By Jessica Owers ● Written In The Stars ● April 6, 2026

Over 14 years, Emma Cully has become an indispensable and important part of the success of Star Thoroughbreds – the quiet constant beside Denise Martin. So how did this Irish-born daughter of a national hunt trainer end up in the heartbeat of one of Australia’s leading syndication companies? Jessica Owers finds out.

It took two consecutive Saturdays in late March, and a little over four-and-a-half collective minutes, for the Ranvet-Tancred stakes double to sail Aeliana into the hearts and minds of Australia’s racetrackers.

On that second Saturday, Aeliana, the dashing ATC Derby winner of last season, elevated her status further with a thrilling snatch-and-grab of the Tancred from Dubai Honour. In the wash-up, she had edged into territory occupied by Verry Elleegant and Tuesday Joy.

“Full credit to her, she’s a proper horse,” said Chris Waller, who knows a thing or ten about handling proper horses. Waller’s favoured praise ‘proper’ could be said of Denise Martin, Aeliana just the latest to have carried Martin’s purple and white Star Thoroughbreds livery right to the top.

After the Tancred, Martin had all the mobbing expected of the result. As Martin stopped outside the Rosehill mounting yard to receive her well wishers, Emma Cully was there, gently keeping her schedule on track.

Cully has charge of client relations at Star Thoroughbreds, but Martin will have you believe she is the living, beating heart of the syndication company, and few of Star’s clients will argue it.

“When people ask what my role is at Star, I never really have an answer for them,” Cully tells The Straight. “It’s a bit of everything now, but it has evolved over the years. I like to think I’m a bit of a sounding board for Denise these days, but when I started back in 2012 I was definitely just an admin assistant.”

Cully is measured, warm and well-mannered, but also frank in the way that many Irish are.

“That’s the Irish. We talk,” she says.

She comes from a small Cork townland called Callas in Ireland’s south. Few have heard of it, but almost everyone has heard of its neighbour, Blarney Castle.

This is national hunt territory, the mud and the pints a county pastime during the long winter months watching the point-to-points, and it was deep in this upbringing, with its wellies and blue-collar crowds, that Cully grew up the child of a trainer.

“My dad is Gerry Cully, who trained national hunt horses,” she says, and a quick sweep of the archives shows that Gerard Cully sent out his last runner in August 2010 at Tramore. His last winner had been two years before.

For his daughter, who grew up on game Irish ponies riding hunter trials, the more polished world of flat racing didn’t factor at all during those years.

“Cheltenham week was the pinnacle of the calendar in our house growing up,” Cully says. “I look back now and I think it’s funny that flat racing was never on my radar.”

Cully, today, is in her mid-thirties, married, a mother, and a resident of Sydney’s North Shore. She commutes most days of the working week to Rosehill, where Star Thoroughbreds is based within the Chris Waller institution.

At this time of year, the yearling sales and racing carnivals occupy most of her time, but every so often she will think about how a trainer’s daughter from Ireland landed a job on the other side of the world in a code she had never given much thought to.

“I always knew I would work in the industry, but not necessarily in the hands-on parts of the industry,” Cully says. “But if you said to 16-year-old me that she’d have a career in flat racing in Australia, I probably would have laughed at you.”

Because of Star Thoroughbreds, Cully has found herself within some of racing’s biggest fairytales, and Aeliana is just the latest. She wasn’t around for Sebring and Theseo, but she has been for D’Argento, Invincibella, Espiona, Foxplay and Olentia, and so many others.

She was hovering close to Martin when Espiona sold online as a $4.15 million broodmare prospect two years ago, and when Olentia sold similarly for $2.6 million.

In 2024, Cully was recognised as the ‘engine room of Star Thoroughbreds’ with the Administration and Ancillary Award at the industry-driven Stud and Stable Staff Awards. For a woman most comfortable behind the scenes, and so effective there, it was flattering but excruciating.

“I like to think my job encompasses every aspect of the industry,” Cully says. “That’s the best part about it, going to the yearling sales and looking at the horses, then watching them through the whole process and being there on race day.

“And, I think it has really suited me. I’m super-organised and an extreme neat freak, and have been since I was a kid. I like to think that work ethic really suits the way Denise likes things done.”

Denise Martin has, for 30 years, run Star Thoroughbreds up the board of this sport like few others. The longevity of her syndication points to a master manager, but for all the razzle at the top of the sport, she has never grown bigger than the business, and has never wanted to. Her common touch is exceptional.

“Denise is remarkable,” Cully says. “To be doing this job for as many years as she’s been doing it, and to still be hungry for it as she is, is just remarkable.”

Cully will flank Martin all year round, their relationship beyond the borders of work. When she was still new to Australia in 2012, she sent out a raft of enquiries around the industry, looking for work. Martin was the only one who responded.

Fourteen years later, you’d forgive Martin for thinking she can’t live without Cully.

“It’s been so many years of working so well together,” Cully says. “But you still don’t want to be on the wrong side of Denise if you send out an email with a typo.”

As far as strong women go, Martin ranks highly in Cully’s life. Perhaps she’s too young, or too close to Martin, to know just how monumental the legacy is that Martin is leaving.

“My mum, Helen, was a powerhouse in her own right, but quietly unassuming,” Cully says. “She’s from an equestrian background herself. My dad, obviously, was the trainer, but it was Mum in the background keeping everything going. I don’t remember wanting for anything as a child.”

When Cully finished school, she studied equine management at Maynooth before two seasons in Kentucky on the yearling circuit, and then another at Coolmore in the Hunter Valley, which is how she ended up in Australia.

It is a path many have trodden on their way to the Australian thoroughbred industry and today she is one of the 105,000 Irish-born residents in this country. Like many of them, Cully didn’t arrive, never intending to leave.

“My mum is still upset about it on the daily,” she says.

Her parents split up during her first year at Maynooth. The training business, with the 70 stables out the back door and the life that came with it, was carved up along with the family.

Gradually, Gerard Cully fizzled out of Ireland’s training ranks, and they were difficult years. Emma reveals he had been an alcoholic in his earliest life, a scourge that reemerged when his daughter was about 17.

“My entire childhood, I had never seen my dad have a drink,” Cully says. “He had given it up cold-turkey when my mum got pregnant. Essentially, it caused the breakdown of their marriage when he started drinking again. Just one day, suddenly, I think he woke up and thought he wouldn’t mind having a drink again.”

Cully is frank about her father’s battles. She talks about it openly, but she isn’t sure many people know about it.

She was there for the years before her emigration when Gerry Cully bounced between sobriety and personal recklessness. In the end, he moved to Lanzarote in the Canary Islands and dabbles as a bookie in a busy Irish bar.

“Half the time in Ireland, half the time in Lanzarote,” Cully says. “He was very proud this year because he got a shout-out on Cork’s Red FM, that if anyone was going to Lanzarote during Cheltenham, there was a great Cork bookmaker in Murphy’s Bar.”

Probably, these personal circumstances made it easier for Cully to stay in Australia. That, and her Irish friends like Sebastian Hutch, who teases the “Cully from the hills”..

But every so often, especially since the birth of her daughter Ruby last year, Cully’s thoughts turn to ‘home’ and a childhood Ruby will never know.

“It’s the weirdest thing, knowing that Ruby won’t have that childhood going to hunter trials or the races like I had,” she says. “But then I remind myself that she’ll grow up with nippers and sunshine instead.”

Like Martin, Cully hasn’t let the dazzling success of Star Thoroughbreds change her at all. She does her job quietly and brilliantly.

She works tirelessly on client ticketing, hospitality and social media so that the racehorse experience is the effortless pleasure Martin wants it to be for Star clients, and Cully doesn’t just hear this. She gets it.

“One of our owners in Aeliana, it’s their first ever racehorse, which is amazing, right?” she says. “But we can’t promise that experience to everyone, obviously, because it’s not realistic.

“But I do like to hope that anyone who has a horse with us will leave the experience thinking it was a nice experience, and, at the end of the day, we love the Aelianas, but we also love those really good geldings we’ve had over the years that keep showing up every Saturday, the breadwinners that keep you relevant all year round.”

She could be talking about herself.