By Les Carlyon
Les Carlyon, journalist and a former editor of The Age, was a devotee of horsemanship. The Melbourne Cup fascinated him. We revisit his passion with this article from the archives, first published in The Age on November 3, 1973.
'Nowhere in my travels have I encountered a festival of the people that has such magnetic appeal to the whole nation. The Cup astonishes me.' - Mark Twain.
The Cup still astonishes.
A British journalist (and it pains me to mention that he writes golf) was sufficiently astonished last year to write: `To describe the Melbourne Cup as a horse race is rather like referring to the second world war as an international incident.'
A time when hats and binoculars were an essential part of a male racegoer's gear, 1959 Melbourne Cup.Credit: The Age Archives
The Cup still astonishes me. Unlike ordinary events - grand finals, Victorian Opens and other parochial diversions - the mystique which shrouds the Cup is never fathomable.
There is a logic which pleads with you every November. Don't go to the Cup, it says.
Think of the traffic. You'll hear the first two races on the car radio, deep in the claustrophobia of a traffic tangle, gulping gusts of exhaust gas, thinking this could be the year the car park overflows and you are remorselessly waved on to Rockbank or Colac or somewhere else west.
Think, for instance, of the pushing and bustling and elbowing and shoving on the course. If you like betting, the Cup Day crowd is about as helpful as last year's form guide. Bankruptcies and mortgagees' auctions have been postponed, families have actually eaten, simply because men in the terrible grip of "the punt" have been unable to get to the ring on Cup Day.
Huge crowds on the lawns and in the grandstands for the 1973 Melbourne Cup.Credit: The Age Archives
And if the punt hasn't got you, if you just like looking at horses, you still have to buffet your way to the birdcage. Then, just as likely, you'll see someone fix his gaze on a ram-headed, roach-backed mare and announce: "Doesn't HE look marvellous". It's the shiny coat that does it.
Think, too, of that punter's lament, the divisions of the Railway Highweight, a dash down the straight six every Cup Day which is invariably won, as if by decree, by some unknown beast at odds of not less than 20/1. It's as though bookmakers are allowed one wish a year, and the wish is called the Railway Highweight.
I once worked with a fellow who only disclosed his father was a jockey after dad had ridden a 100/1 winner on Cup Day. Poor dad hadn't won in the city for more than two decades and was getting tired of the galvanised iron and rough benches of country jockeys' rooms. You're right: he won the Railway Highweight. He hasn't won in town since.
And think too, of the social bit, the quaint rituals around the Rolls-Royces and Mercedes.
Yet, somehow, again inexplicably, it is hard to scoff at this social dross on Cup Day.
Incredibly, you tolerate these affectations, these leftovers from Victorian England and colonial Australia. They seem to belong to Cup Day. And you tolerate the traffic, and the crowds - and even the Railway Highweight.
English model Jean Shrimpton at Flemington races on Melbourne Cup day, 1965.Credit: The Age Archives
So much for logic.
It is also part of the mystique that no matter how much you were pushed and trampled, each Cup etches some picture on your brain, and it flashes back over the years, offering you the opportunity to become that marvellous creature, a Racing Bore.
There was Macdougall throwing up great divots as he surged down the outside in 1959 ... Hi Jinx jogging back to scale in silence in 1960 as 100,000 people were entranced in the same private reverie: what had happened to Tulloch ... Light Fingers and Ziema, the classic bobbing finish of 1968 ... Magnifique, finely boned and regal, the way a race mare should look beaten last year by Piping Lane, a nondescript bay, a bolter from Tasmania.
But wait. The story of Piping Lane, truly a romantic tale of the turf, lifts one of the shrouds from the Cup mystique. For the Cup is a romantic phenomenon; that is one of the things which distinguishes it from big races overseas.
Ray Trinder, a 69-year-old Tasmanian amateur rider, bought Piping Lane early last year. His aims were modest enough: he wanted to win the Melbourne Cup. His son, Michael, also an amateur rider, immediately took the new purchase for a gallop and was horrified to find he had to slap the horse to keep him going. "He couldn't win at the Black Stump," Michael announced to the family.
But the Trinders nursed and nurtured the gelding on their farm, sent him over for the Cup ... and won it. A few hours after the race a jockey was driving home past the course when he noticed an elderly couple trying to hail a taxi. They were carrying a large box. The jockey recognised the Trinders and gave them - and the Melbourne Cup - a lift into town.
Now the difference is that big races overseas, particularly the English Derby, are invariably won by the aristocratic and industrial elite: the Englehards, the Aga Khans, the Marcel Boussacs. The flabby industrialist struggling to keep pace with the horse he is leading in is almost a pictorial cliche.
But our Cup is often enough not won by these sorts of horses and these sorts of people for it too becomes steeped in the romantic, the triumph of the underdog, the triumph, perhaps, of guts over class.
The field passes the post the first time in the 2006 Emirates Melbourne Cup.Credit: John Donegan
The stories are part of our folklore ... the sire and dam of Comic Court (the 1950 winner) were bought for a paltry $260 ... a trainer ruined by the Depression keeps one favorite mare, skimps to send her to a stallion and the result is Rivette, winner in 1939 ...
Pat Glennon flukes the ride on Comic Court when, in his words, he didn't have a zac (he was never broke again).
And there is Flemington itself. That is perhaps another tiny shroud lifted from the mystique. Flemington is so agreeably timeless when compared with the modern courses like Sandown or the American tracks. The urban world around changes: Flemington doesn't. Flemington is the elms in the betting rings, the great old poplars near the Showgrounds, the straight six.
A colleague and I were once driving past those poplars, "Marvellous place," he said, "make a great university." The relationship is still recovering from this rupture.
It would be outrageous to despoil Flemington with a university, or an oil refinery, or - God help us all - a golf course, or anything.
Even on a wintry morning, with the wind searing your nostrils and fingers, the mud squelching underfoot, anonymous horses snorting white balloons into the drizzle, Flemington has a fascination, a uniqueness.
Here are the timeless cameos that are racing, and they either touch you or repel you.
Here are the lived-in faces of racing men, for racing is tough and hard and dangerous. Owners may occasionally strut: trainers and their boys just sweat and fuss ... and maybe grin a little when they win.
Here are two youngsters learning to gallop the filly, her coat still long from the paddock she left six weeks ago, plays with the bit, unsure of where to put her head.
Here is a yearling colt, still pony-sized, shivering at the thought of it all, being lunged and doing just about everything wrong. His owner paid $6000 for him; if only he could see him now. You need to be a romantic to think this little chap will ever race, let alone win a Cup. But he might.
Flemington echoes hoof thuds and the smack of the whip, the snorts of hard-held horses, the practised swearing of a boy screwing his wrists against a puller. It is redolent of sweat and tack and the Newmarket saleyards.
And it is where they run the Cup. The Cup that holds up Parliament and turns millions to transistors. The Cup that is important enough to warrant a public holiday; the one true folk festival in a land so desperate for folk festivals it contrives expensive false alarms like Moomba.
The Cup that, for an outlay of half a dollar, allows you to buy a great prancing horse for three minutes and twenty seconds.
A race that touches and moves a nation ... and each year is indeed astonishing and never quite explicable.
Dawn track work at Flemington.Credit: Vince Caligiuri