There are “obby osses”, hooden horses, morris dancing horses and any number of “mock beast” traditions, dating back centuries, where humans carry horse heads on a stick.
In the Eumundi School of Arts hall, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, they’re riding plain old hobby horses. Only they’re not so plain.
One has a rainbow mohawk; another sparkly eyes. There are colourful bridles and noble forelocks and funky ear covers. There’s even a dragon among the wondrous creations of Hobby Horse Riders Australia (HHRA).
In June the HHRA herd and its riders gathered in Eumundi for a trot ahead of the Queensland championships (believed to be the first hobby horse championships in Australia), to be held next Friday.
Hobby horse riders learn dressage, show jumping, jousting, obstacle challenges and breed showing. They are taught about saddlery and other accessories, and make their own hobby horses.
They are mostly young girls and some of them are dreaming of getting to the ultimate competition – the Finnish hobby horse championship.
Back in 2017, Coralie Kedzlie and Matti Somani (who run horse courses for humans) saw videos of the Finnish championship. It’s a serious spectacle, with athletic riders clearing higher and higher obstacles in serious kit.
“We went ‘wow, this would go down really well at our events’,” Kedzlie says. So HHRA was born.
“From there, we realised how much enjoyment people were getting from it and how useful it was in all sorts of ways,” she says.
“We see the young people thoroughly enjoying themselves, making friends, being outside, getting lots of exercise, being very creative and very inspired.”
It’s been growing year-on-year and other clubs have popped up around the country. Riders from New South Wales and Victoria will travel to the Queensland championships. And maintaining and travelling with a hobby horse has some advantages over the real equine deal.
“It’s so much easier carting a hobby horse to an event. You don’t need feed, a float, you don’t have to clean up after it,” Kedzlie says.
Guardian Australia asked riders from NSW’s Outlook Riding Academy what they loved about hobby horsing. Ava, 9, says she and her friends “get to make up games and learn to ride like it’s a real horse”. She also likes wearing her horse riding uniform, building obstacles courses and competing. Charlotte, 8, says her pony Spirit is good at trotting and likes to eat flowers. “[I get to] brush her mane and we get to play in the paddock and rainforest,” she says. Harper, 11, is among those who would love to compete overseas – her favourite part is seeing who can jump the highest in show jumping.
The history of hobby horsing is complicated and contested.
In The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (1996), the historian Ronald Hutton writes about three strands of hobby horse history: animal disguises worn in midwinter rituals; a fashion for hobby horses as entertainment in medieval times in Europe; and in Britain, local traditions of taking animal heads around towns. They could have pagan roots, he writes, or be derived from the toy horses ordered for the royal courts, and there are associations with morris dancing.
There is the “tourney” variety (“a structure sitting about the rider’s hips so that his body stuck up out of the centre as if he were riding a genuine horse”) and a “mask” variety, where the rider is disguised and impersonating a horse.
The first known written record is in a Welsh poem by Gruffudd Gryg in the latter half of the 14th century. Hutton says Gryg was mocking the horses as a novelty and “a miserable pair of lath [narrow, wooden] legs, kicking stiffly”, when he wrote: “Hobi hors ymhob gorsedd / A fu wych, annifa’i wedd”.
The May Day Padstow Obby Oss festival still happens in north Cornwall, in the UK. It involves a children’s parade of their own hobby horses, before the main event of two dancing obby osses.
Hutton writes that historically they danced through the streets with a “fearsome mask … red and white with glaring eyes and snapping jaws”.
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He was told by locals it had come from a prehistoric ritual in which a man – representing a fertility god – was sacrificed for the good of his people, but he seems sceptical of this idea.
Hoodening – derived from either “wooden” or “hooded” – is a Kentish winter custom dating back centuries. The hoodeners ride around on their hooden horses, performing a play.
It is unclear if the Ancient Order of the Hoodeners carries on today.
The Mari Lwyd tradition uses a horse’s skull dressed in a shroud, and is often accompanied by morris dancing in English and Welsh celebrations.
There are other “mock beasts” recorded in midwinter events along the British coastline in the 19th and early 20th centuries. There have also been historical hobby horse antics linked to 11th century Iraq, to 13th century France, and claims that the cheval-jupon (hobby horse) entered Catholic Europe from Muslim Spain and may have been used in Persia as early as the 5th century.
The Finnish Hobby Horse Association claims it invented the modern equestrian sport in the 19th century. And now, Australian riders are competing.
The Hobby Horse Riders’ motto is “fun, fantasy, fitness”.
The fun part is obvious, Kedzlie says, and friendships are quickly formed.
“What was lovely on the weekend, one of the older riders was into her teens, there was another little tot who was only four or five and she was wanting to do dressage. The older rider took her hand and took her around the arena,” she says.
The fitness aspect is abundantly clear. From beginners trotting around to a countryside gallop to the serious athleticism of show jumping.
And there’s fantasy. Riders can make their own horses, learning to sew and create, to make characters, even play out games.
“The riders get involved with their horses, what they’re good at; if they’re playing up, their speciality – dressage, jumping, barrel racing. They also get involved in designing tack for them or getting Dad to build some stables in the bedrooms. They play it out, depending on the age group,” Kedzlie says.
As for Finland, that’s the “big hope”.
Hutton writes that the horses were “primarily a comic entertainment, but one demanding considering skill”. They mixed “clowning and dexterity” and “provided opportunities for rather risqué and exciting licensed misconduct, as the model beast kicked, gambolled, and pretended to attack”, he writes.
Hutton writes that from his own experience he can testify to the nervousness of spectators when approached by “something that is, and yet is not, a human being”.
“I am still a bit breathless but I am happy with my performance,” dressage competitor Jojo Hanninen says, adding that to succeed, you must channel your inner centaur.
“In hobby horsing, my legs are the horse … I am both horse and human,” she says.