Almanac Horseracing (Memoir): Confessions of a teenage racegoer of the 1970s

 

 

 

Prologue: This article is the first in a series of extracts from a book published in November 2023, titled Sydney Racing in the 1970s: an Illustrated Companion. I realise that there are many similarities in terms of subject matter and approach (humorous) with John Harms’s terrific Memoirs of a Mug Punter, which I discovered (or was made aware of) only this year.  John has of course pre-published me by more than twenty-five years! I do trust, however, that these memoirs of mine provide something a little different and make a worthwhile addition to the field. They start a bit earlier, in 1968, and I was younger – just eight –  than John. As the title suggests, they are mainly concerned with my teenage years in the the 1970s and into the early to mid-1980s. They are mainly set in Sydney, rather than Brisbane or Victoria, although there are several anecdotes that draw upon my mates and my annual pilgrimages south for the Melbourne Cup.

Wayne Peake, October 2025.

 

[Note: Wayne will be part of the line-up at The Footy Almanac Cox Plate Eve Lunch on Oct 24. More details HERE]

 

 These contributions of mine to The Footy Almanac seek to convey why, when a teenager in Sydney in the 1970s, if I were prevented from attending a Saturday race meeting, I behaved like I had been placed under unlawful house-arrest; why, on every Saturday afternoon for more than a decade, the one place I wanted to be was at whichever of Sydney’s four racecourses were racing—not the beach, not the footy, not the library, not chasing girls; why, when with my last dollar, I backed the first winner at Rosehill at 66/1 one Saturday, I immediately collected from the starting price bookmaker working the East Hills Hotel, commandeered a car and driver and demanded he get me to the track in time for the third race. An apparently binding commitment was rarely enough to stop me jumping on the earliest racecourse ‘Special’ train — not being ‘next to bat’ on the second week of an important cricket match, not a list of backyard chores thought up by my father, nor a wedding, except those of a family member my mother made me attend on threat of eviction.

Just how I came to be so obsessed with horseracing will become apparent to those who read on. Enough to note here I was ‘kidnapped’ and acculturated at an early age, like Natalie Wood in the film The Searchers. One Saturday morning in 1967, I heard a trumpet fanfare on the television. I thought it was the opening of my favourite program, Rin-Tin-Tin, so I jumped out of bed, but found the bugle was sounding not for Rusty the cavalry orphan and Rinny, but rather was the call-to-the-post for a program called Brian Howard Telefilms. It was replaying films of the previous night’s Harold Park trots. The images of the paceway and its ‘Ribbon of Light’ mesmerised me. Robin Dundee surged from last to victory in the Miracle Mile. The twangy pop-hit The Happy Guitar by Reg Owen accompanied Howard’s call. Weeks later, I left the television on long enough after the trots to catch the bizarre opening sequence of the race-day tipster’s program Clarence the Clocker; ‘Clarence’ and race caller Ken Howard wandering around the Randwick scrapings sheds with their outsized wooden binoculars and microphone. I realised I loved the gallops even more than the trots. Thus was this incursive seed sown.

My Dad and Pop were keen punting partners. They bet on Saturdays in the luxuriant beer garden of the Padstow Park Hotel. My brothers and I tagged along, cadging Tooths’ ‘Blue Bow’ lemonade and Smith’s crisps. I sucked on a paper straw, simultaneously absorbing fizzy drink and Ken Howard’s rococo descriptions of horses like Time and Tide and The Snow Burner winning. I thought I had found the ancient paradise.

Then, in 1968, returning from a South-Coast family vacation, near the Kembla Grange racecourse entrance, I excitedly pointed out to my Pop one of those ‘Next Race Meeting’ billboards. Next Kembla meeting was this day. ‘Bloody-well pull over Jack!’ Pop cried to Dad. Pop turned and advocated the races like a queen’s counsel to Mum and Nan, sitting on the car’s backseat (or the second row of the mobile barrier, as Pop called it).[i] In we went. For us kids it was an un-gazetted holiday of pies and lollies on a vast greensward, in the middle of which was a rickety old Grandstand that we climbed all over like a giant cubby house. Of the racing—small fields of two or three, gradually increasing as the day progressed. I watched every race, enthralled, from the course proper outside fence. I looked up into the craggy faces of the jockeys as they rode to the barrier. One winked back at me. Pop did his dough (Dad as well, but not as much), and every few miles on the long drive home to Panania, Pop muttered under his breath about my unhealthy schoolboy obsession with horseracing.

 

***

 

 

When the teenage Will Shakespeare first came up with that gag for Hamlet about ‘the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,’ I reckon he had been betting at the Stratford-Upon-Avon picnic races with a bookie named Fortune and Will’s horse had been knocked over at the last jump with a ten-length lead. For, to parody another noted lyricist and dark-cloud spotter, Paul Simon (as someone does in one of the stories to follow), there are at least 50 ways to lose your ‘couta’ (that is, money) on the punt. The writer PG Wodehouse once described golf as ‘the great mystery,’ but he must have given the horses away by then. Golf is a mere bagatelle compared to picking winners at the track. My teenage mates and I were the aggrieved parties in a swag of Ripley’s Believe it or Not!-type yarns of racecourse near-misses and appalling bad luck. Some occurred a year or two after my school days were over and some were at the trots or greyhounds, but I’m calling on the discretionary powers of the controlling body (me) to include them in this confession.

But first I wish to finish the story of how I became besotted with horseracing. My Pop quickly shrugged off the disappointment of his Kembla misadventure — punters are a hardy lot — and remained a committed racing man. He kept a library of Turf Monthly and Racetrack magazines in his pleasure-dome Padstow backyard shed and I would pore over them for hours, reading of the performances of Flying Fable, Great Exploits, Sandy’s Hope, and the sire Smokey Eyes. I became a champion of anything remotely related to racing. I urged Dad to buy Mum ‘Winning Post’ chocolates rather than ‘Milk Tray’, and to smoke ‘Turf’ brand cigarettes, not ‘Camels.’ I sketched on strips of toilet paper hundreds of race finishes, copied from Sunday-paper sports sections, mostly featuring the horses Tails or Special Girl. Like all the future race callers (though I had no aspirations to become one), I substituted marbles for horses and ran them in pretend races along driveways, or, even better, paddle-pop sticks painted with jockeys’ colours, down drains after storms. I saved for months to buy the racing boardgame, Totopoly, and while a little bemused by the pointlessness of play itself (all the preamble, including training and side bets, and the size of your bank at the end, counted for nothing — it all came down to which horse won the race), I spent hours on the edge of my bed, resting on my chin, gazing down at the dramatic illustration on its lid. It depicted three horses driving to the finish line on some glorious imaginary British racecourse, under puffy white clouds. ‘Which horse would have won?’ I wondered (my money was on the grey down the outside). Years later I came to think of it like Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ — those three ageless horses and jockeys, race-day fit and in their absolute prime, were of course destined to never weigh in, but may possibly still be intriguing youths obsessed with horse-racing in 2,000 years, as I think the artwork will outlive the game.

 

 

I was determined to get back to a real racecourse after that day at Kembla gave me a taste for racing. One Sunday evening my family was visiting old Pop. The next day was the bank holiday and Pop, being a Water Board employee, had the day off. Although it was a regular school day, I fancied a respite myself and somehow convinced him and, even more incredibly, my mother, that he should take me and my two older brothers to Luna Park, the amusement park on Sydney Harbour.

However, I had seen that Luna Park was not the only diversion that day — there were to be the traditional bank holiday races at Randwick as well. I considered them a more alluring prospect than being hung upside down on the wall of the ‘Rotor’ by my brothers. So, when we got home from Pop’s that night, I took them aside and proposed a hijack. They agreed. Next day, as soon as we joined the train for the city, I got to work on Pop, pointing out with feigned surprise the form guide for Randwick in his newspaper. At first, he made out he was not interested, but by the time we reached Kingsgrove he was rubbing his chin thoughtfully and kept turning back to the sports section. Nan, who had decidedly puritanical sensibilities, and had not forgotten the Kembla debacle, frowned each time he did, but I knew in the end that mattered little; she would not be game to dissent if Pop’s sporting blood got up. When I saw him extract the form guide and put it in his coat pocket, I knew the campaign was won. As we pulled out of Sydenham, he cleared his throat and announced his intention to leave the train at Central and transfer to the racecourse ‘Special’ bus in Eddy Avenue. I could not suppress a ‘Yes!’ of victory, which did not go unnoticed by Nan, who pulled a sour face at me like the post-Prince-Albert Queen Victoria.

Pop lost heavily again, including in a photo-finish defeat of his ‘get-out’ hope, the favourite, Yeoman Service, by the outsider, Tom Tom, in the welter. I had bet 50 cents on Tom Tom (a reluctant Nan the agent). Pop took it hard. We left immediately after my collect. As in the miserable retreat from Kembla, Pop spent a lot of time staring blankly out of windows on the way home.

After Tom Tom’s win I immersed myself even more in the racing media. I also became something of a Saturday afternoon hermit, reluctant to lose contact with the transistor radio in our back shed. My friends asked me to go bike riding or play touch footy, but I would invent some excuse to stay home. I did not want to share with them my obsession with horseracing. It seemed a little weird. My father Jack, though a keen racing man himself, thought so too. Every now and then he told me that my love affair with racing was excessive and unhealthy, and that I should turn the radio off and go fishing or something. I responded that my interest was purely theoretical. I did not bet ‘off-course’ back then; I just made selections and listened to how they went. I did that too for the broadcasts of the Penrith trots on Thursday summer evenings (which interrupted ‘Italian Hour’ with Momma Lena and Frank Fraumeni on 2KY), out in the cool under the veranda. Still, I was desperate to get back to the races. I waited in vain for Pop to propose another outing. But he had probably decided I was a ‘mock’ and best avoided when he was betting. Thereafter he restricted his punting to Padstow pub and abandoned the course. I decided it was time to go out on my own.

 

I become a fair-dinkum racegoer

One day in June 1975 at about 9.30am I left home for Rosehill — for the first time going to the Saturday races, alone, and with the intention of betting, although I was four years shy of the legal age. I had six dollars and thirty cents. At the railway station I bought a child’s excursion ticket with the change and waited for the-all stations train to Central. I produced Friday’s form guide and studied again the entries, the jockeys, and the betting market for the first race, scheduled for 1.05pm.

Kevin Moses had a ride in the first on Chelsea Lady, third favourite in the morning paper. She was owned by ‘The ARABS’ — not Middle East sheiks; they had not yet discovered Australian racing — but instead the new Australian Racing and Breeding Stables. The ARABS also had the fillies Cinch and Debbie Jo in the race. Moses had won on Cinch at her previous run at Canterbury in mid-May. I had been there — that was my very first day alone at the races, on a Wednesday during the school holidays. But I had not bet, just watched. Reconnaissance.

When I reached Central, I asked a station assistant from where the Rosehill racecourse ‘Special’ left. Platform 18, he said, and I got there as a train was pulling in. I was new to train-hopping in 1975 and did not realise that trains leaving from a particular platform might have more than one destination. So, I joined the train, expecting it would deliver me directly to the Rosehill racecourse platform. I knew there was a Rosehill racecourse platform, and that it was somewhere near Parramatta, but that was it. Meanwhile, the train stopped at Redfern, then Newtown and Stanmore. Two weeks later, I would have realised that I was on the wrong train, as the Rosehill ‘Special’ did not stop between Redfern and Strathfield. Also, I would have noted the absence of men in pork-pie hats smoking cigars and reading form guides on the train. But such worldliness had to be gained by experience. So, I studied my form guide and looked up each time the train stopped at a station.

When the train left Auburn, I sensed the departure from the main line must be imminent, but it reached Parramatta and still there had been no sign of Rosehill racecourse. So, I kept my seat as Westmead and Wentworthville came and went. The view out the window was becoming increasingly occidental. As the train trundled into Seven Hills, when I spotted another railway employee sweeping cigarette butts, I asked him if was on the right train for the racecourse. He spat and told me I was on the right train for Hawkesbury racecourse (which was near Windsor), but if I wanted to make the races today, I had better get off here and take the train back to Clyde station, on the other side of Parramatta, and wait there to join the Rosehill ‘Special’. Rosehill, I learned, was one stop past Clyde, on the Carlingford spur line.

Feeling ridiculous and humiliated, I got off. Rather than risk further smart-arse remarks from the railways bloke, I checked the timetable on the wall and saw the next train back would not arrive for 20 minutes. Would I miss the first race and Moses on Chelsea Lady?

As it turned out, I had left home so early that when I got to Rosehill there was still an hour to post-time.[1] The bookmakers were just starting to set up their boards and betting would not commence for half an hour. Later there would be some 17,000 people in attendance, but the crowd was only trickling in at present. I took a tour of the Paddock to kill time.

I had already decided to have a dollar a win on Chelsea Lady. Now it was just a matter of getting it on — with a tote clerk or a bookmaker? I didn’t fancy the severe-looking women behind the tote windows; they reminded me of the old crones in Reformation woodcut illustrations. I thought I had more chance of striking a sympathetic bookie’s bagman; one of advanced years, who, in all probability, had had to cross a similar punting Rubicon of his own back in the 1930s or forties.

I walked down the Sydney ring looking for a specimen who met this description and paused before the stand of one Joe Jacobs. Joe, the owner of a magnificent hook nose and heavily framed black spectacles, looked like he might have produced and directed an Old Testament Hollywood epic or two in his time. I said to myself, ‘Joe must be a “four-be-two”’ and thus unlikely to refuse even a one-dollar bet from a fourteen-year-old.’ And Joe’s bagman looked very promising. He was, I guess, in his mid-sixties, wore a cardigan, which made him look avuncular, and had kindly features that reminded me of Pop’s. I steeled myself, stepped up and said to him, ‘Chelsea Lady a dollar, please.’ Without any suggestion of a raised eyebrow, the bagman informed his principal out of the corner of his mouth, ‘Seven dollars to a dollar Chelsea Lady.’ He took my note, and in return his boss gave me a green watermarked rectangle of cardboard with ‘CL’ and a figure ‘8’ rubbed onto it with thick black crayon. ‘Thank you,’ the bagman said as the exchange took place, again without any sign of irony or condescension. However, not wishing to press my luck, I turned and plunged into the crowd of punters that had by this time gathered in the betting ring.

I hurried up the stairs to the upper deck of the Paddock Grandstand, then once more admired that wondrous betting ticket. I was not to know that I had taken way under the odds for Chelsea Lady, which blew to twelve-to-one. What I did know was that I had been accepted unreservedly into the great fraternity of committed racegoers, and that I could never imagine myself voluntarily leaving its ranks.

After the field left the barrier gates, Chelsea Lady and Amatrice contested the lead, with Cinch not far behind them. Early in the straight Chelsea Lady took the lead and momentarily looked the winner, but Cinch, in the ARABS first set of colours, emerged, and quickly settled the issue. She went on to win by three lengths.

So, my first racecourse bet had resulted in a second; an outcome that was to become irksomely familiar in ensuing years. I was not particularly upset; what I took away was the adrenalin rush experienced, particularly during those few seconds when a win had seemed likely. Once the horses had been unsaddled and correct weight declared, I descended the Grandstand steps and re-entered the ring, standing in front of Joe Jacobs, who was to retain my business exclusively until I found the courage to diversify some months later.

My horse was unplaced in the second race but in the third I backed Skirnir, second favourite at 3/1. It won — by a half-length, having got to the lead at the top of the straight and defying several challenges. I think I expended more energy whipping it to the line than its jockey, Allan Denham, did. I had punted two dollars on Skirnir; one for me and one for Mum’s punters’ club.

I went down to the ring and joined the line of successful punters at the rear of Joe Jacobs’s stand.[2] As I neared the top of the queue, I harboured fears that Jacobs’s ‘pay’ bagman would refuse to honour my bet, on account of my age, but he paid up without demur. I examined the contents of my hand; a crisp five-dollar note and three one-dollar notes. I stowed the money in my wallet, then produced my form guide and resumed my spot in the ring.

The open-class stayers race followed. I backed a horse called Ragham. He started 13/2 third favourite and won easily. Again, I got ‘unders’ from Joe — my fault for again betting too early. My personal profit was now about eight dollars. Once more I joined the collect queue awaiting correct weight, still with a little trepidation, but without cause. This time the clerk acknowledged me with a wry smile.

The next race was the open sprint — the 1100 metres flying handicap. The second favourite was Purple Patch, resuming after a short spell following a Brisbane winter campaign. He was one of Sydney’s favourite racehorses, one that could run splits for the final 400 metres that would leave clockers shaking their heads. I went into the ring to see what Joe Jacobs was offering —  3/1. I had one on for me and two for Mum’s punters’ club.

It was an even start but soon I saw a white cap bobbing along several lengths behind the rest of the field. The gap between it and the second last horse was expanding alarmingly. I did not need Geoff Mahoney to tell me the horse in arrears was Purple Patch. Coming to the corner he was at least six lengths from the nearest horse. Worse still, the favourite, Tivoli Prince, was travelling comfortably at the quarters of the leader. Then Mahoney announced that Purple Patch had pulled to the outside and was running on powerfully. I looked up and saw something like a grey and brown meteor hurtling down the outside of the track. I have never seen a horse finish so fast relative to the rest of the field, either live or on television — Bernborough and Chautauqua probably closest. The Patch had raced to the lead well before the post and Allan Denham sat up and allowed him to make his own speed to the finish.

As I returned to the collect queue, fantasising about being offered a cadetship with the ‘Legal Eagles’, I became aware of a towering presence immediately behind me. I turned into the chest of a policeman of about six-six. With a sick feeling I looked up and gave him a wan smile, then turned back. What, I wondered, was the penalty for under-age racecourse betting? Even worse, I could imagine the looks of betrayal from Joe Jacobs and his clerks as I was hauled off in handcuffs. ‘What! You’re not eighteen?’ the bookie would cry in a hurt voice. ‘You misled us?’

Damn, would they never call correct weight on this race? I was sweating a funk inside my martin jacket, despite the cool winter air. Finally, I received the poke between the shoulder-blades I had been dreading. It felt like it had been delivered by Purple Patch’s hindquarters. Slowly I turned again to face this vast instrument of the law. It raised its sunglasses above its eyes and bent down and delivered a stage whisper that must have been heard several bookmakers away.

‘Thought we were no hope at the top of the straight.’

‘Sorry, officer?’ I responded dumbly.

He pointed at the pasteboard ticket in his hand that bore the shorthand ‘PP’ and a three-figure amount below it. I worked it out at last. This copper was no agent of retribution, but a brother of the punt. Our shared faith in Purple Patch was our bond. He looked at the ticket in my hand.

‘You took threes?’

I admitted it.

‘Got seven-to-two myself. Still, threes was a good price for a horse like him in that field,’ he observed generously. ‘He must have run the last two furlongs in under 18 seconds,’ continued this new-found and erudite colleague.

‘He’s got the biggest finish of any horse in Sydney, I reckon,’ I responded, glad to finally be able to contribute to the conversation, and the remark found favour, for the policeman grunted in a way that could only mean approbation.

I collected my winnings from the clerk, who asked me—and I am sure he was being fair dinkum—what I fancied in the next. I mumbled something as I fled.

 

***

 

One day’s racing a week was soon not enough. Occasionally I skipped school to attend Wednesday meetings at Canterbury racecourse. These coincided with sports afternoons. It was possible to escape, because the roll was called at lunch time, before the young bloods changed into their sports apparel. So, no ‘absent’ note was required from Mum next day. Moreover, the teachers press-ganged into umpiring house cricket or softball matches were so bored and inattentive that half the kids in their charge could have wandered off without their noticing. In the morning I would have hidden my ‘civvies’ in my Globite school port. I would change into these at a mate’s place on the way down to Revesby for us to get a bus to Bankstown and then a train to Canterbury station, from where we would run down the hill to the track. Of course, all this cross-country ‘hard arsing’ took time, and we would be doing the form for race five on the train. We would stay for two more races but leave well before the last, so that I could get home, once more in uniform, early enough not to excite Mum’s suspicions — which were easily aroused.

On another Wednesday I went to Canterbury the other way — leaving the East Hills rail service at Sydenham for the Bankstown line train to Canterbury. Kevin Moses had a rare (at that time) ride for Jack Denham, on a horse named Roman Toga in an early race. As I waited for the train, I considered the lettering on the adjacent seat ‘Sydenham’… ‘Syd Denham’…Both my grandfathers were known as Syd, and Moses was riding for Denham. Surely, I thought, here was an omen tip. By the time the train arrived I had convinced myself. Once on course I cut out about a third of my bank — two dollars — and placed it on Roman Toga’s Roman nose, but the Toga plot unravelled, and he ran an inglorious eighth. ‘So much for omen tips,’ I said to myself, but it was not the last time I thought I had found clues to winners in fanciful word associations.

 

Hawkesbury blues

Incidents of ‘truancy’ were not restricted to school and university days. I was on my way to work, in the City, running late, one Thursday. It was early spring; a lovely, sunny morning, and I was in tropical kit; just a light cotton business shirt and trousers. As the train left Sydenham, I noted in the sporting pages that Hawkesbury was racing. I was immediately stirred by the prospect of a delightful, leisurely train-trip to Clarendon racecourse, passing through orchards, dairies, and stud farms. As the train pulled out of Redfern, I exclaimed, like Mole in The Wind in the Willows amidst his spring cleaning, ‘Bother work!’ (or something to that effect) and minutes later was headed for the exit at Central station.

I had no cash, but I did have a credit card good for a hundred bucks. So, I darted across Elizabeth Street to my bank. While I waited for it to open at 9am, I rang work, hacked a cough a few times into the telephone speaker and announced I would not be in today. I got the money from the bank, returned to Central and bought a return ticket to Clarendon. The excursion exceeded all expectations. I could smell the orange blossoms wafting through the well-ventilated carriage as we trundled through Riverstone and Schofields. I read the potted form maybe ten times on that longish journey, yet I still arrived more than an hour before the first race (early again!). I therefore called into the Clarendon Hotel, which was on the corner of Racecourse Road. The barmaids (two of them) were wearing see-through nighties. I had several beers, the form guide discarded for the time, but as soon as I saw that the racecourse gates were open, I headed for them. Perving on barmaids in diaphanous nightwear is fair enough but cannot compare with the pleasures of the track. I bought and ate a nice home-made local pie — just as well, it turned out — then walked over to the interstate ring. The Victorian country meeting was starting before the local races.

I had a quick look at a Sporting Globe form guide sticky-taped to a board behind one of the bookmakers’ stands, picked a horse, and placed a bet. Minutes later the crackly voice of the interstate race caller identified my horse as the winner, at the juicy odds of sixteen-to-one. How good is this! I recall congratulating myself. In the first at Hawkesbury, I was on a horse at even longer odds. It led into the short straight by three lengths. The favourite picked it up right on the line, but I had backed mine each-way, so the result was still good.

Unfortunately, my fortunes deteriorated rapidly after that (as they so often do when you fluke the first winner) and the only other highlight of the day was to covertly watch the trainer, Theo Green, enjoying a packaged sandwich on the lawn in front of the Grandstand. He was (appropriately) wearing olive-green socks and a pair of trousers far too short for him.

After the second last at Hawkesbury, I was broke and had no choice but to shuffle disconsolately to the rail siding, where a couple of other punters with ‘loser’ written all over them were already mooching around, hands in their pockets. When the Sydney-bound train drew slowly up, we signalled the driver to stop. I had the race book to read on the return trip but had little heart for it. Worse was to come. When the train reached Blacktown, it heaved to a halt with a perceptible note of finality. The stationmaster advised us via the public address that there had been a massive points failure around Blacktown station, and while he had no hard information on when or where the next Sydney-bound train might arrive, his money was on platform four (he turned out to be a bad judge). So, my fellow travellers on this forlorn return-trip (I had nicknamed them Burke and Wills) and I headed there — from platform one. The beautiful spring morning had turned into a nasty, cold, windy afternoon and I stood in the breeze trying to chaff my arms (the waiting-room door was locked). I had no silver with which to ring home and report in. To make things worse, my supply of cigarettes had given out, so I was denied even that illusory modicum of warmth and comfort provided by puffing on a gasper.

The points failure turned out to be even more massive than the station master had indicated. It was after 10pm when I finally reached home. Another ‘sickie’ next day was impossible. I was not tempted to play Thursday racecourse hookey again for some time.

 

***

 

Hawkesbury was never a lucky track for me. A year or so after the previous incident I went into debt to buy my first car. On this day I drove out to Hawkesbury with the Poon and the Cube, who I had I picked up at the East Hills Hotel. They had insisted we leave in time to get there several hours before the first race, as I had mentioned the barmaids in the Clarendon Hotel.

 

 

The Hawkesbury racecourse car park adjoined the pub’s back fence. I backed my XC Ford Falcon up it. This location offered the dual advantage of being close to the pub entrance as well as the racecourse exit.

As we leapt from the car and headed for the pub, a large horse trotted over from a corner of the hotel’s yard. It seemed of a friendly disposition, so I gave it a pat and scratch between the ears. ‘Friendly’ proved an underestimate; the beast was more like a big slobbering Labrador dog than a horse, and it proceeded to lick me with great enthusiasm.

‘Gee, what a nice horse,’ I said to my mates. Turning back to the horse I promised, ‘I’ll bring you a juicy carrot or apple after the last, if I have any luck on the punt.’

The horse licked even harder, and then whinnied, which I took as approbation for the plan.

After an hour or so at the pub we left, well-fortified, and ready to take on the bookies. However, unlike my previous visit to Hawkesbury, the punt began foully and stayed that way. The only thing that broke the monotony of my endless losing bets came when one of my chums said to me, ‘Did you leave a jacket or something in the boot of your car?’

‘No. Why?’

‘Your old mate the horse seems to have detected your scent in it, or maybe he thinks the tucker you promised it is stowed there. He looks like he is trying to lick his way in.’ I looked over in the direction of the pub and there I saw the horse, its neck arched over the fence, its head pulsing rhythmically over my car boot, like it was giving an outsized ice-cream cone a workover.

Strange way for a horse to behave, I thought to myself. Still, what harm could it do? But I soon forgot it. There were other more pressing matters — like finding winners.

That did not happen and not long after, disgusted, I rather churlishly told my pals I was scarpering and if they wanted a lift, they should meet me at the car in five minutes. As I walked through the car park, I could see them standing by the rear of my car, smoking cigarettes, and pointing at the boot. They were both chuckling. But when they saw my cranky face, they wiped their grins off and shuffled uncomfortably.

‘Er—’ one of them began, and then stopped. Clearly, he had not thought his opening remarks out very extensively.

Meanwhile I had looked down at my car. There were five or six furrows ploughed into the duco, through to the metal, each about a centimetre wide. What could have happened? At that moment there was a cough, followed by a snort, from the far corner of the pub yard. There was the horse, shaking its head and sucking on its teeth like Mr Ed. Suddenly I put the form together.

‘You moke! You no-good hay burner!’ I yelled at the horse. ‘What’s the strong of chewing up my car! No carrot for you!’ The horse looked back at me like it was off its long face. Maybe it was effects of the duco. It turned its rear-quarters towards me, lifted its tail and left a trail of droppings as it wobbled around the corner of the yard. We got into the remains of my car and drove home.

 

***

 

On still another occasion I went to Hawkesbury with a carload of the Yobboes (I’ll elaborate in due course), because one of them (Pretty Boy) had a quarter share in a horse called Mostly Mine running in the intermediate handicap. It had decent recent form and Pretty had received the word that today could well be the day. It was another splendidly fine morning, and we were in high spirits, like the Canterbury Tales pilgrims leaving Southwark, as we drove west along the Windsor Road. Mostly Mine’s race was in the middle of the program. I was the first of our party to back a winner. The others were slower off the mark but by the time Mostly Mine’s race came up we were all in front.

I do not recall the exact circumstances, but I did not back Mostly Mine, which was second favourite; instead, I backed an outsider. Mostly Mine, after a tough run, loomed up at the 100 metres, stuck its head out and won in a photo —  my horse nowhere.

When Mostly Mine’s number went up, the other members of my party exploded with victory yells and followed with cries of exultation such as ‘You trimmer!’ and ‘You beauty’ and ‘Bore!’ I rather half-heartedly joined in. I did not reveal I wasn’t ‘on’ Mostly Mine but somehow Gut, the smallest yet loudest yobbo, deduced it. ‘You’re kiddin’, aren’t ya?’  he cried incredulously, then laughed, when I finally admitted it. When the euphoric owner Pretty Boy returned from the Official Stand, Gut rushed him, not to congratulate, but to blurt out ‘Oi, Pretty! Peake didn’t back your horse!’

I could not snare a dividend after that; the others had no such problems though, especially Gut, who preceded to back long-priced winner after long-priced winner, without even bothering to consult the race book, and greeted the arrival of each with increasingly uncouth vocalisations and the spilling of drinks.

Each of these winners, and the rare losers too, were celebrated with a bourbon and coke, and by the time we got into the car for the long trip home, Gut was as full as an agisting racehorse’s backside. I was stuck in the back seat between him and another pitiless winner, the Cube, for the duration. It was murder. At first Gut contented himself with repeatedly asking me ‘How did you go, Peake? Eh?’ But we had not long left the Hawkesbury car park when he revealed a talent for parodying the lyrics of popular songs, like Weird Al Yankovic. Each touched in some way on how I was the sole loser on the day and ditto the only pilgrim that had not supported Mostly Mine. Finally, he was visited by inspiration and began to sing Paul Simon’s ‘Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover’ except he changed the words to ‘Fifty Ways to Lose Your Couta’ (‘couta’ being East-Hillian slang for money). The lyrics gave me advice on how I might avoid losing bets (for example, ‘Don’t bet mid-week, Peake/wipe the outside gate, mate’), and so on, ad nauseum. He dissertated on all 50 ways I had done my ‘couta’ that afternoon, then carried on to reach his ‘ton’. On reflection, I should not have been surprised by the great creativity Gut displayed with these impromptu song lyrics — you really don’t back five 33/1 winners in an afternoon unless you have been blessed with a fertile imagination.

 

Kembla capers

More than a decade passed, after my Dreamtime visit to Kembla Grange in 1968, before I returned to that racecourse, which was quite difficult to reach by public transport. From Panania, the first leg was an all-stations train to Sydenham, where you changed for the inter-city service to Wollongong. From there, you needed to get the local motor-rail on the single line service that ran past the western boundary of Kembla Grange. There were no additional race-day services; just the standard dailies that passed by every hour or so. And the driver and guard did not make many concessions because the races were on. Most days, probably, there were few passengers wishing to alight at the Kembla platform, which was some distance from the course, and on the other side of the main road. So, the driver was not in the habit of stopping unnecessarily. He would slow down to a speed which made it just possible for someone to get off without breaking his neck.

On my first day back to Kembla the train, which was running late, was approaching the racecourse platform, about ten minutes before post-time for the first race. Gathered in the vestibule of that carriage which would give the quickest access to the course were a dozen or so grizzled, stooped old punters — relicts of the pony-racing era. They were clutching form guides and had portable radios hard against their ears. To look at them, you would hardly have thought them capable of raising a jog-trot, and yet they were jockeying vigorously for positions at the carriage doorway. As the train drew alongside the platform, it almost ceased moving for a second. That was a signal for the carriage doors to be thrown open and these veterans of the turf began to launch out onto the platform like elite paratroopers. As soon as their feet touched solid ground, they hared off in the direction of the racecourse entrance, taking frightful risks as they plunged across the road. Then they formed a panting, heaving, queue at the lone ticket-seller’s kiosk, and produced their pensioner cards. Once through the turnstiles, they disbursed and disappeared, like tiny crabs on a beach scuttling off in diverse directions — most to the bookmakers’ ring, some to the totalisator windows, and a few, moving fastest of all, towards the toilet block.

 

Rosehill ruckus

It might have been the remnants of that squadron of veteran Kembla Grange commandos that my mate Porky and I witnessed in action in a similar operation a few years later. It was a Rosehill Saturday race meeting in the first days of the post-racecourse ‘Special’ era; to get to the course by train from Central you henceforth had to take a regular western-line train scheduled to stop at Clyde, disembark, and wait for the Carlingford-line shuttle service. This was much less satisfactory than the fast and efficient service that these old-hand racegoers had enjoyed for many years on the ‘Specials’, so they were probably already grumpy, but as the train approached Clyde they rose and prepared to get off. There were a few murmurs in the vestibule as the train failed to slow as the platform loomed, but the murmurs became outraged bellows as it sailed straight past Clyde. Nor did it stop at Granville but continued to Harris Park. As soon as the train slowed to walking speed, its doors burst open, and all those aged would-be racegoers jumped out and immediately headed for the guard’s compartment. That individual was slumping in a posture of oriental lassitude from his door, no doubt enjoying his quiet Saturday morning, when he saw with alarm a scrum of old diggers descending on him, angrily waving rolled-up form guides, and shouting obscenities. They quickly surrounded the guard like a lynch mob. It might have been my imagination but I’m pretty sure that one of them was calling for a rope. The guard was not enjoying the interview at all and was banging feverishly on his bell, which should have caused the driver — the actual guilty party, blissfully unaware, in the front carriage, of the guard’s predicament — to get moving.  But his partner seems not to have been on the ball that day, and the guard endured another 30 seconds of terror before the train finally began to roll out. Even then, some of the disaffected veterans kept pace with his compartment for some distance and continued their abuse of him.

I looked at Porky. ‘Do we wait for the next train back or hike across country to Rosehill? I reckon it’s half an hour’s walk.’

‘Walk,’ Porky responded immediately. ‘I don’t fancy sharing a confined space with that lot’ — he indicated the old fellows, still waving their form guides in the air, with a nod of his head — ‘while their blood is up.’

I concurred, so we commenced our long trek.

 

Rosehill racecourse plumbers

 As noted previously, hardly a meeting passed at Rosehill in the 1970s when there was not a call over the public-address system for the course plumber to report to the race-day secretary’s office. Most days there were two or three summons for that in-demand tradesman. This was brought to my attention by my mate, the Cube, who happened to be an apprentice plumber.

I had talked the Cube into accompanying me to Rosehill one day. He had never been to the races previously, and to his great consternation the first horse he backed, Hot Land, straight, at 25/1, was beaten a short-half-head in a 2,400 metres graduation. He quickly got the bug. His brother, Bad Ronald, also a plumber, thereafter, would drive us to Rosehill, drop us off, go home to Panania, then drive over again after the last to pick us up. At last, we prevailed on him one day to also join us on course. As he tumbled through the turnstiles, he noticed that most everyone else was being lured by one of the STC spruikers in grey dustjackets calling ‘Race book and pen! Race book and pen!’ Being a compliant sort of guy, he bought a race book himself. I was keen for him to feel part of the racecourse milieu, so up in the Grandstand before the second or third race, I asked him what colours the jockey I had backed was carrying. He consulted his book.  ‘You’ve got black, red quarters and armbands, and a black cap…,’ he told me. He looked up from his book just as the jockey in question was passing by the stand in the parade. He studied him a moment, then added, ‘and white pants.’ I thanked him.

 

Butch and Jack

One day in 1976 at the Randwick races I was on the movator, gliding up to the public section of the Queen Elizabeth Stand. As I was admiring the view over Randwick, a slightly dishevelled and stormy-browed bloke in an old pork-pie hat and raincoat approached at high speed from the rear. As he pulled out to overtake me, he slowed slightly, looked at me closely, and from the corner of his mouth grunted, ‘Back Butch Cassidy in the next.’ He then hurried on.

I didn’t take much notice. I certainly did not back the horse — in fact, I had already placed my bet when the tip came. Butch Cassidy won, at sixteen-to-one. It was only next day in the paper, when the report on the race was accompanied by a photo of the trainer, did I recognise my movator boon-giver as Jack Denham, the Rosehill conditioner — ‘Grumpy Jack’, as he was known to the press. Denham was noted for being a taciturn trainer of the old school —the heir to ‘Silent’ Leo O’Sullivan — who would sooner die under torture than release stable secrets.

 

 

Why had the monkish Campsie-boy and former Canterbury trainer Denham favoured me, a random youth, with this spot-on inside information? I had no idea and scratched my head through my Canterbury-Bankstown ‘Berries’ footy beanie, which coincidentally, I had been wearing the previous day at Randwick.

 

[1] The racecourse gates generally opened at 10.30am and the liquor bars half an hour later.

[2] Most bookmakers, except those working on the ‘Rails’, paid out to the rear of their stands; the rails who operated on both sides, had separate payout areas around the corner in the concourse area leading through to the Paddock lawn and the terraced area above the birdcage enclosure.

[i] ‘Mobile barrier’: a retractable pair of barrier gates installed on the back of a pick-up truck used to start harness races.

 

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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