King Charles : "do you know the Joyce's?"
- Bruce Clark
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Updated: 20 minutes ago
So, this is how it goes down at Royal Ascot when you’ve just won the Group 1 Coronation Stakes and knocked off the Aga Khan and Coolmore in doing so with your 33-1 shot Cercene.
Picture this, big Shane Stafford, he’s 63, a 45-year stock and station agent from mostly Richmond in north-western Queensland, traversed many a dry gully, but proud monarchist, receiving his trophy from The King, Charles III that is, of Windsor.
Shane tells it that he strikes up the conversation - as you do - “I’m a bushy from the outback, I reckon you’ve been there” in a true Queensland drawl you can imagine without much imagination.
Charles quickly retorts, telling him his favorite place in Queensland is Eidsvold (about 500km from Richmond mind you) but throws in - “do you know the Joyce’s?”
“Do I know them,” says Shane, “I grew up 30 miles from there in Monto, we bought some of their famous Santa Gertrudis bulls off them back then.”
Barney Joyce* ran the Eidsvold Station in the beef capital of the Burnett and twice entertained a young then Prince Charles (ages 17 and 23) before being invited to his 1981 wedding to Lady Dianna.
“They had beautiful red cattle,” said Charles to a startled Stafford, wondering how he even got to Ascot let alone with a Group 1 winner in a race dating back to 1840, and is now magging about cattle and The Joyce’s of Eidsvold with The King of England and the Commonwealth.
“He was so easy to talk to,” says Stafford, still coming to terms with the enormity of the achievement.
“My aunty Audrey Doyle was the race secretary at Eidsvold ** for years.,” he throws in an aside.
And so, begins a swag of truly rollicking Australian stories, barely possible to believe, harder to conjure. Ancestry dot com would have trouble keeping with, Banjo Patterson would have relished the rich content, indeed.
Shane has turned bush poet himself - about those Royal Ascot winning colours and then the late great mate Kenny Rusell - as you will see below.
“I’ve been watching races and been around horses and cattle since I was four,” said Stafford.
“We are bush people off the land, basically if it didn’t have four legs I didn’t know much about it.”
So, when you talk of Stafford’s, Shane recalls growing up around Callaghan Park in Rockhampton, there is a former jockey turned trainer Maurice (rode a good two-year-old called Ascot Bridge) in the family tree, His nephew Ron was a trainer.
His uncle was Hector Goody, who rode into his 60’s. “There was one day at Mount Perry the stipe never turned up, He had such a good reputation Hector that he was appointed as the honorary steward of the meeting and rode at it.”
There were a few other Goody’s too, hence a few more good stories - “there might have been four (Goody’s) in a race one day at Monto and just one other, they may have backed it and chased it home.” Nudge Nudge.
Stafford himself is no one-trick pony, so to speak. As you could imagine.
“I rode as an amateur, had my last ride May 9, 1985,” he says as a stickler for facts and memory that purveys our chat, and as much as required when so often on the road to cattle sales across long dusty Queensland roads.
“Only had 12 rides, (Koorooinya was his track*) - four winners and four placings, mainly around the Hughenden district, had a go at training a few, even called the races, Richmond, Normanton, Julia Creek, anywhere along the line, jointed in a book maybe a few times under cover.” (Jointed being another unique Australian racetrack colloquial or having a share with a bookmaker’s “joint” - well book, ok, well illegal, but hey, let’s stop here.)
Stafford’s grandfather was a clocker at Monto for 50 years, on retirement, his stopwatch was donated to the club. His colours, those yellow, red cap and star, were registered in 1936 and carried by Cercene at Royal Ascot, as well as far flung Australian racetracks over decades of much lesser success.
Into the family tree comes the great former Queensland jockey Kenny Russell, he of course from Monto. “Mum’s first cousin, Aunty Beryl was Kenny’s mother.”
Stafford and Russell ran cattle together at Hughenden in the 90’s, ok, until his shocking race fall death at Rosehill in October 1993, but it was Russell who found Stafford first decent horse - Scopics (by Private Thoughts).
“Kenny told me this would be the best horse you could buy for the bush for five thousand, he rode it in a welter in Sydney when it was trained by Gwenda Markwell. Anyway, when we bought him, but then we couldn't get the papers because the owner had been gunned down in Sydney,” Stafford says.
“Eventually he turned up at my joint and his brands were BS, I knew we were on to a winner, my wife was Belinda (so Belinda Stafford - BS).” And that’s no BS!”
He was right. He won 22 of 32, starting at Prairie to Richmond to Hughenden, Maxwelton, before Julia Creek, Mount Isa, Nelia and Pentland became regular winning haunts.
“We were living on fresh air back then, that horse kept us going,” Stafford said.
“My best horse though was Pride Of The West and no-one ever knew it.”
Won a two-year-old maiden a Cloncurry by as far as the dust settled. By Pride of Kellina, a grey like dad, had an accident and died.
All this with Shane on the wide-open Queensland roads, selling cattle and property with daughters, Penny Meagan and Samantha, left behind while a passionate father chased the working dollar and his family dreams.
Which is a long way round of getting to Royal Ascot with Cercene and starting this chat with The King. So trying to make a long story short!
“I’d met a few of the Coolmore guys, Paddy Oman, through Kav (Mark Kavanagh) when he had Atlantic Jewel. We stayed in touch, anyway a couple of years back we were over here (Ascot) and couldn’t get a flight back to Australia and rang to see if we could come and look at Coolmore.” Stafford says.
“Well I just fell in love with the place and the people and couldn't believe what they (Coolmore) did for us, we’ve ended up buying a little farm (Clover Hill), Knocklofty, Clonmel, that’s in Tipperary in Ireland, just down the road, not to be confused with that speck of a place called Clonmel, just down the road from Monto in Queensland. But Shane likes the synergy.
Now there is also Maadi Manor in nearby Fethard (home to the famous McCarthy's Bar, well frequented by Coolmore staff and many a traveller looking for ghosts and undertakers.) A man of the land, likes his land, wherever it is.
“I remember my grandfather riding over the back sur in Clonmel to get to the school in Monto, a lot of my forebears came from that area, but the farm here, well that’s something different.”
Which is a long way of getting back to Cercene.
“When we bought the farm, one thing led to another and bought into a couple of horses, Waterford Flow with Joseph O’Brien, (Ran 9th in the King George V) was one of them.
But I was watching the races at Gowran Park and saw this horse on debut, it reminded me of Atlantic Jewel, never seen one finish so fast so I rang up and was able to buy 25 percent,” Stafford said.
Next start at Naas, Cercene is in the Goody family yellow and red cap colours and delivers her best impersonation of Atlantic Jewel, she wins impressively and offers flood in for a sale.
For a man who has traded livestock for life, this is one not for sale, so much so that he ups his shareholding in the filly - naturally by Coolmore's sire Australia - so it stays with 70-year-old trainer Joe Murphy.
“They (the Murphy family) are just solid earth, battlers like we have been along the journey to find a horse like this. This has never been about the money, more the people, the amount of compassion they have shown this filly and us has been incredible, you couldn’t buy or sell that, let alone her.”
And the rest is, as they say history.
“I still run a few steers back home, about 1600 around Hughenden, that's all we know. I’ve kept a few special clients just to keep the eye in, probably sell about 20,000 a year to make a few shillings to pay for the horses, but honestly, this has been an unbelievable ride, and it still hasn’t sunk in.”
So look out for Yousaynothingatall a full sister to Wemightakedlongway with Joseph O’Brien, while back home in Australia, Stafford has the exciting Cashel Palace with Dan Morton in Perth, winner of the Listed Lee-Steere Classic, at Ascot, but the royal version. (The horse taking its name from the hotel built in 1732, just down the road from Coolmore in county Tipperary.)
Which is a long way from Eidsvold, and a long way from Richmond. For Shane Stafford though, he’s come a bloody long way to talk beef with The King at Royal Ascot. Just another remarkable journey for his robust memoirs.
*BARNEY JOYCE - There were some suggestions also offered in relation to Barney Joyce's bloodlines - possibly being by "Bertie" (King Edward VII) whose successor was King George V (second cousin to the new King Charles and of course with an Ascot race in his name), but we need regal pedigree experts to trace those nicks and crosses.
**KOOROOINYA Races, under the Oakley Amateur Picnic Race Club near Hughenden, is the last of the grass-fed true picnic race meetings (with Tower Hill) in Queensland.
Both clubs decided to relinquish their Racing Queensland licenses this year that dictated what facilities were required in relation to the track, car parks, horse stalls, mounting yards, stewards and jockeys' rooms, calling towers etc.
The clubs said this would cost them $100,000.
"Both clubs subsequently advised RQ that in order to preserve the nature of their grassroots racing, rather than change their operations and upgrade facilities to comply with the Licensed Venue Standards, they would not elect to be re-licensed."
***EIDSVOLD - 430km (270m) north of Brisbane, population in the 2021 census - 538. Cattle country. Named after Scottish settlers the Archer Brothers who had land holdings in Norway, EIDSVOLL, that native spelling. Legendary Australian bushman, grazier and entrepreneur R M Williams established the ROCKYBAT property in the mid 1950's, had four children and wrote his biography "Beneath Whose Hand" there. The Reginald Murray Williams Australian Bush Learning Centre in Eidsvold showcases Williams' life and achievements,
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