Robin Levett

Levett continued to travel abroad and across Australia in her last years, and visited her beloved Kilmore Turf Club at every opportunity. After being named “The First Lady of Australian Racing” in the 1990s, she was a popular hostess and guest at race-related events. Following Levett’s death on 14 August 2008, from pneumonia, there was a send-off at the Kilmore Turf Club in her honour. The Kilmore track now runs a Robin Levett Memorial race in honour of the pilot, parachutist, traveller, writer and naturelover.

Following the death of her husband Geoffrey Levett in 1990, Robin Levett was forced to close Willowmavin stud farm and its wildlife refuge. She took up writing to fill the void. Her first and most successful book, a novel entitled The Girls, was based on her experience growing up the third of three daughters of a military man. The book twice hit the bestseller lists in Australia, and led to her meeting her publisher – and second husband – Nick Hudson, whom she eventually married at age 77 (he was 70).

Robin Levett served for years on the committee of the famous Kilmore Turf Club, and as president from 1989 to 1994, the only woman ever elected president of a grade one Australian turf club. Despite her consuming involvement in horseracing and breeding she found time to open a wildlife reserve at Willowmavin, where she included rescued animals into everyday life. “Guests in the committee room at Flemington would be bemused”, said the Australian newspaper The Age in its obituary of the racing legend, “when she would pull a young wombat from a large shoulder bag and feed it from a bottle.”

Levett devoted a book to her experiences in Kashmir, which she visited every year since 1972 (including the years of intense civil war), calling it The Shikari. Its twin subjects were an unlikely pairing: the wonders of fly fishing and the horrors of civil war. Critics were enraptured with the work, some calling it Levett’s finest. As for Levett, she continued to travel to Kashmir each year, and supported several Kashmiri families.

In the early 1960s the couple found a new avocation. They leased a filly named Never on Sunday. The horse turned out to be a winner, and soon they were breeding racehorses as well as racing them. They took up the Lyndhurst Lodge stud farm in Cranbourne, Victoria, and later also had the Willowmavin stud farm in Kilmore, before finally settling on Willowmavin. The venture was a success. In 1966 the Levetts won the Victoria Derby with their horse Khalifa; in the following year Khalifa won the VRC St Leger.

Robin Levett was born Robin Walker, the daughter of Major Geoffrey and his wife Aileen (Whiting) Walker in Sorrento, Victoria. As a girl, she attended the prestigious Hermitage School, from which she was expelled after she tried to burn it down. She later attended Toorak College in Mount Eliza, Victoria, which seemed to suit her better. She excelled, was named head girl and won the top prize in 1943. She subsequently studied at the National Gallery School, where she was awarded a coveted travelling scholarship.

Robin Levett (14 October 1925 – 14 August 2008) was an Australian travel writer, novelist, philanthropist, pilot, and breeder of racehorses anointed the “First Lady of Australian Racing” in the mid-1990s. Her eclectic interests ranged from fly fishing in Kashmir, about which she wrote a book, to running her own wildlife refuge in Victoria.