There’s no number on the fence and no car in the driveway. This flat block of wet soil and tufty lush grass has a kind of bare and unfinished air, as if Michelle Payne’s old, white, weatherboard house was just plonked in the middle of a lonely paddock. The retired jockey’s farm sits somewhere north of Ballarat – a regional centre that always seems like the coldest place in Victoria – and it’s predictably, painfully frostbitten on this arctic August afternoon.

The whole chilly windswept patch is honestly so far removed from the pomp, pageantry and warmth of Melbourne’s spring racing carnival – the fabulous Flemington Racecourse roses, and champagne-soaked marquees, and fops and fillies stumbling drunkenly in all their hatted finery – that I briefly wonder if I’m in the right spot. I’m actually doubtful once I reach the front door, because it’s capped with a big pile of dried bird poo.

I rap my knuckles on the threshold anyway and with a delayed rustle and click she eventually emerges, the first and only female jockey to win “the race that stops a ­nation”. That was 10 years ago, of course, when Payne, then 30, sat atop the longest of longshots – 101-1 chance Prince of Penzance – yet won the day with a stunning ride, giving rise to a memoir (Life As I Know It) then a movie (Ride Like a Girl).

These days she’s a trainer and greets me with a high ­ponytail and shiny face, having scrubbed up after a bitter morning in and out of the stables. Leading me down a Baltic pine hallway to her lounge room, Payne chit-chats about the frigid weather in a thin, surprisingly tremulous voice, then perches on a cushy couch, knees hugged into her chest. Her feet snug under a warm brown blanket, a gas heater kicks on in the corner and the timbre of her voice deepens.

Payne’s got a tale to tell, and it’s not the gumboots-to-glory story you might expect following her famous victory. What came afterwards is a story about injury and exhaustion and risk, addiction and heartbreak and grief. And it starts back when she was a kind of national sporting fairytale come to life. Do you remember that day?

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