My first visit to the races was not even planned. At around midday on a certain Wednesday in the December mentioned, a car pulled up at our front gate in what is now South Oakleigh. In the back seat was Len Luxford, one of my father’s best mates and a keen punter, although on a modest scale. Len, like my father, had no car, but he was being driven to the Mornington races by his son-in-law. The man’s wife, Len’s daughter, was in the front passenger seat, but Len offered my father a seat beside him in the rear. I’ll never know who suggested there was room also for me.
Mornington in those days was surrounded by open paddocks and was considered a country town, but even country meetings attracted much larger crowds than nowadays, and we were late arriving in the car park. The first race was a hurdle race and I had been looking forward to watching it but, just as we walked through the entrance to the course, I saw, through the gap between the members’ and the public grandstands, the bobbing caps of the riders as the field in the hurdle race came up the straight for the first time. That gave me the first of my several surprises at my first race meeting. The horses seemed to be travelling at breakneck speed. Whenever I had listened to a radio broadcast, I had supposed the horses to be ambling through the early stages of each race. Reporting this today reminds me of how removed I was from racing in the very years when I was becoming obsessed by it. Horses, jockeys, trainers, even the coloured jackets that so interested me—I had read about them or heard about them but never, or hardly ever, set eyes on them.
Had I not learned from those black-and-white newsreels mentioned earlier how fast a field of racehorses travelled? Seemingly not. Perhaps I assumed the image-horses in the newsreels had been speeded up like the image-persons in old silent films. Or, perhaps I forgot my brief sight of the Melbourne Cup field during the year that followed, when I would have spent hour after hour moving my glass-marble racehorses around the lounge-room mat so that a race could be prolonged for hours or even days.
I surely learned much on that first day at Mornington, although there were surely also a number of things that turned out to be just as I had expected them—the racing colours, for example, or the bookmakers’ odds and the betting. I learned each of my two most memorable lessons from a particular horse. One was the actual mare Targie and the other was the imaginary mare Ladies’ Pants.
Targie (Light blue, burgundy stripe and cap) ran in the last race of the day. I’ve forgotten her trainer, but her rider was Kevin Mitchell, who seldom attracted publicity but was an outstanding jockey for many years. Targie was second- or third-favourite in the race. The favourite was Great Caesar (Green, gold star—or was it a diamond?). Mitchell kept Targie just behind the leader until they entered the short, uphill Mornington straight. The rider of Great Caesar had kept his mount midfield and wide for most of the way. While Targie was about to pass the leader, Great Caesar was circling the field with a strong run.
As I prepare to write the forthcoming paragraphs, I’m reminded of the many debates, during the history of Christianity, on the subject of free will and predestination. I was once able to make myself slightly dizzy by trying to reconcile the opposing views, as I understood them. Sometimes, it seemed to me that if God was all-knowing and if He foresaw all of human history, then human beings were incapable of making free choices; all they could do was to follow whatever course of action was already mapped out for them. But sometimes, I could convince myself that human beings were indeed free. At any moment, a person was able to decide between several possible courses of action and so to alter his or her future. In this scheme of things, however, God seemed reduced in stature. How could He be all-knowing and all-powerful, if human beings—His mere creatures—were making up history as they went?
The above may seem far removed from horse racing, and yet I’ve observed myself over the years changing from someone whose view of racing was that of a predestinarian to someone who stands on the side of free will. Probably because I saw no actual races until I was nearly fifteen, I tended as a boy to think of each race as predestined. When I looked through a field of horses of a Saturday morning, I felt as though I was merely trying to see in mind the results of the race as they were going to be printed in the Saturday evening edition of the Sporting Globe. I might seem to myself sometimes to be weighing up the claims of various horses, but God or Destiny had done this already, and the race would be run so that the preordained winner actually won. This was the sort of thinking, by the way, that drove many punters to search for the perfect betting system. The researcher of systems, having found, let us say, that horses carrying top weight and starting favourite won twenty-five per cent of the races they contested in a given year, would assume that such horses would register exactly the same achievement in any later year.
I hadn’t been a regular racegoer for long before I came to understand that no race result should be thought of as inevitable; that the best a punter can do is to pick a horse that seems to have a winning chance and to hope that the horse has good luck in running. Even if the Almighty, in the vast Grandstand in the Sky, knows all the winners in advance, He knows too that in many a race an eventual second-placegetter was being hailed as the winner twenty metres short of the post.
I don’t remember whether I had tried to select the winner of the last race at Mornington on that day in 1953. I would have been still a predestinarian, and if I had selected Targie I would have supposed, a few seconds after the field had straightened, that I had correctly worked out what God had known through all eternity. Kevin Mitchell had driven the mare to the front. None of those immediately behind her was making any ground. She seemed safe. Kevin Mitchell, though, seemed not to share my theological views, or perhaps he knew what a strong finisher was Great Caesar. Mitchell took to Targie with the whip—not flogging her but keeping her mind on the job, as one racecourse expression would have put the matter, or making a good thing of her, to use another such expression. And well he might have whipped the mare, for Great Caesar—whose rider had sat quietly rounding the turn, perhaps to let the horse keep its balance—was now finishing fast.
This was only my first day at the races, but I could see that Great Caesar would beat Targie, even when he was still a length or two behind the mare. The favourite drew level twenty or thirty metres out and quickly passed Targie. And then, still three or four strides short of the winning post, Kevin Mitchell put away his whip. I must have been watching him intently, for I can call his actions to mind with absolute clarity and have done so many times during the last sixty years. Mitchell looked across at the colours on the jockey just then passing him. Then, with a surprisingly graceful gesture, he changed his grip on the handle of his whip so that it rested near the mare’s shoulder while he rode her with hands and heels towards the post. Whether he was a believer in predestination or whether he argued for the operation of free will, his graceful gesture seemed his way of saying that he had done all in his power and could do no more.
A few hours before I had learned from Targie to question some of my beliefs about racing, I had been offered a lesson in quite a different field of knowledge. I used the word offered advisedly. The lesson took place, but I doubt whether I learned much from it. Or, rather, I doubt whether I’ve profited much during my lifetime from whatever I learned that day at the Mornington races.
A good-sized crowd was on course. On the grassy slope overlooking the winning post, people stood shoulder to shoulder before each race. I watched most races alone. My father and Len Luxford liked to stay in the betting ring until the last few minutes, whereas I liked to have a good view of the races. Before one of the main races, the persons nearest to me on my right side were two or three young women. I have no recollection whatever of the appearance of the young women or of what they would have been talking about in my hearing. I was a gangling boy of nearly fifteen. Even if the persons beside me had seemed only three or four years older than I, I would have thought of them as mature women and of myself as a mere boy. Even if they had seemed to be of my own age, I might
not have met their eyes. I had not even spoken to any female of my own age for two years.
In 1951, I’d had a girlfriend for most of the year. We were only twelve years old, she flat-chested and I still in short pants, but we were comfortable together. By early 1952, my family had moved to the opposite side of Melbourne and I was attending an all-boys school. We lived in a suburb of mostly new houses occupied by couples with infant children. I don’t recall even passing any girl of my own age in the streets of my suburb.
Not long before the start of the main race, a young man positioned himself just in front of me. He may have been one of a group of two or three—I don’t remember. He seemed to be of about the same age as the young women and, although they were obviously strangers to him, he set about getting their attention. His chief target was the young woman nearest him, who was also the one nearest me. I was embarrassed and kept my eyes on the horses milling behind the barrier, which was not far away at the top of the straight.
Races in those days took a long time to start. This was before starting stalls came into use. The horses were supposed to walk in a line towards a barrier consisting of rubber strands that could be released into the air at short notice by the starter. Sometimes, a field of horses would be behind the barrier for five minutes before their riders could get them to walk forward together. During this time, if the race was being broadcast, the commentator would have to fill in with naming the troublemakers or making small talk until his sudden cry of ‘They’re racing!’ or ‘They’re away!’ or ‘They’re off!’
The young man in front of me began imitating a racing commentator while a field was behind the barrier. If I had known what he was up to, I would have pushed my way into the crowd and fled the scene. But I had no suspicion of what he was about to say and, anyway, his patter was brief and he reached his punch line with hardly any preamble. ‘Peter Pan, Carbon Copy…’ He named a few of his imaginary horses…And I’m sure today that he would have locked eyes with the young woman on my right while he said, ‘Ladies’ Pants…they’re off!’
During the remaining minutes before the field was off at Mornington and during the two minutes while the race was run, I dared not look at any of the young persons around me, and as soon as the field had passed the post I made off into the crowd. I had looked at none of the young persons, and I was so uncomfortable that I never afterwards recalled any sort of conversation that may have begun among them. I neither looked nor heard, and yet I somehow sensed the atmosphere and was amazed to find that it seemed not to have changed. Not only had the young woman not slapped the face of the young man nor sent one of her companions in search of a policeman, but there seemed to be between her and the young man the same easygoing mock-wariness as before. How many days or weeks passed before I understood that I was the only person in our little group who had been shocked by what was said?
20. Elkayel and the Enzedders
I’VE MENTIONED THE New Zealanders already. They baffled me. I used to try to outwit them but I mostly failed. Sometimes, as I tried to explain earlier, I was driven to suppose that the cunning of the New Zealanders consisted in their following a wholly predictable course of action while conspiracy theorists such as myself awaited the unfolding of convoluted plots. At other times, their deceptiveness, or what I might have called their old-fashioned crookedness, fooled me completely. I can hardly believe it today, but after having decided, in early October 1960, that Eric Ropiha’s Ilumquh (Black, green Maltese cross and cap) had been set to win both the Caulfield Cup and the Melbourne Cup, I dropped off the horse, as the saying goes, after it was beaten at short odds in a lead-up race to the Caulfield Cup. What was I thinking? Ilumquh won the Caulfield Cup at double-figure odds and would have won the Melbourne Cup but for interference.
I was alerted to Even Stevens (Gold, emerald-green band, red cap) in 1962, but I stupidly put a lot of money on him at his first Australian start. The race was at Caulfield in the week before the Cup. I’ve never seen a rider use less vigour than the rider of Even Stevens used that day. If the jockey had sneezed in the straight, the flashy chestnut would have won, but he didn’t—I mean, neither did. I backed Even Stevens in both cups and collected, but he was at very short odds. His connections had put their money on weeks before, when no one knew anything about the moderately performed horse. I won barely enough to cover my losses from that first dead run.
I’m calling them the Enzedders in this section. My friend David Walton, who might fairly be called a social animal, would always use that term when introducing my wife and me to some or other New Zealanders that he had invited to the numerous gatherings that he organised. ‘This is So-and-so and his wife, So-and-so,’ David would say. ‘They’re Enzedders.’ I was always disappointed to find that the Enzedders at David’s parties knew nothing about racing. Or, did they only say that to keep me from suspecting that they were in Australia as undercover agents for some fiendishly secretive stable at Wingatui or Awapuni?
The year 1964 was a significant year for me. I had left Frankston and was living and teaching in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. In the first weeks of the year, she who had been my girlfriend for the past few months had cast me off, so to speak. This turn of events hardly surprised me. Nor was I surprised when my first day at the races as a bachelor brought me outstanding profits. The day was Oakleigh Plate Day, one of my favourite days at Caulfield. The Oakleigh Plate is run mostly on a hard track, but in 1964 rain fell all day and the track was sloppy. I’ve forgotten how I did it, but I backed five of the eight winners, including Pardon Me, the winner of the Oakleigh Plate. The horse’s trainer was a man named Bede Horan from Sydney, and its colours were a combination of gold and black and red. The Oakleigh Plate is a keenly contested race, but I felt almost from the start that Pardon Me would win. He seemed to be cruising or coasting in fourth or fifth place down the side of the Caulfield track. I remember Oakleigh Plate Day in 1964 as one of the few days when I felt as though I had learned at last how to make money from racing.
The year 1964 promised to be a year of regular race-going and perhaps the sort of profits that I had been trying for years to achieve. The spanner in the works was my having met up with, at my new school in the inner suburbs, a certain young woman who had been at teachers’ college with me five years before. I’d had no interest in her at teachers’ college, but five years had wrought all sorts of changes in the universe, and I asked her out, to use that quaint old expression, in midyear. I took her to the races at Caulfield, and we got on well together. Four months later, when the Spring Carnival was underway, we had made no formal announcement, but we seemed to have agreed that we would eventually become engaged and afterwards marry.
As if all that was not enough, I had made a solemn promise to the young woman, my future wife, that I would enrol as a part-time, mature-age student in an arts course at the University of Melbourne. My course would occupy all my spare time for several years to come. I would have no time for writing poems or short stories or the beginnings of novels. I would probably not even have time for reading form guides or betting on horses. My betting might be curtailed also by my need to save towards the deposit for a house. My girlfriend and I had only modest bank accounts, and eligibility for the federal government’s grant to buyers of first homes depended on regular saving.
Without any prompting from Catherine, my girlfriend and future wife, I resolved to give up betting. I mentioned no period of time. I knew in my bones that my vow could never be permanent. One day I would come back to the punt, but for now I would deposit in our home-savings account each week the sum that I would previously have bet on the Saturday races. My vow would come into operation immediately but with one modification or exemption. The time of year when I made the vow was late October. The Caulfield Cup had only just been run, and the Melbourne Cup was a couple of weeks away. Under the terms of my vow, I was allowed to have one last bet on the Melbourne Cup.
I seem to remember that the entries for the big cups in 1964 included fewe
r than the usual numbers from New Zealand. Even so, I considered only New Zealand horses when making my final selection for the Melbourne Cup. I looked forward to having my last bet for the time being, if not for all time, on an Enzedder and, of course, on collecting. Not only would I win good money—I’d have the satisfaction of having worked out the Enzedders’ plans.
Selecting my horse seemed easy enough. With hindsight, I understood that I should have been suspicious, but one horse seemed to stand above the others. This was the six-years-old gelding Elkayel. He had been placed in the Caulfield Cup, as had many Melbourne Cup winners during my lifetime. The other New Zealand horses had moderate form and, even allowing for the Enzedders’ noted cunning in these matters, I could not foresee any of the other horses improving sufficiently to beat Elkayel, whose trainer I’ve forgotten, but whose jockey was Grenville Hughes wearing a combination of green, blue, and yellow.
It seemed appropriate that my farewell bet should be a good-sized one. I took twenty pounds to Flemington on Cup Day to put on my selection. I got half my bet on at tens and half at twelves, so that I was set to win 220 pounds. I happen to recall that a new Volkswagen Beetle cost about a thousand pounds at the time; my winnings would have been a useful addition to our home-savings account. Those odds, by the way, made me a bit uneasy. They seemed to me twice what should have been on offer. If I had been setting the market, I would have had Elkayel favourite at six-to-one. Betting markets, however, just like other markets, are affected by supply and demand, and Elkayel was not greatly in demand. Had I been better informed, I might have noted the significant demand at long odds for another six-years-old New Zealand gelding. This was Polo Prince (Gold, emerald-green hooped sleeves and cap), which had run fairly in his lead-up races and close up in the Mackinnon Stakes without attracting my interest. I seem to have supposed that Polo Prince had been fully extended in all of those races, which is a supposition that should never have been hastily made about any horse from New Zealand in the years that I’m writing about. Maurice Cavanough, in his book The Melbourne Cup 1861–1982, reports that Polo Prince firmed from twenty-to-one to twelve-to-one with leading bookmakers on the day before the Cup. Cavanough adds that the owner of Polo Prince later denied having put any money on his horse—but an Enzedder would say that, wouldn’t he?
Something for the Pain Page 15