Les Carlyon, poet laureate of the turf, makes last trip to Flemington

We won’t see the likes of Les Carlyon at Flemington again, nor read new words from him about its glorious green running straight that sometimes, as he once put it, seems ‘‘as long as eternity, a cruel place’’.

And so those who loved this brilliant, modest man who could give a dreary mid-week race meeting the gift of word-magic about horses and those who trained and rode them and lost their shirts to them, took Les Carlyon, newspaperman and poet laureate of the turf, one last time to Flemington to say goodbye.

Premiers, prime ministers, historians and the odd journalist were in attendance at Les Carlyon's funeral.Credit: Jason South

His casket sat high above the track, this place he called the racecourse of dreams, right above the winning post, and hundreds crowded around to hear last words from those who knew him best.

Andrew Rule – one of the fine journalists who Les, editor and mentor over decades, called one of ‘‘his boys’’, though some of them were girls – spoke of how Carlyon had always said the hour before dawn was always the best.

‘‘Never miss a sunrise, Andy,’’ he’d instructed Rule.

That was when the racing stables came alive, when the ordinary world slept – the time Carlyon spoke of as racing’s ‘‘closed society’’; the hour he once wrote brought ‘‘the thump of the bags of dirty straw and the tap of the farrier’s hammer, strappers swearing at horses, the blue heeler straining at the chain, trying to eat the new apprentice kid’’.

Amid the crowd at Leslie Allen Carlyon’s Flemington funeral was former prime minister John Howard, who awarded Carlyon the Prime Minister’s Prize for History in 2007 for his book The Great War, which followed his enormously successful Gallipoli.

And there was the Governor-General, Sir Peter Cosgrove, who invested Carlyon in 2014 as a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for eminent service to literature.

There was Brendan Nelson, director of the Australian War Memorial, and historian Geoffrey Blainey, who Carlyon believed wrote Australian history best, and former Victorian premiers Jeff Kennett and Ted Baillieu, and billionaire philanthropist Kerry Stokes.

Down the back, up behind the ranks of journalists and writers who idolised Carlyon and who had worked with him at the old Sun News Pictorial, The Age and the Herald and Weekly Times, were less identifiable characters – some wearing cloth caps and the occasional pork pie punters’ hat – who read Carlyon’s works, knowing them to be true of the world they inhabited.

Broadcaster Neil Mitchell speaks at Les Carlyon's funeralCredit: Jason South

Beyond, way across the great sweep of Flemington’s green, the city of Melbourne rose, its towers almost touching grey clouds.

Here was the city that made Les Carlyon, and the city that loved him best.

He came to Melbourne as a boy from an impoverished childhood around Elmore, north of Bendigo, where his grandfather trained trotters.

Les Carlyon Credit: The Age

Here Carlyon was captured by the craft of newspaper writing and editing; and here he met Denise, the woman who would become his wife and stay beside him for 55 years, becoming his researcher and muse and to whom Les would dedicate his last book, The Master, about the great trainer Bart Cummings, declaring : ‘‘I owe her more than words can say’’.

Les and Denise had three children, and there are seven grandchildren, all bearing the distinctive lean Cornish Carlyon genes.

At the funeral, words of admiration and love were spoken by race caller Brian Martin, journalist and 3AW radio broadcaster Neil Mitchell (another of Les’s boys from newspaper days, intent on meeting Carlyon’s admonition to be brief and to avoid mawkishness when delivering a eulogy), Australian War Memorial historian Ashley Ekins, and publisher, literary agent and friend Deb Callaghan.

They remembered a man who lived on strong black coffee and cigarettes and who lived for the stables at dawn and the words that seemed to flow so effortlessly.

‘‘Get out there; tell me what it smells like,’’ Mitchell remembered Carlyon instructing his cadet journalists.

This is what it smelt like at Flemington on Tuesday: like warming turf, fading roses. And love.