She could not hear, she said, the baying of 100,000 voices as she and Prince of Penzance thundered towards the winning post.

"It was so surreal," she said. "It just goes so quiet. I don't remember hearing a thing." And then came the knowledge that she'd won.

"Oh my God," she remembers screaming. "We've won the Melbourne Cup."

She had believed for days she and Prince of Penzance could do it.

She'd had a vision of it, this moment she'd wanted ever since she was a little girl.

It was as if fate had intervened. From the moment when her brother Steven, Prince of Penzance's strapper, had waltzed out to the barrier draw and had plucked barrier number one, a video moment that has become a worldwide sensation on social media, everything "just fell into place".

Payne said trainer Darren Weir had prepared the horse perfectly.

"He just had that horse peaking, just like Bart Cummings would have a horse peaking," she said.

Prince of Penzance has "an inner strength about him that I've never felt in another horse".

He was so keen she had to hold him from bolting to the front too early.

"At the 600 he was pulling me into the race. I thought, is this for real?" But she couldn't allow it. Not yet.

"Darren had drilled into into me: don't go too early. I think he would have killed me if I'd gone too early." But at the 200 "I just let him go". And her world went silent. Just her and a horse. Balance. Breathing.

Suddenly, she and Prince of Penzance had passed the winning post. She was the first female jockey to win the Melbourne Cup, and the soundtrack came back: her own screaming, the roar of the crowd.

Darren Weir had asked a single question of Michelle Payne before she went out on to the track.

"If you win the Cup, it will change your life," he said. "Are you ready?" "Yes, I'm ready," said Payne.

She understands she is now an ambassador for the sport, and for women, and for those who have dreams.

But she is a jockey. She drank water during celebrations on Tuesday evening, wanting to remember it all with perfect clarity.

On Wednesday, the day after winning the greatest prize in her sport, the $3.6 million Melbourne Cup, she was off to ride in the $100,000 Kyneton Cup.

She will be aboard Akzar, trained by Darren Weir, and she sees it as the final step towards taking Akzar to a win in her hometown's biggest race, the Ballarat Cup.

"I love my job," she said. "It's the best job in the world, even though it's so dangerous and so on."

"It's no job, really. It's my life."

And this from the youngest child of 10, whose mother died when she was a child: "If you've got a dream, never give up."