by Andrew Rule
But after about two years, it had worked. Lucky sailed with us, dined with us at pavement cafes, attended our friends’ parties, rode in the car while draped like a stole around one of our necks, slept on the end of our bed and spent his days on a cushion beside my home-office desk. He became one of the gang.
He responded by introducing us (through his looks, jokes, snorts and joyful affection) to the real him, and to depths of understanding with an animal we’d never experienced. Lucky stopped running away, accepted the leash and became—as a mate noted—’the happiest dog in the world’.
Then the three of us took off on a live-aboard sailing adventure that lasted almost three years, and the relationship became even closer. Always at our side, Lucky crept through spooky rainforests, explored deserted islands, clung stoically to his sofa during rough seas and hopped onto the chart table to oversee planning for each new leg of the journey. When we came home, I missed the sea and felt gloomy for months. But Lucky didn’t care, because he was with us.
And then, about the start of last year, he began to fall behind on walks. Sometimes, if touched around the neck or shoulders, he’d flinch and growl. We thought it was arthritis, but an MRI scan revealed a large, inoperable tumour plaited through his upper spine. He was dying.
While he slept, dosed up with painkillers, Leisa and I wept and snivelled—victims, we began to realise, of our own curiosity about the extent of love and understanding possible between people and dogs. Of course it was Lucky, being impossible not to love, who dictated the outcome. And it was Lucky, with one of those grimly eloquent looks often recalled by dog lovers, who told us when it was time for him to go.
He couldn’t stand by then, yet each morning when I went to my office he would give one of his famous snorts, summoning me to carry him to his spot beside my desk. On his last morning we carried him instead to the backyard, and lay with him on a quilt under the trees, waiting for the vet to come with his bright green injection.
Lucky’s eyes closed calmly after the shot. ‘He’s gone,’ said the vet. And he was. Completely gone.
Leaving only space.
Kid on a Crock
Andrew Rule
Melbourne Cup day 1948. A one-horse town called Birchip drowses in the Mallee heat. It’s a day’s journey by train and a world away from morning suits and manicured lawns at Flemington. George Neville, battler, is leaning on the bar at the Commercial Hotel. Like most of Australia, he and his mates are listening to the races on ‘the wireless’.
George is a bow-legged bush jockey who once went around in a Caulfield Cup in the 1920s before coming home to Birchip. Feeds a couple of slow gallopers and thirteen kids the best he can.
Cut to Flemington. The track looks magnificent but beneath the turf it is soggy after days of rain. An obscure jumper called Finentigue has pinched the Cup Hurdle at 100–1. An omen, maybe, that it’s a day for outsiders.
In the Cup, the interest is in the topweight, Howe, at 7–4 the hottest favourite since Phar Lap in 1930. The champion Harold Badger is on him, and they pulled a crowd of 101 000.
The odds say Howe has the Cup in the bag, but as the caller ticks off the rest of the field, back in Birchip George Neville automatically listens. All the way through the card to number 25, an 80–1 shot.
‘Rimfire, R Neville, seven stone two,’ the caller says.
George nearly drops his beer. ‘R Neville’ is his son, Ray—a tiny fifteen year old who’s had nine race rides since getting his licence two months earlier.
George bolts for home. He calls in at the school, yelling to several of his offspring in the playground that their brother is riding in the Cup. The boldest of the Nevilles immediately wags school, heading to a cafe where there’s a radio.
At home, George blurts the news. His wife is stunned. Why would anyone put a raw kid on a Melbourne Cup horse? She grabs her purse.
Flashback to the previous year. Little Ray is working on farms—driving tractors, trapping rabbits, plucking wool from dead sheep—but dreams of being a jockey. He gets his chance when an old local horseman recommends him to a respected Mordialloc trainer, Lou Robertson.
Ray and his suitcase catch the train to the city. His mother doesn’t want him to go, but there are too many mouths to feed at home. He starts riding work as soon as he gets to Robertson’s stables but doesn’t get his race permit until the following season, just two months before the Cup carnival.
By that time Robertson has polished the boy’s style. His first race ride is in a field of forty, up the straight six at Flemington. Two hours later, he wins the last race of the day on a stayer called Lincoln.
Cut to Cup eve. Rimfire, a handsome 6-year-old chestnut gelding with legs as patchy as his form, is still sore after finishing behind Howe in the Hotham Handicap. Rimfire is well named and well bred, grandson of the legendary Carbine, but so unsound that the people who leased him as a young horse have declined to pay the asking price of £2000 and sent him home to his breeder.
A leading lightweight jockey, WA Smith, has the Cup ride, but tells Rimfire’s trainer, Stan Boydon, he’d rather ride Sun Blast because it is not so likely to break down.
With the clock ticking, Rimfire’s connections need another lightweight. Why pick Neville? One story is that a stablehand suggests the boy from Birchip because of his win on Lincoln.
Rimfire’s trainer books the ride with the boy’s master. But the shrewd Robertson doesn’t tell Neville until the next morning, making sure he sleeps soundly and has no time to be nervous.
Cup morning. Neville is up before dawn to ride work as usual. As he comes off the track, Robertson breaks the news.
‘Hurry up and clean your gear,’ he says. ‘You’re on Rimfire in the Cup.’ As soon as the trainer is out of earshot, the stable foreman scoffs at Neville, ‘If that bastard Rimfire wins, I’ll walk from here to Sydney—barefoot.’
Public and the bookies agree. Rimfire is 80–1 and friendless. He has won only five races in four years, only once as favourite.
In the rooms, older jockeys laugh when the kid puts on Rimfire’s colours. The jacket is so big the sleeves have to be rolled up and pinned; the tail reaches his knees before he tucks it into his breeches.
Neville borrows a lead bag from Smith, the rider who has turned down the Rimfire ride. Smith says, ‘He’ll be a good ride for you.’ The kid asks innocently, ‘Has he got a chance?’, and Smith laughs.
‘No, but he’ll give you good experience.’ He’s right.
In the mounting yard, Rimfire looks good—for a crock that has limped off the track on three legs at his most recent win, months earlier, and pulled up sore after the Hotham Handicap three days earlier. His trainer has been putting cold compresses on the horse’s legs until late the night before, hoping the authorities will let the horse run.
The sight of the baby-faced boy perched on Rimfire doesn’t inspire confidence. The field includes some of Australia’s best horses and some of the world’s best jockeys: Williamson and Badger, Cook and Hutchinson, Thompson and Moore. From barrier 23, the kid eases the flashy chestnut crock across well behind the leaders, to be almost midfield passing the post the first time. Rimfire gradually gains ground, the kid sitting quietly as a bolter hares along in front. At the turn, as the leaders tire, Rimfire moves up to seventh place. Photographers snap the kid still sitting tight.
Then it happens. Rimfire forgets he is a cripple looking for a place to break down, and sweeps to the front … just as the favourite, Howe, falters in his run with an injured ligament.
If it were a film, this is the moment when the audience starts cheering the underdog. In the real world, punters aren’t so generous when longshots flog favourites.
Rimfire hits the front as Howe flounders. But the script calls for a tight finish. The Sydney Cup winner Dark Marne, ridden by the ice-cold Sydney jockey Jack Thompson, sets out after Rimfire. Thompson pulls the whip and lifts his horse closer with every stride. His horse is on the rails, the kid’s is on the ropes. They h
it the line locked together … the favourite and the joker in the pack.
Afterwards, the boy tells reporters: ‘I was so excited halfway down the straight at the thought of winning the Melbourne Cup that I hardly realised Dark Marne was so close.’
The taciturn Thompson thinks he’s won. So certain he wheels his horse around first and trots back in front, tells waiting reporters he’s got the money. One of the other senior riders calls to Neville: ‘Do you reckon you got there, son?’
‘Well, I hope I did,’ the boy replies doubtfully. A sea of punters hope he’s wrong. He rides back to scale in front of a hushed crowd.
For the first time in Cup history, the judge calls for a photograph from the new finish camera: it shows Rimfire by a nostril.
Angry punters boo. Thompson, the hard man who is to ride for another thirty-five years, swears to the day he dies that the camera was faulty, and that Dark Marne won.
Meanwhile, in Birchip, Neville’s parents run to the hotel in time for the race. His mother has ‘a quid’ each way with the SP bookmaker in the bar.
One of the Neville brothers sneaks back to school after the race and is caught by the teacher, who produces a strap. Luckily, he asks what won the Cup. When the boy says, ‘Me brother did, sir,’ the teacher lets him off—and declares a half-holiday for the school. It’s a big day in Birchip.
Late that afternoon, the kid goes back to Mordialloc in the horse float, clutching ‘twenty-five quid’ Rimfire’s owner has given him. He gets an extra-large serve of steak and eggs to celebrate, and is allowed to go to Wirth’s Circus to be presented with a trophy whip.
Next day is his sixteenth birthday. He’s up at 4 a.m. to ride work and muck out stables. The fairy story’s over. Fade to black …
The boy from Birchip turned sixty-four just before Bart Cummings won his tenth Cup, with Saintly in 1996. Exactly forty-eight years after he piloted Rimfire into Melbourne Cup folklore, it’s hard to tell whether grandfather Neville is tired of recalling his brush with the big time, or just modest. Maybe both.
It’s true that the chapter of Ray Neville’s life that reads like a film script closed on that golden afternoon in 1948. But, in his own way, he has lived happily ever after.
He didn’t go on to a glorious career in the saddle. But he didn’t vanish without riding another winner, either, contrary to myth.
The truth is somewhere in between. Like many apprentices, Neville got heavy. He won a few more times, but within eighteen months of the Cup couldn’t make the tiny weights he needed to ride in claiming races.
Too big to be an apprentice jockey, he became a small apprentice carpenter. At first, he worked in Melbourne but he soon went back to the bush. And stayed there. But he didn’t stay out of the saddle.
As a schoolboy, he had loved riding over jumps at local shows. He’d listened to the stories of the old ‘jumping men’ his father knew. It wasn’t long before the only carpenter ever to win a Melbourne Cup dusted off his childhood ambitions and dreamed of adding the Grand National steeplechase to his record.
He’d been ‘riding work’ for trainers around Birchip, and taking the occasional flat ride at country meetings. One day an old jumps trainer, Reuben Fisher, asked him if he wanted to ride in a hurdle race.
‘Yeah,’ Neville replied.
‘Ever done it before?’
‘No,’ said Neville.
‘Well, you’re the right man for the job,’ said the old timer drily. ‘Because the horse has never been over jumps either.’ The horse ran second. Neville was hooked.
For nearly twenty years he built houses Monday to Friday, schooling jumpers before work. Saturdays he rode in races for ‘three quid’ a losing ride, more for the occasional winner.
It helped feed the kids. He had eight.
His biggest win was the Commonwealth Steeplechase. He didn’t win a National. The closest he came in Warrnambool’s famous Grand Annual was fourth. But he won plenty of other races, including a few for the premier, Sir Henry Bolte.
He was stable jockey for a Mallee trainer, Reg Fisher. When Fisher moved from Rainbow to Stawell in 1966, the Nevilles went with him—and stayed.
Neville’s second racing career ended in a Ballarat steeplechase in 1969, when his horse fell and crushed him.
‘I woke up next morning in St John’s Hospital with one arm in plaster and one leg in plaster and said, “That’s it. I’ve given it away.” I came right six months later, but I couldn’t go back on my word.’ As soon as he was fit enough, he started riding work again. He kept it up until he turned sixty. After that he still got up at dawn to help his eldest son, Geoff, a former rodeo rider, who broke in young horses for other trainers.
Jumping jockeys are a tough breed. Like a lot of the crosscountry fraternity, Neville looks a bit like an old fighter because he was one. A nugget of a man, with square hands, a strong jaw, a gruff manner and the sort of neatly parted hair that used to be seen in Brylcreem ads.
A blue singlet shows up beneath a well-filled check shirt. He’d tip the scales at nearly double the featherweight he was in 1948.
There are two big photographs on the mantelpiece. One, a striking picture of Rimfire with the teenage Neville in the saddle. The other, in an oval frame, of the Nevilles’ wedding in 1955. June Neville was a Mallee bride, born and bred at Beulah.
‘Isn’t everybody sick of this story?’ Neville grumbles.
But he doesn’t protest as June proudly produces each piece of Melbourne Cup memorabilia. Here’s a copy of the Cup trophy, presented by the GMH car company. The plating is tarnished. ‘It’s gone a bit black from the gas fire,’ June says apologetically.
And there’s the gold-mounted whip presented by Wirth’s Circus to the winning jockey. It lives on the mantelpiece next to the Rimfire photograph.
Then June produces a miniature set of Rimfire’s colours—white, light blue sleeves and red cap—that she ran up herself on the sewing machine. The grandkids love them, she says, eyes shining.
Finally, she produces a recent snapshot of her husband in a jacket and tie, and tells the story that goes with it.
The previous year, the Birchip Shire went out of existence because it was amalgamated with others into the Buloke Shire. It decided to mark the occasion by honouring Birchip’s most famous sons.
One was the country singer Dusty Rankin, who made his first record in 1948. The other was Ray.
‘Yeah,’ he cut in. ‘The old bloke that rang said they usually wait until you die, but this time they decided to do it while we were still alive.’
So he and June put on their Sunday best and drove up to Birchip for the function.
After the speeches Ray was asked to pull back a tiny curtain. Behind it was a metal plaque of a jockey boy on a racehorse.
Ray Neville died in 2008.
Animal Acts
John Silvester
The private schoolboy was beginning to doubt the wisdom of choosing former standover man Mark ‘Chopper’ Read as the subject of a short documentary that was part of his senior-year assessment.
As he sat on the couch next to Read, ready to film an interview, Chopper’s dog, Kayser (named after his defence lawyer, Boris Kayser), placed his fearsome snout uncomfortably close to the young man’s lap.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Read. ‘Haven’t you ever sat with someone with no ears, with a dog about 2 inches from your knackers?’
It was a rhetorical question. While both Read and Kayser looked ferocious, their days of crime were behind them.
Read wasn’t one to bear a grudge. He once named a greyhound ‘The Buggster’ after Tasmania’s then Director of Public Prosecutions, Damian Bugg QC, who had sent the self-confessed killer to jail for an indefinite sentence. The greyhound was slower than Australia Post but the barrister was fast-tracked to become Commonwealth DPP and Chancellor of the University of Tasmania.
When finally released, Read moved to a Tasmanian farm with two terriers, Reggie and Ronnie, named after London’s criminal Kr
ay brothers. Sadly, the terriers had the same bloodthirsty streak as their namesakes and had to be put down for killing chickens.
Not that Read was always a committed animal lover. He once admitted to killing an enemy’s small dog, barbecuing it with garlic salt and making the rival eat his former pet accompanied only with American mustard.
Crooks are often referred to as animals (dogs, jackals, hyenas, rats, maggots and stool pigeons), which is wildly unfair to the non-human community. In fact, many colourful characters have an affinity for pets—often based on companionship but sometimes for practical purposes.
Prolific drug dealer and killer Dennis Allen kept attack geese at his Richmond house, believing they were more effective than guard dogs. As he dealt in cash, had more jewellery than Elizabeth Taylor and was a prodigious police informer, the watchful geese were a wise investment.
One of Allen’s relatives also had an interest in birds, of the canary variety, until her favourite went missing during a police raid. She concluded that a detective (who himself had a wildlife nickname) had freed the feathered pet in an act of petulance. That is, until she opened the freezer to find the bird wedged between the fish fingers and the raspberry ripple, extremely dead.
Master armed robber and alleged gangland killer Russell Cox didn’t stay on the run for eleven years after escaping from Sydney’s maximum-security Katingal jail division by taking risks. He was a master of disguise, with a number of aliases, including ‘Mr Walker’ from the Phantom comics. Even his dog, Devil, had a fake name, answering to Butch. ‘Mr Walker’ and ‘Butch’ went for early-morning runs because Cox liked to be out of the house by sunrise, knowing that police preferred to conduct raids at dawn.
Hitman and former poodle breeder James Frederick Bazley had great affection for dogs but little time for victims. Bazley was paid $20 000 to murder drug couriers Isabel and Douglas Wilson, whose bodies were found buried in Rye in May 1979. The Wilsons were killed on the orders of the Mr Asia drug syndicate boss, Terrance John Clark, after corrupt police confirmed the couple were talking to Queensland detectives.