Bicentennial of Racing

Introduction

Two hundred years ago but less than mile away from the Opera House, and a century before it became a nation, this country first heard the roar of a crowd cheering the favourite home.

Governor Macquarie, officers of the 73rd regiment and emancipated convicts – pimps, prostitutes, forgerers and other felons - rubbed shoulders together at a three day race meeting in Hyde Park Sydney. Perhaps this was the seed from which Australian democracy was born – the sense that on the turf, and under it, all men are equal.

There can be no doubting that this was the beginning of something profoundly important to the Australia we know today. In this bicentennial year let us spend a few moments chronicling an amazing story.

Racing And The Colonies

European settlement of Australia began in 1788. Not far from where you are sitting Australia’s first Europeans established a penal colony consisting of 700 convicts, their marine guards and enough supplies to keep them all until they become self-sufficient. It is interesting to reflect that for thousands of years beforehand …40,000 or more…. no one in this land had seen a horse, nor any animal with a rider atop. And yet from those earliest colonial days horses were the key to unlocking the vast interior of the island continent. Horses pioneered transport routes. Horses provided the means of ploughing, mustering and droving. Horses delivered the mail, and carried people to church on Sunday. Bushrangers on stolen horses robbed banks and stage coaches and it was mounted policemen who gave them chase. Literally, Australia rode on the horse’s back. It is little wonder then that racing quickly emerged as the first Australian sport.

“The universal love of horseracing in Australia is shown by the large number of meetings every year. There is scarcely a township in any one of the colonies which has not its annual event. The principal reason for this is the abundance of good horseflesh and the number of good riders as there are few persons residing in the country who cannot mount the saddle. Under such circumstances a love of the turf is natural.” - Australian Sportsman 1881

As the colonies grew towards maturity and nationhood so too did the sport. Organised racing commenced in Tasmania in 1814, Western Australia in 1833, Victoria and South Australia in 1838, Queensland in 1843 and the northern territory in 1874. As the Presbyterian clergyman John Dunmore Lang recorded in 1834 – “the three never failing accompaniments of advancing civilisation in the new colony are a racecourse, a public house and a goal.” And he named them in that order.

Anything worth celebrating was accompanied by a race meeting, from the Queen’s birthday, Christmas or St Patrick’s Day to the end of shearing or the arrival of the railway. When the centenary of the colony of New South Wales came round in 1888 there were 66 anniversary race meetings advertised in the Sydney newspapers for the holiday.

The bush poet John O’Brien immortalised this colonial racing world in his tale of the Bishop lecturing a

country schoolboy:

“Come tell me boy” his lordship said in crushing tones severe, come tell me why is Christmas day the greatest of the year?

“The ready answer bared a fact no Bishop ever knew – it’s the day before the races out at Tangmalangaloo”

Or as Banjo Patterson put it

“Before the North Pole was discovered, some cynic said that it would be discovered easily enough by advertising a race meeting there, when a couple of dozen Australians would infallibly turn up with their horses” – AB Patterson 1935

Flying across the Australian inland today you can still see passing over an outback town a circle of post and rail fencing and perhaps a judge’s box still standing...a reminder of this special period of Australian racing. Once a year in the desert outback of Birdsville, in Queensland, racegoers come from all distant places to attend the running of the Birdsville cup and to relive this bush tradition in Australian racing. Birdsville is a very long way from Hyde Park.

But another tradition had entered Australian racing by the mid century: it came with the gamblers. In a sense Australian history itself had had been a gamble. The convict system... immigration... land settlement... were all life’s gambles and now in the 1850’s came the biggest gamble of all... the gold discoveries. Into Australia and soon onto the gold diggings in the bush came boatloads of gold seeking immigrants. Once again the horse came into its own for transport and for this gold-seeking population horse races were the place to go to give their new won wealth a fling of fortune.

Now enter the bookmaker... the bookie... the bagman... the satchel swinger... into the Australian racing story. The bookie on his stand under a tree, or on a box with his penciller is one of the enduring images of our earlier racing story and the life and style of the bookie with his gold watch chain and panama hat writing the bet on his betting ticket and taking on the punters is one of the images set into our picture of Australian bush racing.

When the bookmakers formed their own Tattersall’s clubs where their betting markets were framed and published they became a powerful influence, especially on the Australian preference for handicap racing. The handicap race made for a better betting market and the bookies charts added extra interest to the racing cup and festival meetings. It gave to the racing scene its own special character. The great interest in the bookies charts did not escape the interest of the racing patrons in the taxation department and the purveyors of the odds provided a bonanza for the nation’s budget when feature racing carnivals came round each year. The punter and the bookie are among Australia’s folklore characters and in one of our popular sporting cartoons it was the weekly battle of Perce the Punter, with Shaw Todds the bookie, that won such appeal with Australian racegoers and boosted Sunday newspaper sales.

There were no bookies at Hyde Park. But any number of gamblers.....many with their life.

Another influence on Australian racing carrying it further away from its English origins was the Irish influence. Irish immigrants had been here in the Australian colonies from the beginning as convicts, and then as immigrants from the potato famine, and now the gold rush arrivals brought their luck of the Irish outlook onto the goldfields and into the Australian racing story. From a mostly rural background and without inheritance they entered the racing world..... into the stables as grooms, stable hands, and trainers, into the saddle as jockeys and trackmen, and where they found a special calling was into the ranks of the bookmakers. Today, in any list of licensed persons on the racecourse there they all are- Irish names appear like peppercorns, and in generations they follow: O’Shea, O’Sullivan, O’Reilly, O’Gorman, O’Connor, O’Neill, O’Leary, O’Grady and the Mulligans, Murphys, and McCartneys, and the Quinns and the Quintons. Now we have Kathy O’Hara leading the field home in the saddle...and the Irish Cummings family into its third generation as trainers with a record of Melbourne Cups.

The St Patrick’s Day meetings became a regular fixture in the racing calendar and when the St Patrick’s race clubs hold their annual meeting each year at Geelong, Broken Hill, Rockhampton and Springsure with the shamrock on the racebook Australian racing would seem to have come a long way from Governor Macquarie’s Hyde Park meeting. Among racegoers at the St Patrick’s Day meetings a beer may well have been downed for the Irish convicts who, at Hyde Park, in 1810 were not allowed to have a bet or a drink.

By the end of the century in Australia racing was the national sport and when all the colonies entered the new Commonwealth in1900 it was celebrated throughout the new nation with federation race meetings. It might not be too far from the mark to suggest that more Australians in the new nation knew the name of Carbine, the winner of the Sydney and Melbourne cups, than that of Edmund Barton the first Prime Minister.

As Australian life entered the new century the motor car was still years away, horses were part of everyday life and racecourses set into the landscape of the town and the city. In Sydney and suburbs there were eight race courses and Australian bred thoroughbreds were making their mark on the racecourse and gaining status at the bloodstock sales. The new states had created their own carnivals and horses were travelling by boat and train to the capital and country cups. It was a horseracing world.

That was until 1914. When the British Empire declared war on Germany all things changed. Australia was part of the empire so Australia too was at war. In the next four years thousands of men and their horses found themselves in far off lands.....in Egypt, Turkey, Palestine, and in the trenches during the freezing winters of France and Belgium. Far from home with his horse, taking dispatches from the trenches during the battle of the Somme Jack Hutton, a jockey from Bayly Paytens stable in Sydney writes in his small Gem diary ... Murder bloody murder... Shells all night... And then... I wonder what won the Epsom. It was spring at home and his thoughts were carried back to when he was rounding the turn and riding into the wind at Randwick. Happily he did return home and was to find out who won the Epsom in 1917.

In Belgium when the war was over and Australian soldiers were waiting for a ship home they organized a race meeting with their artillery horses and some local mules. The names each animal carried were straight out of an Australian race book. It was their best recollection of the world they had left and their prospect of coming back to the world they missed...a day at the races.

RACING AND AUSTRALIA’S CULTURAL IDENTITY

Every nation has its own distinctive cultural identity, and the literature, films and art of that country both draw from and shape that identity.

In Australia’s case the highs and lows of racing, the courage and beauty of the thoroughbred, and the eclectic cast of personalities who consort at the racetrack are a constant refrain in our national story.

The first Australian film ever made was Marius Sestier’s Melbourne cup 1896 which was screened not only in Australia but also in London, St Petersburg and Paris. That iconic Australian journal The Bulletin declared at the time how “beautifully appropriate it is that the first picture presented by the new machine should be a horse race.”

This was echoed some 70 years later with a broadcast of the Caulfield cup introducing colour television to Australia.

Australian newspapers have also reflected this cultural significance. As a Cyril Pearl wrote in “So you want to be an Australian”, in 1959:

“The marriage of a jockey is always front-page news. So is the death of a trainer. The death of a poet does not rate newsprint unless the poet’s wife is able to afford an announcement in the small ads columns. This is very unlikely.” – Cyril Pearl 1959

Australian literature has long had a love affair with racing. Today it is writers such as Peter Temple and Les Carlyon who mine its rich lode of characters and stories but the literary tradition stretches right back through frank hardy and Cyril Pearl to Breaker Morant and CJ Denis. Of course this list must also make mention of the bard of the bush, Australia’s best loved poet, Banjo Patterson.

They bred him out back on the `Never',

His mother was Mameluke breed.

To the front -- and then stay there -- was ever

The root of the Mameluke creed.

He seemed to inherit their wiry

Strong frames -- and their pluck to receive --

As hard as a flint and as fiery

Was Pardon, the son of Reprieve.

They're off and away with a rattle,

Like dogs from the leashes let slip,

And right at the back of the battle

He followed them under the whip.

They gained ten good lengths on him quickly

He dropped right away from the pack;

I tell you it made me feel sickly

To see the blue jacket fall back.

And if they have racing hereafter,

(And who is to say they will not?)

When the cheers and the shouting and laughter

Proclaim that the battle grows hot;

As they come down the racecourse a-steering,

He'll rush to the front, I believe;

And you'll hear the great multitude cheering

For Pardon, the son of Reprieve.

The Cup

No statement on the Bicentenary of Australian racing could be complete without some mention of the Cup. It can be fairly said that Australia has three truly national days: Anzac day, Australia day and the Melbourne cup. As Les Carlyon writes, the cup is a reference point for many of the most important events in Australian history. Grand Flaneur, ridden by the crack Tommy Hales, won in 1880, days before they hanged another useful horseman, Ned Kelly, after a $30 trial.

In the second great conflict the Queensland-bred bolter Old Rowley’s 1941 win was broadcast by BBC radio to members of the AIF stationed in Britain, and the fact that the 1944 cup was won by Sirius and Darby Munro seemed almost incidental to the military operation of getting film of the race to the troops on Port Moresby, Lae and the most remote Australian battle stations.

Russia, a chestnut stallion, won in 1946, as the allies realised they had licked Hitler only to inherit Stalin. Equally poetic, Think Big won in 1975, days before Gough Whitlam was sacked as PM by Sir John Kerr. In the country towns of Les Carlyon’s youth, the Cup was the reference point. A squinteyed farmer would say: ‘We haven’t had a crop as good as this since…buggered if I can remember….when The Trump won the cup.’

And the race it self surely defies easy or neat definition. One of the most prestigious of races anywhere in the world, unlike any other of its peers it is a handicap race. Myth has it that winner of the first and second Melbourne cups, Archer walked the 500 miles from Nowra to Flemington, though it is more likely that steamboat was the means used.

By 1993 the Irish Vintage Crop had traveled 40,000 miles to become the first non-Australian trained winner of the cup. In 2006 Japan quinellaed the race with Delta Blues and Pop Rock. And unforgettably the English-bred Makybe Diva re-wrote the history books by winning three cups from 2003 to 2005.

The Heroes

Mark Twain said that “it is not best that we should all think alike; it is a difference of opinion that makes horse races.” Differences of opinion would surely visit any attempt to short list the champions of the Australian turf, but we must name a few of them. Carbine was the shot that echoed around the world, and the Carbine Club continues to celebrate his grace and courage around Australia and internationally. While the Great Depression broke lives, Phar Lap broke records. He lifted Australia’s spirits at one of its grimmest hours, and the nation wept at the news of his death in America. Bernborough, Tulloch, Kingston town, These also take their place in the pantheon.

And over time the concept of what is an Australian-bred horse has evolved. From the speed-dominated genes of our colonial sires to the best classic blood of the international shuttle stallions – and a unique hybrid (further evolved through the importation of superior North American and European mares over the space of three decades) that has produced our current generation of champions. This has moulded the likes of international success stories Takeover Target, Miss Andretti, Silent Witness, Choisir, Why Be, Elvstroem, Starcraft – modern day heroes who have ably emulated the deeds of their forefathers such as Strawberry Road, and Balmerino.

Our jockeys have thrilled us at home and glittered overseas. George Moore, whose name is given to the annual medal for Sydney’s outstanding jockey, Roy Higgins, Darby Munro, these were the brilliant lights of past generations just as Darren Beadman and Damien Oliver are today.

And the trainers, TJ Smith started life in Golgowi on the edge of the outback. His first job was trapping rabbits but he raised himself to the point of utterly dominating Sydney racing for over 3 decades. Bart Cumming’s first brush with the Melbourne cup was in 1950 when he strapped the home-bred Comic Court for his father. 60 years later he has the unmatchable record of 12 Melbourne cups and 5 quinellas.

C.S Hayes, Etienne de Mestre, Jack Denham and their ilk have given Australian racing a reputation for producing some of the best horsemen in the world.

Others have also added greatly to story of Australian racing.

The ‘accurate one’ Bill Collins called 34 Melbourne Cups and races around the world. And bet London to a brick that Ken Howard is still exercising his magic eye somewhere in the hereafter.

At the beginning of the 20th century, working in a shed at the back of his house in Sydney, the inventor George Julius applied himself to converting a mechanical vote-counting machine he had invented into the world’s first automatic totalisator. He was soon exporting them around the world. A little earlier the jockey Reuben Gray received a ₤5 fine from the AJC stewards for allowing his mount to step over the white chalk line that marked the start. By 1894 he and his father Alexander had given the world the first starting barriers.

Conclusion

And so we come to 2010. Somewhere along the way the sport of racing has become the Australian racing industry. The second-largest foal crop in the world is exported to 24 countries as well as putting 200,000 starters on Australian race tracks every year. To give you some sense of the scale: 50,000 employees, $5 billion in gross domestic product, and 2 million Australians attending at least 1 race meeting a year.

Today Australian racing spans both the calendar and the continent: some 400 race clubs conduct 17,000 races barring only Good Friday and Christmas day. 120,000 flock to Flemington on the first Tuesday in November. And in September the population of Birdsville in remote outback Queensland swells from 100 to 6,000 for a two day race meeting. Two hundred years old. A good age, but hopefully we are still yet to pass the first turn. For this sport we love is evergreen: there is no last race and the hope always stays alive that one day we will lead our horse into the winner’s circle.