Welcome to another Take a Photo post about a man and his horse. The State Library of Victoria holds the photo below, taken on 14 February 1905. It reveals a wonderful story about a horse called Nugget and its owner, Richard Heath.
What caught my eye about the photo was that Nugget was a son of thoroughbred King Alfred, one of the most prolific sires in the Western District in the 1850s and 1860s.
I also noticed Nugget’s age at his death was forty-six, way past the average life expectancy of a horse and placing him among the oldest horses to have lived in Australia.
King Alfred sired horses for racing, hunting, harnessing, and hacking. Within a few decades, many horses in the Western District and beyond had King Alfred’s bloodlines. Richard Lewis of Rifle Downs near Casterton imported the horse that arrived on the Severn and docked at Portland on 30 December 1854. Led from a small boat, he swam ashore with Clydesdale stallion Agronomer, another Richard Lewis purchase, who also left his mark in the Western District. King Alfred stood at Rifle Downs during the next breeding season for fifty guineas per mare.
King Alfred‘s progeny became acclaimed throughout the colony. Poet and steeplechaser rider Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote of him in his 1867, publication Sea Spray and Smoke Drift in the poem The Fields of Coleraine,
Alfred ought to be there, we all of us swear By the blood of King Alfred, his sire; He’s not the real jam, by the blood of his dam, So I shan’t put him down as a flyer.
And again in a poem Verses inspired by My Old Black Pipe, apparently unpublished…
What cheers for King Alfred’s white-faced son Were heard when the Western chase was done,
King Alfred died in 1873, and news of his death reverberated around the country. His most famous offspring was the mare Mermaid, who won the 1871 Sydney Gold Cup for Edward Twomey of Penshurst. And then there was Nugget.
There are two stories of how dentist Richard Heath of Geelong came to own a King Alfred colt. One was that he owned an Arab mare in foal to King Alfred. He sold the in-foal mare to Dr Foster Shaw, the Geelong coroner, with the agreement being Richard would keep the foal. The other story was that while caring for the mare, owned by E.C. Moore, Mr. Moore insisted Richard take possession of the progeny.
However it came to be, Richard was likely the first person to see the foal, born on 17 November 1860, whom he named Nugget. And there began a forty-year relationship.
Richard and Nugget went everywhere together. When Richard was in his role as commander of the Geelong Volunteer Artillery Corps, it was on Nugget. He rode or drove Nugget from Melbourne to Shepparton several times and used him to muster cattle. One exception was yachting, a great love of Richard, but something he and Nugget couldn’t share. Richard was, at one time, the vice-commodore of the Royal Yacht Club.
By the 1880s, Richard and Nugget lived in Apollo Bay, at Heathfield estate on the Barham River flats overlooking Mounts Bay.
Richard selected the land in 1860 after walking along the coast from Barwon Heads to Apollo Bay. You can see “R. Heath” on his allotment on the parish plan below, along with current-day uses for the land.
Nugget reached 44 in 1904 and was attracting some attention.
Nugget’s long life ended on 29 August 1906, less than three months short of his 46th birthday. Richard’s friends knew his attachment to the horse and arranged a photo as a special memento, and that photo is the subject of this post.
The back of the commemorative photo is interesting, with the names of those who subscribed to a copy of the photo.
It includes Richard’s signature and a small photo of Nugget, with the caption, “This print was taken 12 mos. (sic) after the other”.
After a spell of hot weather, Richard Heath died on 27 December 1917 at home on Flemington Road, North Melbourne. His life had headed aged 86, but the story of “Old Nugget” and Richard lived on as this article from 1933 attests, despite the facts being slightly stretched.
Previous “Take a Photo” posts:
Western District Families 
Thanks for this lovely article and research re Old Nuggett – he was certainly a well bred horse loved and cared for. I note the horse racing reference to the Twomey family of “Langulac” Penshurst connection. My 3xGrGrandmother was a housekeeper there in the early 1860s. Many more stories of the Twomey family and the Melbourne Cup successes to be told……
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Thank you, Susan. I’m glad you enjoyed. The Twomey family certainly has an interesting history.
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Hello Merron,
I loved this story and as I live in Apollo Bay it had more interest. There is a house still here known as Heath’s Folly which would have been where Richard heath lived. On one side it looks over the harbour and front beach and from the back would have looked out over Heathfield Estate – now subdivided with dozens of houses but still known by its original name. I’ve passed on your Western District families to our local historical society in case they did not know of all the good work you do.
All the best and keep up the great research. Marjorie Morkham
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Thank you very much, Marjorie. I’m glad you enjoyed it. I read that in 1905, Richard sold/donated some of Heathfield to the Church of England for use as a boys’ reformatory school which operated for ten years. I also saw in Richard’s probate file he still owned property in Apollo Bay at the time of his death. Thank you, again.
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