Heavy Horse Day in 11th year

Yangan farmer, Mick Bradford, is once again opening up his property and staging a horse-power driven spectacular to raise funds for RACQ CareFlight.
On May 1, Mick will invite locals and visitors to his farm just outside Warwick to watch fascinating displays of horse-drawn equipment, along with demonstrations of black-smithing, wheelwrighting, hay and chaff making and corn shelling.
The event is now in its 11th year, with RACQ Careflight being the beneficiary for the past 10 years.
According to Mick, after holding the first event and donating the proceeds to cancer research, he and his team debated on what organisation would benefit the following year.
“We wondered what we could hold it for the next year and then a Careflight helicopter went over and well, we went there and we’ve stayed there,” Mick said.
Mick’s Yangan property is under the direct path of the Careflight choppers. His Heavy Horse Day event has raised more than $100,000 for RACQ CareFlight over the past nine years.
Does he take pride in helping to keep RACQ Careflight in the air and helping out regional Queenslanders particularly?
“I do get a sense of satisfaction every time it flies overhead,” he notes.
Unquestionably, the big-gest attraction of the day is the horses, particularly when they are 10-abreast. A joke about the horses being in training for the big day yields a jovial response.
“There’s still five up the bloody mountain block and I can’t get time to get them out,” Mick laughs.
His social and work calendar is looking a little cramped in the lead-up to the event. He’s had the Toowoomba Show recently, a daughter’s 40th in Mackay, and he’s headed to Highfields Historical Village for a look at Easter.
“There’s not much time to round them up and get them behaving nicely,” he said.
When quizzed if they always behave “nicely”, the stories flow.
“I’ve had the joining strap of the front two pair break, so I had no control over them. As they just come around they had nothing holding them together and the ‘toey’ horse was on one side.
I was very lucky that things didn’t go badly with that one,” he quips.
“One time I broke my ankle and was on crutches for a couple of weeks. The culprit horse’s grandmother was an ex-trotter and it was four years before he saw a yard. Something stirred him!”
Mick’s affinity for heavy horses started at age six, when he began driving Clydesdales on his parents’ farm. His after-school chores of feeding cattle and pigs could be managed just as easily on a single horse or with a team and weekend sport gave way to ploughing the garden behind a team. In the 1850s his great-grandfather, a carrier in the Ipswich district, used bullock teams to haul freight.
The Heavy Horse Day also showcases other farming activities from the 1800s and 1900s.
Visitors will see examples of farming equipment from the Sunshine Harvesters Works, Massey Harris, International Harvester Company, McCormick Deering and other manufacturers. To Mick’s knowledge, his big horse works, the English version of a whim, is the only working one in Australia. The tone of the event is clearly about the days when the horse power was really the power of the horse.
Gates open from 9am and traditional food like stew and damper will be available, along with various stalls for visitors to browse.
For more details contact Mick Bradford on (07) 4664 8209 or email mick@heavyhorseday.com