Andrew Clarke runs Living Legends, the international home of rest for champion gallopers in Melbourne’s north, where you’ll find five Hong Kong Horse of the Year winners – Beauty Generation, Bullish Luck, Designs On Rome, Good Ba Ba and Silent Witness – enjoying their retirements in lush paddocks.

In this week’s Tongue Tie Off, a Q&A series with racing personalities connected to Hong Kong, Clarke talks about the Silent Witness superfan who’ll never forgive Bullish Luck, Beauty Generation’s future in the equestrian arena and Pakistan Star’s immediate connection with an autistic visitor.

Whose idea was Living Legends?

It was a group of the owners of Fields Of Omagh, the beloved 2003 and 2006 Cox Plate winner affectionately known to Australian racing fans as FOO, and I say a group because, if you talk to them, they all have different recollections of how it started.

FOO’s owners talked about what they’d do when he eventually retired, and they’d recognised there were unofficial fan clubs for champion horses like him who had been around a while. None of them had a farm. What they had, however, was the germ of an idea.

Around that time, the Victorian Government called for expressions of interest in leasing a 60-hectare section of Woodlands Park. FOO’s owners approached me while I was a vet at the University of Melbourne. When I completed my PhD in the United Kingdom, I received funding from The Horse Trust’s Home of Rest for Horses. I saw an opportunity to involve vet students and, eventually, raise money for equine research.

There was a lot of interest in it for accommodation and residences – all those sorts of things – and it’s heritage listed. You know what they say. Be careful what you wish for because you might get it. We got it, so now I’m a worn-out old vet with some worn-out old racehorses at Living Legends. But I’m loving life.

Living Legends opened its doors in November 2006 with nine horses. Today, it’s home to four times as many, and nearly half of them raced in Hong Kong. How did you end up housing so many of the city’s champions?

Silent Witness was our first Hong Kong horse. I remember it so clearly. We’d heard they were talking about his possible retirement. We were working hard and looking at how we could grow. I wrote a letter – a long letter – to his owner, Archie da Silva. It was one of those spur-of-the-moment things. We got the answer back from Archie, and it was, ‘Whoa, amazing’.

I’ve been to Hong Kong twice and only spent 45 hours there. Silent Witness was the reason for both of my visits. My first trip was for Silent Witness’ goodbye at Sha Tin in February 2007. He cantered up the straight. About 60,000 people were blowing whistles and waving flags. My second trip ended with me flying back to Melbourne with him, which was very special.

Tony Cruz – a fantastic horse guy who rode in Europe during my time there – visited Living Legends. Then, I received a call from International Racehorse Transport telling me that Bullish Luck was en route to us. It was them doing their initial paperwork, but it was great news. He needed some paddock time, Bullish Luck. When he first arrived, he wanted to give you a nip. We put him at what was Eliza Park for one month – with FOO, actually – and he returned a different horse.

We’ve got five Hong Kong Horse of the Year winners at Living Legends – a sixth, Sacred Kingdom, was with us until not long before he died in 2019. Currently, Designs On Rome, the 2013-14 Hong Kong Horse of the Year, is in our naughty paddock because while he has mellowed in his old age, he tends to have a go at people. Romeo receives visitors, but he can’t have visitors appear unannounced. Romeo is with Zavite, a pretty little Zabeel horse. Everyone wants to pat Zavite, but he likes meat with his carrots.

It’s such a bonus for us to have the international horses. Our Hong Kong visitor numbers went down through Covid, but they’re climbing back up now.

Who’s the favourite of your Hong Kong visitors?

I’d say the number one is Silent Witness because he’s like Hong Kong’s equivalent of Australia’s Phar Lap. He was on the front cover of Time magazine during tough economic times. I’ll never forget when this fellow came from Hong Kong to see Silent Witness. He told me, ‘He’s our Beckham’ as he patted Silent Witness. Tears were rolling down his face. He was so emotional. I told him, ‘We’ve got Bullish Luck next door’, and thought he’d like to see him. However, he wouldn’t look at Bullish Luck because, of course, it was Bullish Luck who beat Silent Witness in the 2005 Champions Mile to end the latter’s winning sequence at 17 races. It probably would have been like an Australian horse beating Black Caviar or Winx.

Do you have a personal favourite?

I was really close to Might And Power, one of only two horses to win the Caulfield Cup, Melbourne Cup and Cox Plate – 1950s superstar Rising Fast was the first.

Beauty Generation is strong-willed but beautiful. We intended to take him to the 2023 Barastoc Horse of the Year Show. Unfortunately, he was lame after one of the lead-up events. It was like he had a little abscess, and in the end, it was a bit of dead bone in his foot. We’ve nursed him back to health, and we’re aiming him at the 2024 show in February, but it’s asking a lot of him. We’ve taken other horses to equestrian events – Super Jockey won a ribbon, and the response from his owner was out of this world, probably similar to when he won the 2016 Group One Korea Sprint – but Beauty Generation is our stand-out show horse candidate.

How easy is it for Hong Kong horses to acclimatise to Living Legends after spending many years at Sha Tin?

The biggest challenge the horses from overseas face is getting used to the kangaroos. Most of them haven’t seen kangaroos before, and kangaroos do everything horses hate – sudden, jerky movements on the ground.

Pakistan Star’s reputation precedes him, so we were interested to see what he was like, even more so after the driver told us it took nearly an hour to get him on the truck. Anyway, he gets off the truck, and he’s as kind as anything. A young fellow – he’s non-verbal and on the autism spectrum – visits us on Wednesdays. Pakistan Star had been on our property for about two and a half hours. He has his head over the fence of his paddock, and this kid is giving him a huge hug. That’s been our experience of Pakistan Star.