Preliminary Programme

Wed 22 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Thu 23 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Fri 24 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

Sat 25 March
    8:30
    10:45
    14:15
    16:30

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Wednesday 22 March 2006 16:30
T-4 LAB10 Horse racing and gambling I: ethnicity, class and gender
Room T
Network: Labour Chair: Janet Winters
Organizer: Mats Greiff Discussant: Susanna Hedenborg
Åsa Bonn : The pictures of the gypsies in Finnish horse journals 1924 to 1965
The gypsies have always been closely connected with horses. Because of this, it is easy to believe that the gypsies also in one way or another should be dealt with in the horse journals published in Finland from 1924 onwards. In the paper I will analyze
the pictures given of ... (Show more)
The gypsies have always been closely connected with horses. Because of this, it is easy to believe that the gypsies also in one way or another should be dealt with in the horse journals published in Finland from 1924 onwards. In the paper I will analyze
the pictures given of the gypsy in six Finnish horse journals, dating from 1924 to 1965. Besides the non-gypsy aspect I will also have an inner gypsy perspective in my paper. In my opinion the pictures of the gypsy population do to a large extent reflect important values in the gypsy society. In addition, the articles reflect the non-gypsy idea of gypsy disinclination to conform to the conventional Finnish society. (Show less)

Mats Greiff : From "Horsemanship" to "Softhanded Nursing". Gender Relations within Swedish Harness Racing 1930-2005
The paper discusses how harness racing has changed from being exclusively practised by men to being a sport including both men and women. However, even if women today represent a considerable rate of the people involved in harness racing, hierarchical patterns are prevalent. Reasons for that are also discussed.

Already in ... (Show more)
The paper discusses how harness racing has changed from being exclusively practised by men to being a sport including both men and women. However, even if women today represent a considerable rate of the people involved in harness racing, hierarchical patterns are prevalent. Reasons for that are also discussed.

Already in the late 1930s a few women took part in the sport as amateur drivers, but it took to the early 1970s before women gained permission to drive and train horses as professionals. Reasons for this development are discussed. Up to the 1960s men successfully defended harness racing as a male premise. Strategies for that are discussed. From the 1970s women became more and more involved in harness racing. Several reasons on different levels of the society and within the harness racing coincided and propelled the development.

Close connected to the quantitative feminisation of harness racing is a change in the view of which kind of skill that is necessary in handling horses. In earlier times strength, braveness and a kind of engineering skill were emphasised but during the 1980s it was more and more pointed to skills connected to care-taking with soft hands. (Show less)

Chris Mcconville : “An erratic journey?" Gender, race and national identity at the Melbourne Cup Carnival 1960-1979
The Melbourne Cup rarely figures in contemporary argument about Australia’s history [the so-called ‘history wars’]. Yet the folklore surrounding Australia’s most significant racing event, does provide neat historical metaphors. In the years during and immediately after World War One horses imported from England for this and other feature races supposedly ... (Show more)
The Melbourne Cup rarely figures in contemporary argument about Australia’s history [the so-called ‘history wars’]. Yet the folklore surrounding Australia’s most significant racing event, does provide neat historical metaphors. In the years during and immediately after World War One horses imported from England for this and other feature races supposedly signified renewal of imperial loyalties. The growing number of entries from Ireland, England, Asia and North America since 1993 have been taken by some to reflect Australia’s exposure to late-twentieth century globalism. Between these two eras in racing history, the varied ownership of cup-winning horses in the 1920s may be related to more fluid class relations within Australia’s post-colonial elite, just as the success of a ‘battling owner-trainer’ in the 1930s can be recalled as indicative of an inward-looking popular Australianness typical of the post-Depression decade. Little of this popular memory is noticed by academic historians. Even less notice is taken of Melbourrne Cup events during the 1960s and 1970s. Academic analysis of these decades is almost mesmerically drawn to newly-mediated identities arising from popular music and television. And yet, whilst, by the 1960s, horse racing seemed no more than a remnant from an older Anglo-Australia quickly fading before a brighter feminised and racially-diverse youth culture, the Melbourne Cup remains a critical marker of social change.

This paper examines some aspects of the Melbourne Cup Carnival between 1961 and 1979, to conclude that spectacular public events like the Cup can be read at the very least as metaphors for wider social transitions. On occasions these popular sporting occasions did play a part in transforming aspects of the broader culture. Events discussed in this paper include the deliberate if highly conservative feminisation of raceday and racecourse design associated with the running of the centenary cup in 1960; the subsequent subtle subversion of this ‘new’ tradition by model Jean Shrimpton’s barefooted appearance in 1965 and the contemporaneous efforts by some in the racing industry to prevent registration of females jockeys and trainers. The rise of legendary trainer Bart Cummings to popular deification as ‘The Cups King’ in this era overshadowed his role in another critical transition; the entry of Asian owners and later breeders into Australian racing.
Tan Chin Nam. The Kuala Lumpur financier and property owner had approached Cummings to buy a thoroughbred, and as part owner of Think Big, winner in 1974 and 1975 Tan Chin Nam led the way for the current close integration of the Australian bloodstock industry and East Asian capital. In horse race gambling ‘The Filipino Fireball’, Philipe Ysmael played a similar role.

Throughout this era Australian owners struggled to come to terms with the fact that the winner was more likely to be a New Zealand rather than an Australian horse. And unlike many New Zealand-bred winners of cup races between 1930 and 1960, these horses were often both owned and trained in New Zealand. The traditional chauvinist technique of simply assimilating successful new Zealanders into some Pan-Australasian identity no longer seemed sufficient, particular as the Cup day events themselves were being subsumed in newly carnivalesque popular behaviours. If the Cup was a great moment in Australia’s acting out of a national identity, then clearly that Australianness was undergoing radical revision in this era. Tensions in the Cup’s place in an Australian tradition came to a head in 1977 when an unsteady Sir John Kerr, Governor General of the Commonwealth of Australia, attempted to deliver an erratic speech at the Cup presentation ceremony, only to be jeered into silence by the crowd. In 1979, when Red Handed finished third in the Cup, the ridiculousness of Australia’s continued connection to the House of Windsor through vice-regal appointments such as those of Sir John, was rendered canonical in the hugely popular drawings of Tandberg. The Melbourne ‘Age’ cartoonist established yet another Cup Day Cup tradition. In it, a red-nosed Sir John, hampered by a substantial bottle of Scotch, stumbled to the Flemington finish line, a pictorial narrative of anti-imperialism which lasted for years.

These iconic moment s in Cup history are known widely to racing fans, reflected on annually in the media and retold with great affection by racing writers. And yet in the many historical discussions surrounding for example the current ‘culture wars’ they are, if registered at all, dismissed as populist romance. The paper argues that if the current historical debates about race, gender and national identity are to make any lasting impact on Australian culture, then festival events like the Melbourne Cup and the mythic characterisations of cup moments in popular memory will need closer attention by historians and social scientists. It is possible to conclude that popular memory and folkloric media histories, in their iconicising of Jean Shrimpton’s bare feet, John Kerr’s unsteadiness on his feet and Bart Cumming’s singular genius, can hardly be dismissed as ‘pop’ or nostalgic readings of the past. Rather, the popular histories of Cup Days can identify important social transitions long before these are recognised by the academic social sciences. (Show less)

Wray Vamplew : Captains Courageous: The Gentleman Rider in British Racing 1866-1914
Racing in Victorian Britain had two distinct strands, flat and jumping. Jockeys in the former rode at considerable lower weights than over jumps and hurdles and few amateurs, with the notable exceptions of ‘Squire Abington’ [George Baird] and George Thursby (who got down to less than 9 stones to finish ... (Show more)
Racing in Victorian Britain had two distinct strands, flat and jumping. Jockeys in the former rode at considerable lower weights than over jumps and hurdles and few amateurs, with the notable exceptions of ‘Squire Abington’ [George Baird] and George Thursby (who got down to less than 9 stones to finish second in two Derbys), were willing to sacrifice the good life sufficiently to compete against professionals. Jump racing, however, was invented by amateur riders, the notion of racing horses across the countryside jumping obstacles en route being derived from the hunting field. Even when professionals came into the sport, some so-called gentlemen riders could hold their own. Arthur Yates won 460 races; Maunsell Richardson and Ted Wilson each won two Grand Nationals; and Roddy Owen had 254 winners from 812 mounts in the decade from 1882 and then gave up racing immediately after winning the 1892 Grand National. Amateurs actually won 12 of the 15 Grand Nationals, the blue riband event of jump racing, between 1871 and 1885, five more between 1885 and 1897, and a further three before 1914. As well as investigating the working and social life of the amateur rider, this paper will consider the changing regulations and definitions of ‘riding for hire’ and ‘qualified riders’ that bedevilled the sport in the late nineteenth century. (Show less)



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