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.
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