Cup Day at Wattle Bank goes down a different track
Wattle Bank Farm brought back its Cup Day celebrations this year after rain forced last year’s cancellation.
About 65 people spent the recent Melbourne Cup Day at Wattle Bank Farm, where children made their own hobby horses, raced them in a steeplechase and spent time with the farm’s ponies.
It was the second time the farm had held its Cup Day event.
Co-owner Beatrice Imbert said about 120 people attended the first one, which was two years ago, while rain forced the farm to cancel last year’s event at the last minute.
The hobby horses even had their own Fashion on the Fields competition, with prizes up for grabs.
The program also included sack races and egg-and-spoon races, with a barbecue and country music on offer between the games.
But the real horses had a role in the day too.
Children could groom them and try a bareback pony ride, an introduction to the way Ms Imbert and her husband, co-owner Peter Bland, teach people to handle and ride horses at the farm near Inverloch.
Ms Imbert said the idea of a Melbourne Cup event originally grew out of the farm’s Saturday morning pony sessions.
Cup Day gave the couple a chance to extend those sessions and bring back some old-fashioned country games.
“It’s just a wonderful way of people meeting our horses and also understanding how you can be with them without necessarily racing them,” she said.
The farm’s horses span four generations of the same family, Ms Imbert said.
Mr Bland leads the horsemanship school and teaches riders to go bitless, using a tool he patented.
The horsemanship school also works with visiting school groups and runs trail rides and camps away from the farm.
For Ms Imbert, one of the best parts of the day was seeing how little time visitors spent looking at their phones, apart from when they pulled them out to film the races.
“People are completely unplugged in nature, and in the cottage garden.”
Some parents come back regularly with their children, but Ms Imbert said one older couple had come along on Cup Day simply because they enjoyed spending time at the farm.
The couple started Wattle Bank Farm in January 2020.
Alongside the horse program, they run an off-grid farm stay and grow about 100 kilograms of oyster mushrooms a week, supplying restaurants and cafés in Melbourne and across Gippsland.
The farm turns used mushroom straw into compost for its vegetable gardens. It also sells pies and quiches at the farm gate, and both were on offer on Cup Day.
Ms Imbert said the crowd was a mix of locals and visitors, some of whom were heading back to Melbourne that day.
She said she wanted to hear from parents about which activities their children enjoyed most, and the couple plan to run the event again, but are weighing up whether to keep it on Cup Day or move it to the Monday, when more visitors might still be in the area.
