Melbourne Cups Remembered

It's the Melbourne Cup today - and here in Sydney, the annual fever has struck. As I walked down Martin Place at lunchtime, a large temporary TAB marquee was attracting long queues of men in suits and ladies in hats, keen to place their bets.
The scene reminded me that from the late 1980s, for seven years, my husband & I had the pleasure of hosting a major bank's 'corporate tent' at the Melbourne Cup. They were long champagne-filled days, with me smiling constantly at our guests while trying hard to hold on to my hat and avoid a Julia Gillard incident involving high heels and grass. (That's me, in the hat.)

One very wet, muddy year I gave up the footwear struggle and retrieved my anklet-style gumboots, used at our farm, from the boot of our car. My husband was horrified at my break with tradition but next year, again with very boggy conditions in 'the car park' where the corporate tents were erected, it was gratifying to see that the fashion statement for the ladies was ..... gumboots. After that, the organisers stepped up - with carpeted duckwalks, and hard flooring inside the much grander corporate marquees.

These days, much of my focus is on the Hawkesbury, which has a long connection to racing and the Melbourne Cup. The Wilberforce Races which began in 1843 ran various events on an oval course, about a mile in extent, including some two-mile races, well ahead of the introduction of that distance for the first Melbourne Cup in 1861. The track in 1847, which 'without hesitation is the best we have ever seen', was situated in the centre of Paul Bushell's run beside Bushell's Lagoon - 'as level as a bowling green, and divested of everything in shape of a tree or stump'. The 'surpassing beauty of the course' was not equalled by any other in the colony and even boasted a grandstand by 1849. The Bushell boys played an active part in the races.

Paul Bushell raised Isabella Forrester from infancy and it was Isabella's nephew William 'Black Bill' Forrester who later won back-to-back Melbourne Cups. In 1897 his horse Gaulus came first and his horse The Grafter came second. In 1898 he won with The Grafter, pictured here in a postcard, by courtesy of the National Museum of Australia. Back then, the legs on 'stayers' seemed to be much sturdier than the spindly supports for today's thoroughbreds.