Michelle Payne, Melbourne Cup winner - 2015
Last year (2015) in November, my dear friend Father Brendan Dillon invited me to take pictures of the Annual Racing Fraternity Mass, held at St. Francis Church in Melbourne.
The mass is dedicated to the jockeys and their horses, in anticipation of the great race that stops Australia every year, the Melbourne Cup.
By luck or destiny, I grabbed a picture of a female jockey, who brought her saddle to be blessed, just when she was leaving at the end of the mass. That woman is Michelle Payne, who two days later made history by becoming the first woman-jockey ever to win the Melbourne Cup, one of the most prestigious Thoroughbred horse races in the world.
I could not believe when the senior editor from Melbourne Universtity Press contacted me to see the pictures and liked that one about Michelle so much as to include it in the book!
"Life as I Know it" tells the fascinating story of Michelle. It was just released a few days ago.
