Something for the Pain (8 page)

Lawrie's successful day had a downside for me (that expression was something else that hadn't come into existence in 1958). Lawrie had decided that I was a master tipster, and every Friday for weeks afterwards I had to give him my selections for the Melbourne meeting on the following day. This was three years before the opening of the first TAB agencies, and so Lawrie probably didn't back my selections but merely checked them against the results in the Saturday evening
Sporting Globe
. He would have lost money if he
had
backed them. Selecting horses for someone else to back is an uncomfortable and thankless task. A Miss Valora comes along only once or twice each year.

If I met up with Lawrie Quinlan during the fifty years following 1958, I have no recollection of it. I certainly met up with him in 2009 and learned from him the detail that completes this section of this book. Certain diligent persons had arranged a reunion, fifty years onwards, for the students who graduated from Toorak Teachers' College in 1959. I had never previously been to any sort of reunion. I suspected that those who attended such functions wanted to boast of their wealth or their achievements. I'm not sorry that I attended the reunion of my old teachers' college, although I had to shut my ears to a certain amount of boasting. No one had achieved great wealth as a result of his or her lifelong career in the Ministry of Education, but those who had stuck it out to the end enjoyed lucrative pensions from their old-fashioned defined-benefits superannuation schemes. What they most often boasted of was their travelling—they seemed to travel every year to some or another far part of the globe. (No one asked me, but if they had I would cheerfully have admitted that I had never been in an aeroplane or on an ocean-going vessel and that I had cashed in my superannuation contributions in 1974 when I resigned from the Education Department, as it was then called, and had used the money as my betting bank during my brief attempt to live as a professional punter.)

Another thing that I noticed about my old fellow students was their abstemiousness. Some drank only water; most drank one or two glasses of wine. The management of the hotel—heaven knows why—had employed three young persons to man the bar in the private-functions area where the reunion took place, and the three stood mostly idle all afternoon. Only Lawrie Quinlan, two other men and I went regularly to the bar for pots of beer. We four supposed that the many hearty beer drinkers we had known at teachers' college had failed to attend because they had drunk themselves into either penury or early graves.

Of course, Lawrie and I recalled Miss Valora's win on Show Day in 1958, and of course I asked if anything had come of his interest in Pat Tully. He told me that they had gone out together only once or twice after their day at Caulfield and that he had not seen her again after they had left teachers' college. He told me, though, that he had heard long ago that Pat had left teaching after a few years and had joined a strict order of nuns.

At the time when Pat Tully had gone off to be a nun, a person entering a convent or a monastery or a seminary was said to have a vocation. Such a person would sometimes admit to having made all at once and unexpectedly the momentous discovery that he or she was called by God to turn aside from worldly concerns and to follow Him. In the days after the reunion, I put together, with hardly any facts to build on, an imaginary account of Pat Tully's discovering her vocation. I was aware of all the social changes that had taken place in the previous fifty years. I was aware that Pat Tully might have long since left her convent, might have been twice married and divorced, and might then have moved to an ashram in India. I understood this, but I choose nowadays, whenever I think of Lawrie Quinlan and Pat Tully, to think of the flame-haired young woman as having turned away forever from worldly concerns after her experience as a racegoer at Caulfield on Show Day in 1958.

Sometimes I suppose that Pat Tully looked around her after the running of the last race of the day and had an insight into the pettiness of what she might have called the material world. She saw the discarded betting tickets littering the ground around her and the dejection on the faces of most of the home-going punters. Even when her escort for the day counted out in front of her the thirty-four pounds he had just then collected from a bookmaker, she felt a sort of pity for the well-meaning young man who could find such satisfaction in a matter so little connected with the salvation of his immortal soul.

Sometimes, however, I imagine that Pat Tully never afterwards forgot the ecstatic moment when the young man who had spent so much effort and so much money in order to have her entertained for the day and who felt, perhaps, a romantic attraction to her—the ecstatic moment when the young man beside her gripped her hand and pointed her fingers towards one of a dozen and more satin-jacketed horsemen bearing down on her from the far distance, and when the increasing prominence of a red-and-white quartered jacket told her that Miss Valora was about to reach the lead; that her lightly made prayer of a few minutes before was about to be answered emphatically; that it was indeed possible for the agencies of the invisible world to intervene in the workings of the visible.

8.
The Two Maikais

I NEVER MET
anyone whose interest in racing matched my own. Both on and off the course, so to speak, I've enjoyed the company of many a racing acquaintance. I've read books, or parts of books, by persons who might have come close to being true racing friends of mine if ever we had met. For most of my long life, however, my enjoyment of racing has been a solitary thing: something I could never wholly explain to anyone else. I've met a few persons with an interest in racing no less intense than mine, but the key word in my opening sentence above is
matched
. Racing has many sides to it, some of them of great interest to me and others of less interest. I have little interest in breeding or pedigrees, for example, but I take a great interest in racing colours and in the naming of horses. In later sections of this book, I'll look further into my lifelong obsession with racing. Here, I'll simply say that I've never met, in person or through reading, anyone who responds to racing in quite the way that I respond.

My first racing acquaintance was Dennis Hanrahan, who sat in the same classroom with me for three years in the early 1950s. In 1957, soon after we had both left school, Dennis and I began going to every Saturday meeting in Melbourne. For several years, we could afford to go only into the cheaper enclosures. We watched every race together from our agreed vantage points on the Hill at Flemington, on the South Hill at Moonee Valley, and in the Guineas at Caulfield. In fact, we graduated to the Guineas at Caulfield after about a year. Before that, we went to the even cheaper Flat, where the patrons were mostly pensioners or persons of modest means or minors such as ourselves. Dennis and I each had a pair of binoculars bought from the first shipment of Japanese optical instruments to reach Australia after the Second World War. We were almost the only persons in the cheap enclosures to have binoculars and to be able to follow each race in detail. We knew the colours carried by every horse at every meeting and we each murmured a rudimentary call as we watched each race. In those days, when the crowd at a Saturday meeting numbered never less than twenty thousand, the roar from the grandstands often drowned out the words of the course broadcaster, and Dennis and I, in the hubbub after a field had passed the winning post, were often asked by those around us to announce the placegetters to them, which we were always able to do—sometimes before the official numbers were raised above the judge's box. Years later, Dennis became the judge for the Victoria Amateur Turf Club (VATC), which conducted meetings at Caulfield and Sandown.

Mention of race calling prompts me to digress. I believe most callers waste far too many words in an effort to describe details better left to the imagination of the listener. This is especially so with course broadcasters, whose audience can usually make out with their own eyes the string of distant horse shapes and need only to be told such facts as that the leader is so-and-so, while the horse going forward on the outside is so-and-so…Even callers addressing radio audiences try needlessly for descriptive language when simpler terms would do. For example, the word
tiring
alone conveys enough to me, and yet callers describe horses as
stopping to a walk
or
falling in a hole
or
feeling the pinch
…The American term
closing
alone would supply me with an image of a horse likely soon to reach the lead. I don't need to be told that a certain runner is
coming with a well-timed run
or
emerging from the pack
, not to mention
finishing like a shot out of a gun
or
coming from the clouds
…

By far the best race caller I ever heard was Geoff Mahoney, who called the Sydney races for the ABC for thirty years, from the late 1950s until the late 1980s. In his
History of Australian Thoroughbred Racing
, Andrew Lemon quotes a description of Mahoney as having ‘superb control, impeccable diction and a style as smooth as velvet'. When reporting a close finish, most race callers raise their voices or shout. Mahoney used not volume but tone and pitch whenever a blanket finish threatened—even in a Doncaster Handicap or a Golden Slipper. I never heard Mahoney stumble over a horse's name or offer a gratuitous comment on anything he observed. He avoided even the use of first names for trainers or jockeys. Most callers seem to use these to suggest that they, the callers, are matey with the big names of racing. Mahoney was the only caller who never referred to the famous Sydney trainer as
Tommy Smith
. To Geoff Mahoney, the man was always
T. J. Smith
.

By far the worst caller I ever heard was Bert Bryant, who has often been named by persons who should know better as having been one of the best. Bryant began calling in his teens in the district around Dubbo, New South Wales, and became assistant caller at 3UZ in Melbourne in 1948, when he was in his early twenties. I would never deny that Bryant was a most capable caller in his first years at 3UZ but he soon afterwards began to turn into a self-opinionated loudmouth, and by the end of his career he was an incompetent buffoon and I could hardly bear to listen to him.

For many years, I owned a long-playing recording of Bert Bryant's calls of the Melbourne Cup from about 1950 until 1960. Even during those ten years, his calls of the Cup gave evidence of his decline. In his early years, he was fluent and impersonal. In later years, it was easy to tell which horse he himself had backed, and not just because it was favourite but because of the inordinate trouble he took to report on its prospects during the running. Not only that, but he tried more and more to put into his calls what his admirers praised as colourful description but I considered time-wasting and foolish. Often, he would report that a horse running wide was hanging out or sticking out like granny's tooth or that a horse showing unexpected stamina was staying on like a mother-in-law.

Most callers in their later years deliver too many of their own opinions and prejudices but Bryant was unrelenting. One day in the 1960s, a horse named Nyngan (some or other combination of black, gold, and pale blue) seemed likely to win a staying race at Moonee Valley. Now, the same horse had disappointed his followers on several recent occasions, starting favourite and finishing no better than third or fourth. No doubt, Bryant had been one of those followers but had not backed the horse on the day that I'm writing about. When Nyngan reached the lead in the straight, Bryant came out with, ‘Don't tell me the dog's going to win a race at last! Yes, Nyngan wins it! The dog wins it!' I was told later that the owners of Nyngan demanded and received an apology from Bryant for his remarks, and rightly so.

Bert Bryant was a profoundly ignorant man who took no interest in the meanings of obscure names or the approximate pronunciation of foreign names. One day he wondered aloud about the meaning of the name Guid Gillie. An obliging listener phoned the studio at 3UZ to say that the name meant ‘good gamekeeper'. Bryant seemed not only to have no acquaintance with Scots dialect words but also not to know what a gamekeeper might be. He interpreted the phrase as
good, game keeper
, and then resorted to his excruciating brand of lame humour. ‘
Good, game keeper
,' he mused aloud. ‘Why, that must mean
husband
!'

Bryant was at his absolute worst one day at Warrnambool in May 1974, when he was calling not only for listeners on the radio but for the big crowd on course as well. Rain was falling, the track was heavy, and jockeys' colours were spattered with mud as the field in the first race came up the straight. Yes, conditions were difficult, but celebrity race callers such as Bryant are paid generous salaries in return for their coping with such things. A hundred metres short of the post, about six horses were vying for the lead—another difficulty, but surely not insurmountable for a man of Bryant's reputation. As the expression goes, Bryant lost it. He spluttered and blurted out not so much racehorse names as cries of ‘I don't know where to look!' or ‘There's half the field spread across the track!' It was the worst call of a finish that I had ever heard, and if a young caller-on-probation had been responsible for it he would surely have lost his job.

Worse was to come. Bryant had obviously no idea of the identity of the winner and, after he had filled in with fatuous chat, the numbers appeared outside the judge's box. Bryant announced the winner's name, which I've long since forgotten. Then came a pause. Now, the rider of the winner appeared in the race book as
S. Buhagiar
. Sam Buhagiar had ridden for years in the south-west of Victoria and the south-east of South Australia, with much success. He had ridden occasionally in Melbourne, where Bryant would have been calling. Perhaps Bert was still discomposed by his failure to call the recent finish. Perhaps he was still hung over from his drinking into the early hours of that morning. (The three-day May Carnival at Warrnambool was renowned for the drinking that went on in every hotel between Camperdown and Port Fairy. My mother spent the last forty years of her life in Warrnambool, and she and her cronies provided me several times with anecdotal evidence—gossip, if you prefer—about the drinking feats of Bert Bryant and his offsider, John Russell.) I mentioned a pause back there. After the pause, Bert Bryant blurted out that the rider of the winner was
S. Boomerang
! Someone in his vicinity must have rebuked him at once, or perhaps even Bryant himself began to understand what a fool he was making of himself. He came out with the absurd explanation: ‘I don't know the lad.' Only four years later, Bryant announced his early retirement from race calling. His stated reason was ill health. He should have been induced to retire many years earlier on the grounds of his gross incompetence. The digression has now ended.