Teacher tells how she served up Rogan Josh to Bart Cummings

Bart Cummings was used to dealing with cashed up horse owners, but none quite like Wendy Green.

Teacher Wendy Green shows her Cup to boarders Jahdarl Rogers, 13, and Dylan James, 15, at St Joseph’s Nudgee College in Brisbane. Picture: Claudia Baxter

Bart Cummings was in Darwin to have dinner with the owner of Rogan Josh. He was accustomed to dealing with thoroughbred owners who had a few quid in their back pockets. He was less familiar with the sort of ute Wendy Green and her husband, Robert, were getting around in. He leant over the table and asked, “Do you own a boat?” She replied, “Bart, we’re ­between boats right now.”

Today is the 20th anniversary of a Melbourne Cup victory that dripped with the romance of The Race That Stops the Nation. The romance lost to internationalisation and foreign raiders. Green was the Darwin schoolteacher, flat broke and clueless about racing, who just happened to have a ripper in her paddock. Cummings was the legendary trainer who thought she was off her rocker for targeting the Melbourne Cup. Rogan Josh had won a few races at woop-woop and Pinjarra and various other places a long, long way from Flemington, but Cummings saw something he liked. Which brought him to Darwin for dinner.

“No one spoke too often to Bart,” Green said. “Bart was God. But he came to Darwin in August and sent the message out. Would we take him out for a bite to eat? At that stage we owned an old ute. We didn’t want to be seen by him in that. One of the sons-in-law had a flash little number, so we swapped the ute for the night. When I told Bart we were between boats, I think he realised he wasn’t dealing with his regular clientele. He ­became a very good friend. We bought a nice Holden car after that but it still wasn’t up to Bart’s standards. He’d always say to us, ‘Still got the rent-a-dent?’ ”

Green took three days to drive the rent-a-dent from Darwin to Flemington for the Cup. She took a month to get home. She stopped at just about every middle-of-­nowhere town to share the Cup with anyone who wanted to see it, touch it, drink from it. She saw the Cup, circa 1999, as a symbol of Australia, of opportunity, of what was possible when you put yourself on any sort of starting line. Rough-as-guts miners at Coober Pedy saw the trophy and cried. “That trophy was a statement about who we were as Australians and how we talked about ourselves as Australians.”

Rogan Josh passes the post.

She called the month-long trip home “the longest pub crawl ever”. She could spin a thousand yarns. Here’s one: An indigenous child at Mataranka was christened by something stronger than holy water when the celebrations were in full swing. The first suggestion from the locals was to wet the baby’s head with VB from the Cup. Green replied, sacrilege! “But I’ve got some Moet in the car,” she says. “Let’s use that!” A passing-through coach driver agreed to do the honours. Unsure what to say, he called on the highest of powers in the land, past and present. In the name of Kerry Packer! … in the name of The Man from Snowy River! … In the name of The Drover’s Boy! … In the name of Gough Whitlam! … in the name of the Melbourne Cup, I christen thee, Rogan Josh!

Rogan Josh was the 11th of the late Cummings’s 12 Cup triumphs. Green became friends with his grandson, James, an accomplished trainer chasing his first Cup at Flemington on Tuesday. Still a teacher at Gympie and Nudgee in Queensland, Green was this week showing the Cup to students at St Joseph’s Nudgee College. She said the dinner with Cummings at Darwin’s Trailer Boat Club was when she realised Rogan Josh was more than a contender to win the most famous race in the land.

A triumphant Bart Cummings with the gelding in 1999.

“Everyone knew Bart Cummings was coming to town,” Green said. “We were old Darwinites by then, so all the old reprobates who loved racing, they all turned up and started peering through the window. Bart said, ‘I certainly have a following up here.’ And I said to him, ‘It’s either you or me, Bart.’ He said, ‘Wendy Green, I think I’ve got the toast of this year’s Melbourne Cup in my stable.’ I said to him, ‘Are you telling me we’ve got a chance?’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you something, Wendy Green. In this life, you’ve always got a chance.’”