I don’t recall having bought a crayfish after Summer Fair’s Caulfield Cup, but I do recall having drunk more than my usual amount of beer at Mac’s, as it was familiarly known. I don’t recall walking home. I don’t even recall the first and by far the most urgent task that I would have had to perform after having entered my little apartment—my hurrying to the sink and emptying my swollen bladder. Afterwards, I would have run a copious amount of water down the sink, but I recall none of this. What I do recall is my sitting down in the middle of the room and counting out my winnings. Even though I could hardly claim to have backed Summer Fair as a result of my own assessment of the field, what mattered was the end result, and I took pleasure in counting out the wad of notes in my pocket.
Nothing else from that day stays in mind. What I next recall is my meeting with Mrs Smith a few days later. Was it an accidental meeting, or had she ambushed me at the letterbox or in the driveway? Mrs Smith was not a racegoer, but the Great Age of Racing was still not quite at an end and suburban wives such as Mrs Smith still kept abreast of racing results in the spring and autumn carnivals. I don’t recall which of us mentioned the Caulfield Cup, but I can never forget my telling Mrs Smith that I had won a goodly sum on Cup Day and her replying that she knew this already; that she and Glenys had overheard me from the kitchen of her house on the evening of Caulfield Cup Day while I counted out my winnings.
Excuse me, as they say nowadays, or used to say recently. Here we have Mrs Smith and Glenys poised with ears pricked in their kitchen while the young fumbling drunk in his room nearby flicks the corners of his banknotes. Now, what is the comparative loudness of a man’s flicking the corners of a few banknotes in the middle of his room with the same man’s pissing furiously from a bursting bladder into a stainless-steel sink in the corner of his room nearest to a pair of huddled, listening females? Even while Mrs Smith was talking to me about my success with Summer Fair, I understood that I had been sprung. My shabby secrets were known. It was time to think of moving on.
22. Sir Flash and the Borderers
THE FAMOUS THREE-DAY racing carnival at Warrnambool in May attracts visitors from all over Australasia. In the 1950s, and for a few years afterwards, a lesser two-day carnival was held in January, complete with hurdle races and a steeplechase. It could not be compared with the May event, but good crowds attended, many of them holidaymakers staying in Warrnambool or other coastal centres. I was like most people in associating Warrnambool with the ocean, but I had never taken much interest in the flat sandy beaches around the city. My father’s family had been settled for nearly a century in the Mepunga district, about twenty kilometres east of Warrnambool. There, the coast consists of tall cliffs broken occasionally by small coves and bays. As a boy, I enjoyed climbing among the fallen boulders and the rock pools at the edges of some of these bays, but the ocean itself repelled me, and I’ve kept well away from it during all of my adult life. During my brief holidays on my grandfather’s farm in the 1940s, I was more interested in another sort of ocean. Whenever I stood on a tall cliff above some or another bay, I got inspiration not from the blue-green Southern Ocean reaching away towards the South Pole but from the yellow-brown ocean of land reaching towards places I had seen only from a distance, if at all: the plains of the Western District to the north and the north-east of Warrnambool or, away to the north-west, a mostly level landscape where I had never been and where the towns were for me mere names on a map—Hamilton, Coleraine, Casterton…
I have always delighted in the atmosphere of the mounting yard. Nowadays, a concern for safety has resulted in owners and trainers and jockeys having to confer before a race in a railed enclosure well away from the parading horses, but for many years I could look into the mounting yard before a race and could see, in the open space bounded by the circling horses, knot after knot of persons, each surrounding a brightly clad jockey. Before a race, anything could be deemed possible. The shortest-priced favourite might be beaten; the rank outsider of the field might get up in a photo finish. The claims of no contender could be dismissed. The plans and tactics being discussed among any one of the knots of people might soon come to fruition, and the colours displayed at its centre might finish ahead of all the others. Those colours, I need hardly say, had a special interest for me when I saw them in the mounting yard before a race. I could read all sorts of things into sets of racing colours before a race. One set might seem to boast; another to issue a challenge; and still another to make a quiet but firm statement. I was easily able to see some sets of colours as representing particular regions or places or even something as vague as a way of life. And, of course, any set of colours was first of all connected with a trainer or an owner: a weather-beaten veteran trainer or a fresh-faced newcomer; an owner new to racing or someone from the third generation of an old racing family—someone using colours devised by his grandfather.
I was leaning on the mounting-yard fence one day at Warrnambool during the summer meeting when I saw a man whose image comes easily to my mind today, sixty years later. I long ago forgot the man’s name; nor do I recall anything of his trainer or his jockey. His horse was named Concito, and I remember the colours it carried, although I found them unattractive. I’ve sometimes tried to persuade myself that every possible set of colours must, by definition, be distinctive and must have a certain amount of appeal, but I’ve never been able to bring myself to like a certain few combinations of colours. One of them is the combination of black, red, and light blue. Concito’s colours were Black, light-blue hoops and sleeves, red cap. At least, the preponderance of the light blue made the colours a bit more appealing than a combination of mostly black and red. The owner of Concito was the best-dressed man in the mounting yard. This was a country meeting, where some owners and trainers wore neat casual dress, as we call it nowadays, but the owner of Concito wore a suit of some expensive-looking pale material, a white shirt, a tie of mostly pale blue with touches of black and red, and a grey hat with feathers in the brim. Even more striking than his clothes was his silver hair—or what could be seen of it beneath the brim of his hat. And there was plenty to see. Most men still favoured short back and sides in the 1950s but this man, like some of the wealthy residents of Toorak who I saw at Metropolitan Golf Club when I worked there as a caddy, obviously wore his hair long, so that it was bunched above his ears and neck.
Nowadays, a trainer’s hometown or suburb is printed after his or her name in the race book, but that was not the practice in the 1950s. My only way of learning where Concito was trained, and so to learn the district where its owner might have lived, was to look at its form in the race book: to see where it had raced recently. The horse’s three most recent starts had been at Hamilton and Casterton in Victoria and at Bordertown in South Australia. Even after having learned these facts, I was still a long way from knowing where exactly Concito came from. A triangle with those three named towns as its apexes covered a large slice of countryside, but my lack of specific evidence was hardly a hindrance to me. At the next opportunity, I unfolded a map of the far west of Victoria and the far south-east of South Australia and set not only my eyes but my imagination also roaming. At that time I had been no further north-west of Warrnambool than the township of Koroit, only a short drive inland, but I was able to recall a few illustrations from the Weekly Times and the Leader. I might also have performed a sort of extrapolation, telling myself that the country further inland must have been by degrees drier than the coastal zone. I guessed that the landscapes I was assembling in my mind were no less level than those I had seen from the coastal cliffs, although any place on a map that had winding roads or the beginnings of watercourses reminded me to include a few hilly districts or plateaus in my private territory.
I called the territory the Border District and its inhabitants Borderers. I awarded to those inhabitants not only the usual amount of shrewdness and sagacity attributed to people living far from the capital cities but extra doses of cunning and acquisitiveness on account of their l
iving close to a border. When I did this, I had in mind vague memories from my reading in history books of parties of Welshmen driving home English cattle from across the border; of wily Pyrenean peasants profiting from smuggling; of the Percy men lording it over Northumberland and southern Scotland. My Borderers did not literally smuggle or steal livestock. No, they used horse racing to achieve what the Welsh and the Pyreneans achieved by less subtle means. Their living near the edge of things made them more circumspect and painstaking than racing men from the coast or from around Melbourne or Adelaide. The long-range plans of Borderer owners and trainers more often succeeded. They more often landed their betting plunges. I would not have my Borderers thought of as wholly devoted to gain, however. They numbered among them many a man who wore his hair bunched above his ears and on his neck and who stood out on a racetrack on account of his elegant dress and proud bearing. Such a man owned a vast cattle or sheep property and lived in a mansion with a veranda on three sides and groves of deciduous trees all around. His mansion included a library and a study. The walls of the study were covered with photographs of the finishes of races won by his own horses. The walls of the library were covered, of course, with books, and while I could never dare to suppose that even one of the many mansion owners in my vast border district sat sometimes at a table in his library trying to compose a local variant of one of the renowned Border Ballads, still I like to think that many a mansion owner read sometimes from a collection of those ballads and considered them, as I do, as eloquent and memorable as any poems in our language.
No plunge was launched on Concito. The horse finished fourth or fifth, but this may have been part of some long-range plan that culminated, months later, in a successful plunge at Edenhope or Penola. I never heard of the horse again. Nor did I ever hear again of another Borderer, Sir Flash, or of his connections, who bore far more resemblance to Welsh cattle thieves or Andorran smugglers than did the silver-haired owner of Concito.
The story of Sir Flash (Green, pink cap) is simply told. The horse may even have competed at the same meeting as Concito. Certainly, the meeting was in January at Warrnambool. I was with my father, who was constantly stopping to talk to some or another old acquaintance from the district or even to a few visiting smart men from Melbourne. The talk always concluded with each man’s giving the other one or more tips for the day and, although no one from Melbourne mentioned him, most of the locals wanted to tip Sir Flash to my father. Several of them added, however, that they doubted whether the horse would actually run that day. They raised this doubt because the horse had still not arrived at the course even a couple of hours before the starting time of its race. My father and I verified this by visiting the stall allotted to Sir Flash in the so-called birdcage and finding it still empty.
Sir Flash must have arrived on course just in time, given that he took his place in the jumpers’ flat in mid-afternoon. Few jumpers’ flat races are run nowadays. They were interesting races, usually over a long distance and reserved for horses that had completed the course in a stated number of hurdle races or steeplechases within a stated time before the race. Sometimes, an astute trainer—to use an epithet much liked by racing journalists—would start a moderate flat-racer in a series of jumps races, not caring where the horse finished but only that it should complete the course and thereby become qualified for a jumpers’ flat race. Most jumping horses were plodders on the flat, and the astute trainer’s horse might have had an advantage after he had been transformed legally from a flat-racer into a jumper.
My father’s acquaintances were not the only ones who expected Sir Flash to run well. The bookmakers, too, had had their ears to the ground. A large field contested the race, but Sir Flash opened at the short odds of five to two. That was the best bet against him. There was no sudden, well-organised plunge—just a steady flow of money. My father and all his tipsters had good bets on Sir Flash. Even my father’s Melbourne friends joined in with their bets. Although there was no plunge, my father pointed out to me two men who went continually to bookmaker after bookmaker, sometimes two or three times to the same one. The men had moderate bets of twenty or forty pounds each, but their total outlay would have been considerable. My father had never set eyes on the men, and no one that he knew from around Warrnambool knew anything about them, but you know who they were, and so do I. Yes, they were Borderers.
I had not then learned to observe the behaviour of horses and jockeys during a race, but my father told me after Sir Flash had won by two or three lengths that the jockey had spent most of his time in the straight trying to stop the horse from winning by three or four times its eventual margin. It may have been my father or Uncle Louis or someone else of their acquaintance who first muttered that Sir Flash may well have been a ring-in. Correct weight was duly declared, but the considerable number of people who went to the birdcage to see the horse rubbed down were surprised to find that Sir Flash had been led straight from the course. This in itself was suspicious, and the more so when people recalled that the horse had not arrived at the course until shortly before its race.
Stewards’ practices sixty years ago were lax indeed by comparison with today. Every horse had its distinctive brand, and its registration papers described its natural colour and markings. Plus, a steward was supposed to go around the birdcage long before each race, asking to inspect the registration papers for each runner and comparing what was on the papers with what was on the horse. And yet, who knows what short-cuts a steward may have taken at a meeting at Warrnambool on a hot day in the early 1950s? Who knows how carelessly a steward may have looked at a forged set of papers or an altered brand? Perhaps a lazy or hasty steward may have waved his hand indulgently after some agitated trainer or strapper had told him that the papers had been left by mistake in a car at the far end of the car park, or that the horse had still not arrived on course because its float had broken down on the other side of Warrnambool? If the city performer Regal Vista was successfully rung in for the poorly performed Royal School at Casterton in 1972, why could not Sir Flash, twenty years before, have been not the horse of that name but the winner of open handicaps at Murray Bridge or Gawler or even Morphettville?
Ring-in or not, Sir Flash took much money from the bookmakers that day, and the horse’s connections got their share of it. They would have taken their winnings in a north-westerly direction. After the race, one of my father’s acquaintances, annoyed that he’d had only a small bet on the horse, jabbed his finger at the printed summary of Sir Flash’s form in the race book. What sort of jumping races had the horse contested, the man wanted to know. By what right had this dashing flat-racer got himself entered in a race for jumpers? He read out the information that Sir Flash had started most recently in a jumping race at Apsley, in far-western Victoria, and before that in a similar race at Penola in South Australia. My father’s friend was not alleging that Sir Flash was not the horse that had finished unplaced in two weak jumping races. What he seemed to be saying was that jumps at Apsley and Penola were lower or easier than at other courses and that the connections of Sir Flash had somehow cheated their way into the race at Warrnambool. He seemed to be blaming a bunch of Borderers for doing what any horse’s connections would have done if they had had half the chance.
After my wife had died, a few years ago, I moved to a small town in what some would call the north-west of Victoria but I like to call the far west. The town lies outside the pointy triangle made by joining up the places where Concito had three consecutive starts many years ago—but not far outside. This is definitely Border Country. And yet, the Borderers are not like the folk I imagined in the years when some of their number brought horses to the summer meeting at Warrnambool. Since I moved here, I’ve been to race meetings at Mount Gambier, Penola, Naracoorte, and Bordertown in South Australia, and at Edenhope, Casterton, Horsham, Nhill, and Murtoa in Victoria. I’ve seen much good racing. I’ve heard, while leaning on the fence of many a mounting yard, absorbing exchanges between owners and trainers and
jockeys. What I’ve seen and heard, however, seems to suggest that most connections can only hope for success. No trainers or owners in this far-reaching district seem even to plan, let alone bring to fruition, the sort of coup that my Borderers of long ago brought, or were supposed often to bring. Even the betting is on a much-reduced scale. I’ve watched owners or trainers walk from the mounting yard after their horse has gone onto the track and bet twenty or, perhaps, fifty dollars on it with one of the few bookmakers fielding. For heaven’s sake! Fifty dollars today wouldn’t equal a pound in 1960, when I began as a primary teacher. I used to take five or ten pounds to a race meeting. My bet would be ten shillings or a pound. That’s either twenty-five or fifty dollars at least in today’s money. But I was so ashamed of my small bet that I would never have approached a leading bookmaker with my miserable stake. And now I see owners or trainers betting what I was ashamed to bet as a young teacher who lived from pay cheque to pay cheque.
I’ve learned much about racing from the meetings I’ve attended here in Border Country. I’ve seen tough-looking men and women brushing away tears after their horses have won maiden races with a first prize of only five thousand dollars. I’ve seen part-time trainers or owner-trainers lovingly grooming and then leading back towards the car park some horse that has started thirty times for one win and a few placings. I’ve seen much more that I feel privileged to have seen, but I’ve seen hardly anything of what I would have expected to see if someone could have told me in the 1950s that I would one day live among the Borderers and would observe them from close at hand.
So, this section of my book is just another variation on the old theme of the grass’s being greener on the far side of the hill—or, is it? In 2012, the publisher Michael Heyward, whom I’ve known for thirty years, expressed an interest in visiting me here, near the border. He wanted not just to see how I was surviving here but to observe the district and some of the people who live here. Michael arrived here in the hot days of late January with his wife, Penny Hueston, and William and Anna, two of their adult children. I was pleased to show them Lake Ratzcastle, to take them to the top of Mount Arapiles, and to serve them each a drink in the tiny clubhouse of our local golf club, where I’m bar manager. Then I had a brainwave. Driving around the district, my guests and I had seemed mostly to be looking from the outside inwards. It was time to look at the district from the inside, so to speak.
Something for the Pain Page 17