Scone Horse Festival Parade 1986
Featured Image: Carlton United Brewery Heavy Horse Team 1986 preparing for the parade
Terry Goodyear leads the team which was a very special feature of early Scone Horse Festival Parades. I think this was the 2nd such cavalcade and I was actually the second Horse Festival VIP? I’m seated on the left behind Terry. Jack Johnston was very justifiably the inaugural Horse Festival VIP in 1985.
With COVID-cancellation of the Horse Festival Parade in 2021 there are whispers if this event will continue into the future? It’s a very different world to the 1980s. Scone Cup Races are no longer ‘in town’ at White Park. The thoroughbred sales have been ‘abandoned’ leaving a huge gap in what used to be regarded as the building blocks of a ‘Horse Festival’ with 2 days of sales and two of racing. The original idea was predicated first on the old ‘Scone Thoroughbred Week’ which grew out of the first Scone Cup Races and Thoroughbred Sales conducted in 1947. This concept reached a peak through the 1960s and 1970s. The Horse Festival added many other facets some of which might have ‘diluted’ the original winning formula. It’s a lot harder to find unanimous agreement when the ‘number in the tent’ becomes too much of a crowd? Let’s see what a VAXX 2022 might bring to the party? In recent times there appear to have been many more ‘themed’ motor vehicles than actual horses?