she wasn’t even there to see it, she had too many horses to handle here and couldn’t make the trip.
“Thank heavens for television,” she said.
“Shadoways was bred in Moama by Rob MacKenzie, and even though the horse last raced in 2011 and was officially retired in 2012, he still lives in a paddock back where it all started as a foal.
“I had him from the start, we raised him and got him ready to race as a two-year-old and he was such a good horse.”
Shadoways won his first race, at Echuca, in 2005 and one start later took out his first city race at Caulfield. Lightly raced over the next three years (Shadoways would spend a total of 55 of those weeks being spelled or freshening).
The Goodwood Handicap was the horse’s last win.
But if finding good horses is hard, Gwenda said finding apprentice jockeys was even harder.
She has only had two — the first was her nephew Peter Johnstone, in the late 1990s and now Hammond in 2022.
“Rose comes from Tongala and her father called me to see if I would be interested in taking her on and I said ‘absolutely’,” Gwenda said.
“After working part-time for me she has now officially come through the 2022 AJTP Victorian Apprentice Intake, which is a good scheme for these young riders,” she said.
A fixture in the racing industry for nearly 40 years, Gwenda has trained 321 winners in Victoria (including 69 at her home track), NSW and South Australia, including Group 1 and 2 and listed races.
At Flemington tomorrow she will be the star attraction and for once can’t send her PR man in her place, can’t say she has too much work to make the trip, can’t do anything but accept the recognition of her peers and for once stand in the spotlight so well deserved.
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