Its the day in November that stops a nation
G'day all.
Well I am not talking about the presidential elections in the States, if you were a gambling man I'm sure you'll know what I am talking about. Its the Melbourne Cup, a horse race, yes a horse race so popular here in Victoria and around Australia, that we have a bank holiday to celebrate it.and as its always on a Tuesday, we don't bother to work on the Monday so to have a long, long weekend.
We really are the sporting capital of Australia and one of those sports we enjoy is horse raceing which culminates today, always the second Tuesday of November for the Melbourne cup. There are acounts of this meet as early as 1810 with reports made in the Sydney newspapers of the meet in Melbourne taking place but the first actual cup race was held in 1861 and won by a horse named Archer and in 1877 it was held for the first time as a public holiday with an estimated crowd of over 7,000 inside the racetrack and a further 150,000 sitting on hillsides outside the venue of Flemington, where every race meeting has been held. There are traditions that have grown from that day and I imagine from that first public holiday the tradition of the picnic has evolved, the crowd always arrive at the track with a picnic lunch and this picnic is always consumed outside of the racecourse. As you arrive and park your vehicle you jump from the car and from the boot remove your table and folding chairs and out come the picnic and heaps of wine and the feast begins, making a few too drunk to get into the racecourse and many that arrive there only with the intentions of a picnic anyway.
"Nowhere in the world have I encounted a festival of people that has such a magnificent appeal to the whole nation. The cup astonishes me" these words were writen by Mark Twain after visiting Melbourne in 1895.
Up until 2003 there had only been two horses that had won the cup more than once, in the 1890's a horse named Carbine won twice and in 1932 and 1934 a horse named Peter Pan. In 2003 we saw a small horse named Makybe Diva win this race and then in 2004 and 2005 she did it again and astounded everyone and is now another legend of this event. The horse that everyone knows the name of and every child can relate too through the history of this country is a horse named Phar Lap, whose story is told to all that arrive here and is a legend to the Australian people. Phar lap was born in New Zealand and trained and stabled in Australia, he won 37 out of his 51 starts, including the Melbourne Cup in 1930 and was a love affair with a nation who at that time, in the early thirties, with so much hard ship and poverty needed something to cling too. In 1932 Phar Lap was sent to Mexico for the richest race in the world at that time, the Agua Caliente, he won this race and sixteen days later was found dead in San Francisco, believed to be from a poison overdose. His body was returned to Melbourne and now is exhibited in the Victorian Museum. We have a saying here "you have a heart as big as Phar Laps", a saying which comes from the fact that when they removed the heart of this horse, to preserve him for show, they found it weighed 6.2 Kilo., where a normal heart from a horse of the same weight would normally weigh 3.2 Kilo.
The race is a culmination of a day that is so special here in this hot country, a day where the Bruces arrive dressed in a suit and a shirt and tie, rather than the singlets, shorts and thongs. The Shielas in frocks and hats, rather than track pants and tee shirt.
Robert, Linda and boys.