The Australian Women's Register

Born in Norfolk, England, Bev Buckingham migrated to Australia with her parents when she was two years old. Living in Tasmania she was soon helping her father, a racehorse trainer, in his stables while taking riding lessons and competing through pony clubs. Aged fourteen she became an apprentice jockey for her father. Women were not allowed to compete against male jockeys until the 1970s when the Lady Jockey’s Association lobbied for fifteen races per year on country Victorian racetracks. By 1979 women were permitted to race as regular jockeys. Buckingham and her friend Kim Dixon were among the first women to race professionally against men in the 1980s.

A win on her fourth ride at Elwick in 1980, on Limit Man, launched Buckingham’s career. By the end of her first season’s racing she had ridden 22 winners and was ranked ninth overall on the jockeys’ table. With a total of 63 winners in her second season, at the age of seventeen, Buckingham became the first woman in the world to win a State Jockey’s Premiership. Over her eighteen year career she brought home trophies for the Devonport Cup, the Launceston Cup, the Queen’s Cup and the Hobart Cup (three times – 1986, 1996, 1998). In 1984 she became the first woman to ride in the Caulfield Cup. On winning the Queen’s Cup she received a personal letter from Queen Elizabeth II expressing her pleasure in being able to congratulate a woman jockey on winning her race.

After a horrific accident in May 1998 in which Buckingham fractured two vertebrae in her neck, she spent many months in rehabilitation on her family’s Tasmanian property. She defied predictions that she would never walk again, and gave birth to a daughter, Tara, in 2000. Today she works with her father as a racehorse trainer at Sienna Lodge in Victoria. She was inducted into the inaugural Tasmanian Racing Hall of Fame in 2005.