Almanac Horseracing – Confessions of a teenage racegoer of the 1970s Part III: Melbourne Cup mayhem

 

Continuing the series of accounts of the misadventures of ‘Ton’ Currie and the Yobboes: this time, of their various pilgrimages to Melbourne…

 

Giddy in Gundagai

Apart from the occasional South Seas cruise and awards nights, the Yobboes’ primary corporate activity continued to be race-going, and the highlight of that was the annual trip to the Melbourne Cup.

This pilgrimage had begun towards the end of the 1970s, when Dobber Des and Ton Currie had been among the first to go south in late October one spring, and they continued to back up for the next few years. Both by nature competitive types, their keeping of tallies of their attendances at the Cup soon transformed from friendly rivalry into hostile one-upmanship. It got to the stage where each hoped the other would break a leg or slip a disc just before the Cup, so they could establish a lead over him. Going into the 1984 Cup, they were level on five tours each. The Dobber was travelling south on the overnight train and would arrive on Derby Day morning, but Ton was planning to drive down in  ‘Bessie’ (his equivalent of Don Quixote’s horse Rocinante) on Cup Eve, expecting to arrive early afternoon. Those of us already gathered in Melbourne attended the Parade of Champions and then went on a pub crawl. Come 4 pm, there was still no sign of Ton, and we were getting a little concerned. We returned to our accommodation at ‘Lygon Lodge’, Carlton, to prepare to go out for dinner. At about 5 pm the phone rang. I picked up the receiver and the receptionist said, ‘I have a reverse-charge long-distance call on hold from a Mr Ton Currie. Are you willing to take it? To myself I said, ‘Gee, he’s got a bloody hide expecting us to foot his phone bill,’ but to reception I replied, ‘Yes, sure.’

A few seconds later, a voice that sounded like its owner was at the bottom of a well, spoke.

‘Hello? Who’s that?’ it demanded.

‘Peakie,’ I responded. ‘Where the hell are you, Ton?’

‘Gundagai.’

‘Gundagai!’

‘Yeah. Bessie  has got a cracked head. She’s in the repair shop now. “Have you got that engine back in yet mate?”’ Ton cried, evidently to his mechanic presumably working on the other side of the road from the phone box. There was an unitelligible response. ‘No, won’t be ready until the morning, the bloke reckons,’ Ton informed me. ‘I’ll have to get a room in the pub for the night. Don’t you blokes start for the races tomorrow without me!’ he demanded as he rang off.

We waited for Ton’s arrival next morning, as he had asked, to the extent that we missed the running of the Cup Day Hurdle, much to the chagrin of Dobber Des and Velarkis, who prided themselves on picking and backing the winner of it each year.

‘Bugger this for a joke,’ cried the Dobber, as he watched his unsupported selection win the hurdle on the television. ‘If we wait for that sea-anchor Currie any longer, we’ll miss the second race as well. Come on. He knows where to find us on course,’ meaning the bar at the western end of the Paddock betting ring.

We kept a weather-eye open for Ton, but he never fronted; in fact, we did not see or hear from him all week. The mystery was not solved until he turned up at the Warwick Farm races two Saturdays later.

‘What happened to you and Melbourne?’ Pretty Boy asked him.

Ton pulled a pained face. ‘The mechanic didn’t finish with Bessie until after lunchtime on Cup Day,’ he explained. ‘Even if I’d driven at a hundred clicks all the way I would have missed the Cup,’ he sighed. ‘And besides, that bloody mechanic charged like a Queen’s counsel, so I had no “couta” left for betting or tucker in Melbourne. So, I declared myself a late scratching and drove back to Sydney’. He turned to Dobber Des and wagged a finger at him. ‘But it stills count as a half,’ he asserted.

‘What counts as half of what?’ the Dobber responded.

‘Half a trip to Melbourne for the Cup,’ Ton informed him. ‘So, you’re only half a trip in front of me.’

‘Wake up to yourself!’ Des advised him. ‘And where do you get a half from? It would be a quarter of a Melbourne Cup, at best.’

‘Eh?’

‘You got halfway down, then pulled the pin. What about the return trip after the Cup?’

And so, for the next hour they argued the point, like an endless (and boring) rally between two baseliners at a French Open. In fact, their argument over their tallies of Melbourne Cups witnessed continued to flare up periodically throughout the next thirty years.

 

Glenrowan and hookey

In the late 1970s, the terrestrial route from Sydney to Melbourne for the Cup was the Hume Highway, which then was mostly a single-lane carriageway, relieved by an overtaking section every ten minutes or so. The Yobboes would most often leave Sydney at about 3 am on Derby Day morning. Given the occasional pause at a roadhouse for petrol and a pie and a coffee, the trip was nine hours or more in duration. Our vehicles were never in the high-performance class, and for most of the time on the road we had enormous semi-trailers sitting a few metres off our ‘Albert Jackas’, pushing us to accelerate to speeds neither the cars nor their drivers were comfortable with. It was quite harrowing, and it was an enormous relief when the sun finally rose, and the trucks began to thin in number. So, by the time we reached Glenrowan, famously the scene of the Kelly Gang’s last stand, we all felt in need of a more protracted stop-over, and maybe a beer or two.

Across the road from the towering ‘Big Ned Kelly’ tourist attraction was the Glenrowan Hotel. After giving our regards to Ned, we would quickly make for the pub, and the scene that greeted us inside was always the same. Along the length of the bar there would be row of blokes in cow cockie hats, sitting on stools, sipping Carlton Draught from five-ounce beer glasses. Next to the glasses would be a small pile of change for their next drinks, which most of them took in the same glass. The drinkers never left their stools except to visit the toilet. They must all have owned properties that virtually ran themselves, or else had good help, for we would call in to the pub on the way home from Melbourne a week later and the same line of cow cockies would still be in situ. Or so it seemed to us.

There were no televisions, pin-ball machines, or pool tables in the pub, and in fact the only diversion on offer was what we labelled a hookey game. This consisted of a board, about the size and shape of a dart board, onto which were mounted pegs in concentric rings, under each of which had been painted a score ranging from ten to fifty. From the peg at ‘six o’clock’ hung three rubber rings, each about the size of a bangle. The game of course is a first cousin of darts, the principal difference being that darts are lot easier to keep on the board.

Ton Currie’s eyes lit up the first time they set upon this bagatelle, for he considered himself a very gifted natural sportsman, with hand-eye coordination akin to Bradman, and it should be conceded he was quite a fair hand at tennis. He was however a newcomer to hookey. Nevertheless, he at once grabbed the rubber rings and began lobbing them at the score board, with impressive results.

‘This is like shooting fish in a barrel,’ Ton said, as another ring took residence on the ‘50’ points peg.

‘Easy enough when there’s no money at stake,’ Pretty Boy observed, ‘especially when you’re virtually standing on top of the target.’

Ton turned slightly red but made no reply. He took several steps backwards, took aim, then quickly landed all three rings on the top score.

‘Come on then, Pretty,’ he said, retrieving the rings and offering them to his interlocutor. His sporting blood was up.

And so began a ritual that was observed whenever members of the Yobboes visited the Glenrowan Hotel. The defeats of adversaries at hookey became symbols of status almost as significant as the tallies of Melbourne Cups attended, and even success at the track. I would like to be able to record that Ton had the mastery in most of his matches, including that first one versus Pretty Boy, but unfortunately, he was unable to resummon that facility he had shown in those first, carefree, rookie lobs at the board, and in fact most years he also found himself on the losing side of bitter ‘double or nothing’ contests on the return leg to Sydney, when he was invariably staking himself on credit.

 

No Easter egg for Ton

In the mid-eighties Ton Currie, Pretty Boy, Tow-ball Head and I went to Melbourne for the Easter races at Caulfield. Why we should have done this, when the autumn carnival was in full swing at Randwick, I cannot recall. Things did not go well for Ton from the start. He figured this was because he forgot during the road-trip south it was Good Friday and had, in all innocence, ravenously scoffed down a chunky-beef pie during a petrol-station stop. God hated him enough as it was, he pointed out, when he realised what he had done, without he (Ton) egging him (God) on. Then he had decided while relaxing in the passenger seat after a driving stint to don a straw boater he had purchased at an Elton John concert some months before. Unfortunately, the hat was rather the worse for wear by this time. This, in concert with the fact he was airing a pair of rank-smelling joggers tied on the external rear-view mirror, while his left leg was resting on the open window, and he had removed his uncomfortable dental plate, failed it seemed to make a good impression on a carload of pretty young girls that had drawn level with our old bomb on the inside lane, and looked over at us coquettishly.

Ton gave the females a wink and a gap-toothed smile like Terry-Thomas from under his battered boater, which he raised in courtesy, but they sped off. When with a ‘Dang!’ he suddenly realised he had not presented himself to his best advantage, he removed the boater, flattened his hair, put his dental plate back in and urged me (driving) to catch up with the girls, but they were long gone. ‘Dis dang!’ he exclaimed, frustrated I guess like a good thing that has been denied a clear run in the straight.

When we reached Melbourne, we booked at Ton’s suggestion into a motel on the other side of town to Caulfield racecourse—nearer in fact to Flemington. I think he had his courses mixed up, but he would not admit it. On the Saturday we were thus compelled to drive through the Melbourne CBD to reach the course. None of us had driven in Melbourne before and did not know that in the centre of town the correct thing was to pull over to the left and let all the traffic pass, before turning right. We stayed to the right and caused several traffic incidents, which did not endear to us to the Melburnians, before we worked out what the go was. Caulfield proved to be a frost, both on the punt and weatherwise. I backed Row of Waves in the Doncaster, being run at Randwick, but it missed the start hopelessly and never figured. A year later, at 100/1, it won the same race. Naturally, I was not ‘on’.

Our ignorance of the traffic laws, and that we were so far out of town, caused us to catch a lot of trams and taxis, most often, late at night, in the case of the latter. We were in some sort of speakeasy on the Friday night when Ton stood up and announced, ‘Time to get a cab home. Want to be at the top of me game for the races tomorrow.’ He started taking long strides towards the exit before he announced over his shoulder, ‘Last bloke in pays for the taxi!’ and broke into a run. There were four of us, so the tailender would be forced into the front passenger’s seat and inevitably compelled to meet the fare. This was pretty poor form on Ton’s behalf, but before the rest of could discuss forming a united opposition, Tow-ball Head broke ranks and took after the fleet-footed big fellow. It was every man for himself after that, and Pretty and I set off in pursuit, jostling each other.

As we raced from the club, we saw there was a vacant taxi directly across the road and that Ton had almost reached it. He turned without slowing and goaded us with the advice, ‘Eat my leather, cap-catchers.’ Or was it cab-catchers?

Ton had that morning purchased a new pair of brown leather shoes at Brunswick on the Sydney Road, after he had been advised that most Melbourne night clubs would not admit him wearing his customary sneakers. When he observed to the shoe-seller that the store’s range was not exactly extensive, she exhaled smoke at him and advised, ‘You’re not in Toorak now, Chunky!’

A little chastened, Ton quickly extracted two more-or-less matching specimens from the ‘Bargain Bin’, though of slightly different sizes, and it was these he was wearing as he homed in that night on the taxi.  It seemed he had not broken them in properly, for suddenly both his feet flew into the air and, almost parallel to the road, he shot halfway underneath the taxi. It was like when you see a mechanic limbo deftly under a car on one of those boards fitted with tiny ball-bearing wheels. A strangled cry of surprise and pain issued from below, as we three stragglers occupied the rear seat. Several seconds later, Ton limped into the front, and after curtly giving the driver our address, he turned and began to argue the toss over who should pay the fare, as he reckoned he had been taken out of the contest unfairly. But given the liberties he had granted himself at the start, we were having none of that, and left him to fix the bill on arrival.

When he awoke next morning Ton detected a painful throbbing in one of his ankles, sufficient he decided to warrant a visit to the nearest hospital casualty facility. When it was time for us to leave for the races, he had not returned, so we left a note for him. Several hours later he appeared at the top of a set of high stairs near the racecourse entrance, armed with a pair of antique crutches. With the aid of these he now attempted to descend the stairs. After almost coming a cropper several times, he arrived at the bottom minutes later, but he was so exhausted he had to sit for some time to recover, fanning himself with his Best Bets. Finally, he looked at the rest of us and declared, ‘I can’t walk around a racecourse on these bloody stilts. I’m going back to the motel—but I’m not going up those blitten stairs.’  So, he rose unsteadily to his feet and departed, seeking out flat terrain, on a circuitous route to the exit.

Ton must have practised on his crutches while we were out, or else his ankle had improved dramatically, for as soon as we returned, he was badgering us to get ready for an early dinner, as he was eager to head off to a joint known as ‘Hunter’s Lodge’. He and Bad Ronald had visited this institution on a previous trip to Melbourne, where they had made the acquaintance of several liberally minded divorcees—Ronald having progressed so far as to take down the address and phone number of one of them on the back page of a copy of Ribald that was conveniently at hand—but he unfortunately later misplaced.

Ton sped on his crutches from the back seat of the taxi—he wasn’t to be caught out a second time—and had soon ensconced himself inside Hunter’s Lodge in a comfortable chair near a heavily carved table, on which he lay his crutches, while he told one of us to buy him a drink.

There was a disc jockey on duty that night and between songs he advised the party that as an Easter treat a dozen chocolate eggs had been hidden around the premises, and that inside one of them two fifty-dollar notes had been secreted. There was a shriek and people began to search the building, and several triumphant halloos indicated that the eggs were being quickly located. Restricted by his crutches, Ton was unable to compete in this stampede, so he remained in his chair. However, his keen eye began to methodically case the room, and it soon noticed something that others at higher elevations might have missed; a ledge that ran across the top of a row of columns on the far side of the room. Between the ledge and the ceiling, he could perceive a small cavity.

Ton looked at me and lifted one of his crutches, with which he pointed to the far end of the ledge. ‘I’ll bet you any money you like that egg with the “couta” in it is up there,’ he said.

‘You reckon?’ I responded doubtfully.

‘It’s a bird. A  tweet-tweet. Here’s where I clean up,’ he chuckled. He then picked up his other crutch and hauled himself to his feet, whereupon he began to hop slowly across the room. ‘Don’t want to attract any claim-jumpers,’ he whispered back to me. When he reached the corner, he set his crutches against the wall and began to reach up towards the aperture. Just then some random bloke appeared from nowhere and took a flying jump past Ton’s outstretched arm. When he landed, his left hand was clutching a large egg wrapped in gold foil. ‘You beauty!’ he exclaimed and retracing his steps placed it on Ton’s table. He raised a fist to smite the egg. Ton had followed as quickly as he could and grabbed the bloke’s arm.

‘Halfsies, eh?’ he suggested to him.

‘No way, Long John,’ the bloke replied, and proceeded to crack open the egg. Inside it were curled two ‘Steve McGarratts’.[1] He shoved them in his shirt pocket and headed off towards the bar. Meanwhile Ton was staring open mouthed at the shattered remains of the egg lying on the table.

‘At least he left you the chocolate, Ton,’ I pointed out.

‘Big deal,’ was the response. ‘This is a low joint. Let’s get out of here.’

 

*             *             *             *             *

 

 

 

The following day of course was Sunday and after a leisurely breakfast at the motel dining room we left the car garaged and got the tram downtown, where we headed straight for the famous Young & Jackson Hotel. Although we could never quite see what the attraction was—the painting of the naked Victorian-era beauty, ‘Chloe’, situated on the first floor, was not all that titillating for teenagers who had grown-up in the Playboy era—the place was packed, as it always was on weekends. We managed to secure some stools along the long bench located beneath the window that looks out diagonally over Flinders Street towards the famous entrance to the train station. We found we were seated next to some other young blokes from Sydney. They must have set up camp early, as they had superglued a two-dollar coin to the pavement directly in front of their vantage point in the pub. Every minute or so, some rube would come along and try to pocket the gleaming gold coin. Each time one tried and failed, the pranksters would bang loudly on the window, which caused their victims to look up and become aware they had been playing before an audience. Most took it in good part, but some became really angry. No matter what the response, these guys never tired of their amusement, nor of banging on the window. The fun ended when a big policeman wandered up, spotted the coin, and dislodged it with his size 14 boot. He grinned through the window at his benefactors. (They were obviously not much abashed, as they were back next day practising the same set-up.)

Not long after, a bell began to clang loudly through the bar.

‘What the hell?’ cried Ton. ‘Is the joint on fire?’

‘That’s the bell for closing time,’ a bloke who was walking by picking up glasses informed him.

‘Closing time? There’s another nine hours of daylight!’ Ton insisted.

It turned out Melbourne had a quaint law that hotels close at 1 pm on Sundays but re-open two hours later. We took some convincing that we were not having our legs pulled by the locals, but in the end, we were compelled to leave. With nothing much else happening in the Melbourne CBD, we returned to our motel to await the reopening of the pubs. Ton and I were sharing a room and once he had exhausted the form guide for Monday’s racing he casually turned to the guests’ guide to the motel’s facilities, which was lying next to the bed.

‘Hey, this joint’s got in-house movies!’ he told me excitedly. ‘I’m gunna ring reception and see what they’ve got.’ So, he picked up the phone and asked to be given the run-down of the currently available titles. He repeated the receptionist’s responses for my benefit.

‘Hmm, Bambi…I see…Sound of Music…very good…Chitty Chitty Bang Bang…I like that one…like-a, all great flicks, but er…have you got any pornos?’

There was a loud click from the mouthpiece of the phone. Ton looked at me. ‘We seem to have been disconnected. Will I call her back?’

‘I think I would let sleeping dogs lie, Ton,’ I advised him.

 

[1] Fifty-dollar notes.

 

 

Read more from Wayne Peake HERE.

 

 

Copies of Sydney Racing in the 1970s: an Illustrated Companion are available via Wayne’s website (worth a look too).

 

Wayne will be one of our guests (along with Andrew Rule) at the Almanac Cox Plate Eve Lunch on October 24. To book a spot, please email [email protected] or sms 0417 635030.

 

 

 

 

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