Vale Julie Copeland
When was the first dream? The first horse? Aged three, sitting in the gutter outside our shop at the top of Alma Road, up from St Kilda Junction, watching and waiting for the baker’s horse, Ginger. A chestnut, of course.
—Julie Copeland, 2004.
Susan Hawthorne writes
I first met Julie Copeland in 1982 when she was looking for a reviewer of a book about Miles Franklin. I’d read just about everything by and about Miles in the previous decade, so my chance of reviewing for ‘First Edition’ on ABC Radio came to fruition. I continued to write reviews for her over the next five years, the most exciting discovery for me was Christa Wolf and her extraordinary novel A Model Childhood, a novel about memory and war and forgetting. This first review commission opened up other opportunities for me reviewing in metropolitan newspapers until I started to work for Penguin Australia, at which point no one wanted me to review books any more.
‘First Edition’ was a wonderful program. In turn, it created a long series of literary and arts programmes on the ABC, so we have a great deal to thank Julie Copeland for. I had also heard her speaking on various segments on ‘The Coming Out Show’ that ran from 1975 to 1998.
At some point I came to know about Julie’s love of horses and so we asked her to contribute to the Spinifex anthology, HorseDreams: The Meaning of Horses in Women’s Lives (2004).
She wrote:
The other real chestnut in my life was named The Gent, a 17 hands racehorse I rode to victory a couple of times at race meetings in Wentworth, New South Wales. At that time, as a fifteen-year-old girl, I rode in what were called ‘Ladies Bracelets’—country races for female jockeys only. Nothing much has changed.
Julie was such a warm person and made writing reviews for broadcast which was initially quite nerve wracking into something enjoyable. She was good at indicating anything unnecessary to the review. I miss Julie’s voice on the radio and am sad that the ABC took at least a week to announce her death. Her contribution to Australian culture is tremendous. But women are still so little noticed, even those who have changed the culture.
Photos are reprinted from HorseDreams.