Tracey Reed grew up on land in Baldivis as a child, with a family that was as self-sufficient as they could be, growing their own food, butchering their own meat, but it wasn’t until she went to university that she realised she had a love of horses.
Immigrating from the UK when she was just six years old, The Reed family finally settled in Baldivis on 10 acres of land, but she knew well before then that she wanted to be a veterinarian.
“We had a house cow that I would milk morning and night, we tried to do the whole self-sufficiency type thing with the house cow, growing the pigs, the chickens, a few sheep and I taught myself how to shear, taught myself how to slaughter animals and butcher them properly for the house.
“I made cheese, I made butter.”
After graduating from high school, Reed made her way to Murdoch University where she completed the compulsory five years of training for Veterinary Science, but little did she know she would be walking away with more than just a degree.
“Going through the five years of Uni at Murdoch, I wasn’t really that interested in horses, I was interested in them, but I never really had one to ride,
“Murdoch had a riding school and some of the school horses we were allowed to ride after Uni finished for the day and a few of us had a little riding club there, I was sort of self-taught, I did a lot of reading, there was obviously no interest in those days, so you had to get books out of the library.
“I read up on dressage and how to ride correctly and contact with a horse’s mouth and all that sort of thing, and I went from there and rode the riding school horses at university.”
Not only did she learn to ride during her time at Murdoch University, but the whole experience also led her to meet her partner Bevan Taylor whilst she was completing ‘prac’ work throughout her fourth and fifth years.
Reed graduated in 1984, but after a solid 17+years of continuous schooling, she couldn’t think of anything worse that heading straight into a clinic or a hospital
“I’d gone from Kindergarten, to Primary School, to High School and then five years of Uni and I just wanted to veg out, and Bevan was share propping a new-ish farm, so there was like 1000 acre of almost virgin bush so we were camping in a caravan out in the middle of nowhere, and he was developing this land and it was actually a really nice way to let my hair down and chill out for a little while.”
Tracey and Bevan eventually made the move to Duranillin where she really got to put her veterinary skills to use.
“There were no local vets really, you had to drive about an hour or so to get anywhere, so I opened up a little clinic, I didn’t have a lot of equipment, but I could do basic surgery.
“I would stitch things up, and I could do limited horse stuff like drenching, sanding, colics and things like that, so that’s what I did, and that lifestyle coincided nicely with a little bit of acreage so I could have my endurance horse, that’s when I decided to get into a couple of Arabians to do some endurance riding, which is usually 80 kilometres or more in less than eight hours.
“My horses became quite competitive, and we were quite often placegetters.
“I had a good and productive endurance riding career, and I was having someone else shoe the horses at that point and Bevan came home with Tamsin Melody, our first pacer, and that’s when it all started, we had a period of overlap between the two breeds of horses.”
Her passion spanned from Arabian horses, to showing and breeding Scottish Deerhound, but it all became too much and gradually Reed stepped away from showing and breeding her dogs and ultimately she walked away from her endurance horses due to a complexity of reasons.
A fire at their property in the early 2000’s saw Tracey and Bevan lose their records and their horse gear, which ultimately saw her walk away from the endurance side of her horse life and concentrate on the standardbreds.
Bevan Taylor and Tracey Reed with Art Revival after a win at Northam.
Tracey made her official debut to training on the 10th of June, 2000 with a horse called Tassies Tiger who had just 11 starts for the stable, unplaced at all attempts, but it was a horse by the name of Speedo that gave her that first winning thrill not quite two years later at Gloucester Park on the 20th of May, 2002.
Speedo won 19 times under the care of Tracey Reed between 2002 and 2006.
Reed has had plenty of success over the past 24 years in the harness racing game, with her career wins currently sitting at 144, but it was a horse by the name of Doctor Evil who came from Callan Suvaljko that ultimately led her to getting horses such as Lightning Jake and Rollon Seymour who won 14 races combined.
Lightning Jake won four straight at Gloucester Park in Metropolitan company in a space of 28 days in June 2006, an incredible feat as well as being his first four starts for the stable.
“Lightning Jake was actually a claimer at one stage, his feet were pretty bad when he got to us and we did all that, we did the chiropractic and acupuncture adjustments and teeth adjustments, got him up and going and he did four metro wins in a row which absolutely gobsmacked all of us, he even re-set the sprint track record before Gloucester Park re-jigged the distances, for a staying horse with no gate speed, he actually set a sprint record, and that made him an M4 at that stage.”
Rollon Seymour was another horse plagued with hoof issues and was the horse that started Reed on her hoof journey.
An avid learner, Tracey not only learnt how to shoe a horse conventionally but has done plenty of research into the benefits of glue on shoes, using her veterinary knowledge to rehabilitate the horses she has taken on over the past two decades.
“I think I had six or seven in work at any one stage, I would interval train them using the Tom Ivers method of interval training which means each horse takes about three-quarters-of-an-hour of actual track work, so there’s a limit you can have in your stable, you have to work them individually, you don’t want the excitement of having another horse on the track with your horse, so it’s a very individualistic way of training them, and that also meant why we had to limit how many we had in our stable, so we just lived a very busy life on the road when we had those horses in work.”
Now based in Wagin, the pair have had plenty of moves in the past four or so years, including an interstate trip that saw them attempt to settle in Victoria, then back to Bokal where they purchased an off-grid property not far from where they initially lived in the small town just 50km south-west of Wagin.
“We were seriously considering that we needed to change our business model so to speak as weren’t getting ahead, in fact we were slowly going backwards and we decided it was probably to do with all the distance we had to travel to do anything, to shoe, to race, so we decided we would sell that place and go to Victoria.
“So, we sold the place, we loaded everything up and we drove all the way over to Victoria, put three horses on the courier, we stayed at Graham Tindale’s place for a couple of weeks, and we had done a bit of internet research and had a few properties to look at,
“We looked at them and then we realised their building and planning laws were far different to the building and planning laws here in Western Australia,
“Since they had their Ash Friday fires, everything has been tightened up on and you’re no longer allowed to camp in a caravan while you are developing your property.
“It limited where we could go, because we didn’t want to borrow money, we just wanted to buy something with what we sold our property with, so after being there a few weeks we decided it was a waste of time after all, if we’re going to do it tough for the next couple of years, we might as well do it tough where we know the people.”
Tracey and Bevan packed the horses up and sent them back home via transport, and purchasing another property in Bokal but in 2020/21 just as Covid 19 sent the world into a spin, it was during this time that Tracey and Bevan weren’t sure how the global pandemic would affect them and their hobby of harness racing, and with racing in WA limited to just Gloucester Park, Bunbury and Pinjarra, they ultimately made the decision to sell their Bokal property to a smaller property in Wagin to be more central.
“It turned out when we put our property on the market in Bokal, it sold within half a day, everyone was looking for little hidey-hole properties away from the centres of people because no one knew when covid was going to stop and this was a little self-contained 100-acre property with a beautiful winter lake and nice aspect.”
Having a long-standing association with Kevin Spurr over the years, it's only fitting that they’ve since become neighbours, but prior to all this, a horse by the name of Shes All Joe made her way to Tracey’s stable and although she never raced, a deal with Kevin Spurr saw a young filly born and on Saturday at Narrogin she claimed her maiden win.
The double Westbred Shes All Go is by Spurr’s stallion Shoobees Place and is the only foal so far out of Shes All Joe who has proven quite difficult to get in foal.
The young filly was eventually handled and sent to SKT Breaking & Pre-Training for her break-in and second preparations and has since gone on to race 20 times in her debut season as a two-year-old for one win and six placings, including a second placing in the 2YO Westbred Fillies Classic heat back in August.
Reed has spent over 20 years learning and perfecting her craft and shows no signs of slowing down in the WA harness racing scene.
Shes All Go (right) with Kim and Toby Thomas of SKT Breaking & Pretraining.
Ashleigh Paikos
Main image: Shes All Go getting the win at Narrogin. Photography by Jodie Hallows