'We're paid to horse around'

Standing on an oil drum to give me some height, I flicked the stock whip forward and sharply back, just like dad had shown me. There was a satisfying crack.

“You’re good at this,” my dad smiled. I was six, and loved everything to do with the outdoors – cracking whips, and riding horses. I begged him to take me to rodeos and finally he drove me to one near our home west of Toowoomba, Queensland.

“I can’t believe how brave they are,” I gasped as fearless young men hung on to bucking bulls and horses.

I laughed at the rodeo clowns who ran in to distract the bull when a rider came off and did slapstick skits to entertain the crowds. As I grew up I’d go with friends and local boys who competed at the rodeos to watch or help.

Every afternoon after school I’d practise my whip-cracking, determined to get even better.

Leaving school at 17, I became a professional dancer and moved to Brisbane for work. I never lost my passion for rodeo and often headed
to the bush to catch a show.

“I’m from the country too,” a fellow dancer told me one day as I was chatting at rehearsal about a rodeo I’d been to over the weekend.
Her name was Katie Spencer. Like me she’d grown up near Toowoomba. “I used to do three-day-eventing and I love riding,” Katie sighed. When she said that I remembered I’d seen her at events when I was a kid.

Back to her roots

Like a lot of country girls, she was strong and tough with lots of energy, making her a dancer I admired. We became good friends and in 2000 Katie, then 18, and I formed a dance troupe called Atomika that toured arts festivals.

It started out with six of us performing modern dance, but due to injury and other jobs the others dropped out until finally it was just the two of us.

Working together all the time we became really close, but after three years we decided the dance troupe had run its course. We stayed friends while pursuing our dance careers. Eventually I realised I missed my country roots and in 2006 I began a whip-cracking act. Basing myself in Brisbane, I toured regional towns and cities. Katie was thrilled.

“It sounds brilliant,” she said, and a couple of years later she joined me on the road to help me with managing and setting up the act. We began talking about putting together a whip-cracking routine.

In June, on a whim, I called the organisers of the Calgary Stampede, a famous Canadian rodeo, to see if they were interested in an Australian whip-cracking act.

Unbelievably they were, and they offered us a paid ten-day gig in July, plus hotel and flights.

“How would you like to crack whips for a living?” I asked Katie. She laughed.

“Sounds like fun,” she said. “But I don’t know anything about it.”

I shrugged. “That’s okay, I’ll teach you,” I told her. I had three weeks to get her in shape to perform in front of thousands of people in a foreign country. “You want me to do what?” Katie shrieked. “You’ll be fine,” I laughed.

We relentlessly started practising. I’d drag her to a park, and standing metres away, just out of range, I got her to flick the whip forward and back, just like Dad had shown me as a kid. Crack! She flicked her whip, which sliced through the air by her head.

“I nearly took my ear off,” she laughed.

Fortunately, she was a quick learner and got better fast. Between us we came up with a slapstick comedy routine in the style of the old-fashioned rodeo clowns I’d watched as a kid. We were both natural jokers and wanted to have some fun with our act.

“Let’s make it real Aussie humour,” I said to Katie. Both of us had some acrobatic training from our dancing days so we incorporated jumps and flips into the act too.

It was a 20-minute performance where we demonstrated how to use a whip in different ways like whip-windscreen wipers, ‘sheila wrangling’ and attitude adjusting for men.

We came up with a name – The Crackup Sisters. My stage name would be S.T. Ruth and Katie was Little B-Ute. We decided to go for the Australian country look, jeans and long-sleeve shirts at fist, but later decided on taffeta ball gowns with boots.

A new adventure

After preparing day and night, we flew out to Canada. We’d only performed once before together in Australia.

“I’m a bit nervous,” Katie said before we went on for the first time. “Me too,” I replied.

Dressed in our gear, complete with Akubra hats, we ran on clutching our whips, some of which were 2.7m long with 1.8m handles.

During the performance Katie accidently wrapped the whip round her head. The crowd roared with laughter, thinking it was part of the show. The whip left a red welt on her face. “I’m not doing that again,” she grimaced afterwards and had to wear make-up to cover the mark at our next performance. Luckily, she didn’t make any mistakes the next day and within a couple of days we’d settled into our act and the crowd were loving it. Then Katie got swine flu. She was short of breath, had a streaming nose and eyes, and ached all over. “I don’t care, I’m carrying on,” she insisted.

Bravely, Katie would paste on a smile and do our routine and then collapse in bed afterwards until the next show the next day. Our performances improved each time, and we bounced off each other and the crowd. Finally, full of confidence, our working holiday came to an end and we flew home.

Back in Australia we quickly lined up the Gatton Show, a big agricultural event in Queensland’s rural Lockyer Valley. It was only one night with two shows, but it proved there was demand for what we did.

“Where have you girls been working?” the show-ring compere asked us before we went on.

“The Calgary Stampede,” I said proudly, knowing it was the world’s most famous rodeo.

“I’ll mention that in your introduction,” he promised.

As we ran into the ring, we heard over the main arena speakers, “Welcome The Crackup Sisters, just back from the Kalgoorlie Stampede.” I laughed at his mistake. Kalgoorlie was a mining town in West Australia! But it didn’t do our reputation any harm and we received lots more bookings. Soon we had shows lined up every other week.

“It’s great to see you doing something you love,” Dad smiled when he came to watch
us perform.

We started travelling to different rodeos and agricultural shows around Australia and I learned we were the only female rodeo clowns in the nation.

“It’s a male-dominated industry,” Katie said, shrugging. We looked into it online and couldn’t find any female rodeo clowns in America or Canada either.

The Aussie cowboys certainly didn’t know what to make of us. As we passed them on the way to the stadium or show ring, they’d go quiet and stare from under the brims of their hats. The fact we usually wore ball gowns and clownish make-up probably didn’t help!

“The conversation just stops,” I said to Katie.

“I think they’re just shy... or shell-shocked by such beauty!” she laughed.

But gradually, we earned their respect. As we did aerial stunts on wires ten metres above the ground, cracked whips in each others’ faces or did jumps and flips, they could see the work was dangerous but playful and light-hearted. The stares and silence started to change and they began to gree us with grins and a, “Well done,”or “Funny show.”

Though we didn’t appear in the ring with horses or bulls, inevitably there were occasions when they’d escape.

At one show a cutting horse, used to round up stock, went straight for Katie and rounded her up like a stray calf.

“I didn’t know which way to turn,” she laughed afterwards. “Every time I tried to move the horse was there.”

A stroke of bad luck

We were usually lucky though, and didn’t have anything untoward happen to us for four years. But injury struck in June 2010 at a show at Rockhampton in Queensland.

During one of our skits I had to pretend to be a kangaroo and launch myself towards Katie. She plucked me out of the air and flipped me upside down with her arms. Unfortunately as she did, my elbow accidentally drove into the back of her left knee.

“I think there’s something wrong with it,” she groaned after the show, hobbling around. We went to the local hospital and discovered she’d snapped a ligament. But with a full tour booked up we just had to carry on.

“I’ll strap it up,” Katie insisted. After finishing our show in Mount Isa, a tough outback town, Katie had surgery to reconstruct her knee.
In October 2010 we performed at Pinnaroo, a little South Australian town on the Victorian border. “We’ve had five years of drought and locust plagues so we could do with a good laugh,” said the organiser.

Standing before the Pinnaroo audience for our performance, I felt humbled that we’d been invited to put a smile on a few weathered faces.
The locals were so welcoming, coming up after the act to tell us how much they’d enjoyed it or chatting when we popped into the bakery to get a traditional Aussie meat pie.

Bookings kept coming and we became better known, getting booked months in advance. Even though Katie and I spent virtually all our time together we remained great friends.

On the road almost permanently it was hard to have much of a social life, but we both met wonderful partners.

Katie’s fiancé is an electrician called Eddie who she met at a barefoot lawn bowls day in Brisbane on Valentines’ Day 2011.

My fiancé Clint Burton is a rodeo rider I met two months later. 

Our families are proud of what we do and how we’re putting good old-fashioned Aussie larrikin humour on show.

Mind you, Katie’s mum Helen did ask wistfully recently, “Can’t you get a proper job, like an accountant?”

She shook her head and laughed. “Sorry Mum,” she said.

Like me, Katie’s hooked on the rodeo lifestyle. And as long as we’re still getting paid to clown around at rodeos, we’ll be on the road spreading laughter.