I'm Callan.  I am seventeen years old and I live most of the time on our family property in the Australian bush.  I have an older brother, Cody.  If you look at lots of rodeo sites, you may have already learned a bit about my brother.  He's Cody Tapp and he's a bull rider.  If you click on his name, you will be able to have a look at his web site.  

As well as bullriding, I like riding horses.   Sometimes I ride in the campdraft events at rodeos and this is really good fun.   I found a couple of photos of a campdrafting event I entered and I've put them in the Photo Gallery.

Apart from bullriding and campdraft, I've also spent a fair bit of time with other sports. Soccer (naturally), bmx, motor bike riding on bush tracks, skate boarding etc etc. All the usual stuff that occupies kids' time as they're growing up. Rodeo is the one that I'm really stuck on though.

If you hop on over to the other side of the fence here, you'll find some of the old stuff from my poddy riding days. This was from much younger days and eventually, it will all go into a special poddy riding archive section on the site.

I live for the next rodeo and think this is the reason I was born.  There's nothing like the thrill of being on the back of a bucking poddy or steer and staying on to ride time.  In case you didn't know, poddy riders have to stay on for six seconds, while steer or bull riders must stay on for a full eight seconds.  This picture shows ribbons I have won at poddy riding.  

 
I got a real nice surprise when I won Katherine Junior Sports Star of the Month in May 2001.  I won a trophy from the Katherine Times, $10 from the Katherine Town Council and 3 months subscription to the YMCA Sports Facility.  

When I'm not messing around with poddies or steers, I like soccer, swimming, exercising, running and other physical activities.   If I'm indoors, I like playing on my Nintendo and have lots of different games for it.  When my friends come over we all play on it.

I have had two ponies and a horse so I'll tell you a bit about them.  My first pony was a gorgeous little dark brown mare with the longest coat and bushiest mane you've ever seen.  She was about ten hands high and we think she might have been a Shetland/Timor pony cross.  She had perfect manners and the sweetest nature and shocked us all by producing a foal the day after we got her!  Nobody had realised she was in foal.  Because she had this great shock of hair, we called her Whoopie and named her foal Cadillac.  That's me and Whoopie in the photo when I first got her.  It was taken a long time ago now, and I've grown up a lot since then.  I was very sad when I got bigger and we had to sell her, but she went to a really lovely home.

The next pony I had was a pretty little grey mare called Jezabel.  She sure lived up to her name!  She was about twelve hands high and I learned to barrel race on her.  The first time I rode her in a competition, she trotted into the arena, spotted a patch of sand and laid right down and rolled!  Told you she lived up to her name.  I still loved her, though.  I haven't got Jezabel any more, but it had nothing to do with her 'orneriness'.

I had a beautiful little chestnut mare, about 14 hh with a big white blaze and 3 white stockings for a while.  I called her Blazing Glory but that's a bit of a mouthful so she got called Blaze for short!  I hoped to learn to campdraft on her and I reckon she would have been good at this because she was very nifty on the turns.  My nana took some photos of her and here's one of them with me riding Blaze.  We were just mucking about having fun here.

Page last updated
01 Oct 2009 08:55 PM