One Moment This Year “Reflections on the Melbourne Cup”
It’s 3.15 pm on the first Tuesday in November 2024.
‘I’ve just missed the Melbourne Cup’ … I think, arising from an early afternoon siesta… Sleepily walking to the kitchen to make a coffee, I find myself reflecting on times when ‘the Melbourne Cup’ was an event, rather than as currently, a non-event, in my life…
It’s the early 1960’s, and I’m in mid-teens, studying at Malvern Girls Secondary School. I often stay with my grandparents, who live a short #3 tram ride away along Balaclava Road. My grandfather, Jack Devitt’s, hobby is intensively study of the form guide of the Melbourne ‘Sun’, with many hours spent perusing it and listening to the races on the brown, Bakelite radio, in the dining room. Genetically linked to a family of horse-trainers and jockeys, it is a family story that ‘racing is in his blood’. He encourages me to follow Galilee – he has great respect for trainer Bart Cummings who employs his cousin’s son Johnny Miller to ride Galilee. An occasion when I placed a bet and won!
My grandfather’s gambling is the only bone of contention between my grandparents. I notice that he diplomatically waits for my grandmother to leave for croquet at Caulfield Park before catching the next tram along Balaclava Road to the Caulfield Racecourse. I also notice he is at home before she returns! My brother tells a wonderful story of visiting our grandfather in hospital not long before he died, and Poppa quietly whispering in his ear to “keep an eye on Galilee” in the Melbourne Cup.
Fast forward to 1982. I’m teaching at Kamloops Senior High School, British Columbia, on teacher exchange. It’s nearing November, I’ll soon be returning to Australia, when I have a brain wave. I’ll have a Melbourne Cup party. Canadians have a way of observing all sorts of occasions, often surprising me when going to the supermarket at checkout operators dressed in a costume to mark yet another occasion – St Patrick’s Day, Halloween, all sorts of days. Keen to repay generous hospitality I’ve received it dawns on me that having a Melbourne Cup celebration on Cup Day could be “just the thing”. I send out invitations, explain the dress code, contact friends in Australia for the entries, jockeys and odds. Buying Australian themed prizes and putting the horse’s names in a hat, I invite guests to choose a horse as they arrive. At 3pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, the phone rings. With a microphone trained at our end of the line, the excitement and escalating cadence of the call transmits to the room. It becomes clear who has won, prizes are distributed, the champagne flows!
A few years later I find myself teaching Year 11 and 12 Economics at Flemington High School, on the grounds of the Flemington Racecourse. A wonderfully diverse school, some of the students and their parents are attached to the racing industry. Instead of arriving tired in the mornings because they’d been ‘up milking’ before school (as I’d experienced in country schools), students arrive tired as they have jobs of various sorts at the Racecourse and rise before dawn.
I teach Year 12 Economics at Flemington High from 1986 to 1989. The lead up to Melbourne cup provided an ideal time for their end of school ‘graduation’ event each year centred around ‘Breakfast with the Stars’, a champagne breakfast enjoyed by people in the racing fraternity keen to see the Melbourne Cup field in their final track work before the big race. The students dress for the occasion, a ‘graduation’ of sorts, the girls wear specially bought or made dresses, with fascinator hats, the boys’ suits. We gathered in the dark at a gap in the fence between the school and the racetrack, passing carefully through it towards a rather mystical experience in which elegant horses pass by as they move towards the track, then thunder past with petite riders, wearing colours allowed for this celebratory practice, skilfully guiding themI Happy Days!
For various reasons my interest in racing wanes completely, although, two decades later, in 2011 while doing family history, I joyously came to know members of my grandfather’s Miller clan who also have a link to Johnny Miller and the story of ‘Galilee’.
A poem my mother wrote about her sister Joyce, a milliner in Caulfield during the 1930’s and 40’s, reminds me again of my family’s links to the Melbourne Cup….
‘Joy Devitt’ for hats…
Kooyong Road, North Caulfield around 1939-1942
My sister Joyce is a milliner
Her talents beyond dispute
Her hats are quite fantastic
All ages she can suit.
She started in a workroom
That’s where she learnt her trade
Then opened her own business
Her fortune to be made.
Her hats were always special
She really had a flare
They were the latest fashion and
Were easy styles to wear.
She gave up many years ago
Now only does a few
May be just for the family, or
when Melbourne Cup is due!
Paula Lee nee Devitt, aged 97.5, October 2010
Oh…. back to the here and now …. I wonder which horse won this year’s Melbourne Cup? …
It seems that ‘Knight’s Choice has won by a nose in a photo finish’!
Beverley Lee
Tuesday 5th November 2024, ‘Cup Day’ in Melbourne
It’s 3.15 pm on the first Tuesday in November 2024.
‘I’ve just missed the Melbourne Cup’ … I think, arising from an early afternoon siesta… Sleepily walking to the kitchen to make a coffee, I find myself reflecting on times when ‘the Melbourne Cup’ was an event, rather than as currently, a non-event, in my life…
It’s the early 1960’s, and I’m in mid-teens, studying at Malvern Girls Secondary School. I often stay with my grandparents, who live a short #3 tram ride away along Balaclava Road. My grandfather, Jack Devitt’s, hobby is intensively study of the form guide of the Melbourne ‘Sun’, with many hours spent perusing it and listening to the races on the brown, Bakelite radio, in the dining room. Genetically linked to a family of horse-trainers and jockeys, it is a family story that ‘racing is in his blood’. He encourages me to follow Galilee – he has great respect for trainer Bart Cummings who employs his cousin’s son Johnny Miller to ride Galilee. An occasion when I placed a bet and won!
My grandfather’s gambling is the only bone of contention between my grandparents. I notice that he diplomatically waits for my grandmother to leave for croquet at Caulfield Park before catching the next tram along Balaclava Road to the Caulfield Racecourse. I also notice he is at home before she returns! My brother tells a wonderful story of visiting our grandfather in hospital not long before he died, and Poppa quietly whispering in his ear to “keep an eye on Galilee” in the Melbourne Cup.
Fast forward to 1982. I’m teaching at Kamloops Senior High School, British Columbia, on teacher exchange. It’s nearing November, I’ll soon be returning to Australia, when I have a brain wave. I’ll have a Melbourne Cup party. Canadians have a way of observing all sorts of occasions, often surprising me when going to the supermarket at checkout operators dressed in a costume to mark yet another occasion – St Patrick’s Day, Halloween, all sorts of days. Keen to repay generous hospitality I’ve received it dawns on me that having a Melbourne Cup celebration on Cup Day could be “just the thing”. I send out invitations, explain the dress code, contact friends in Australia for the entries, jockeys and odds. Buying Australian themed prizes and putting the horse’s names in a hat, I invite guests to choose a horse as they arrive. At 3pm Australian Eastern Standard Time, the phone rings. With a microphone trained at our end of the line, the excitement and escalating cadence of the call transmits to the room. It becomes clear who has won, prizes are distributed, the champagne flows!
A few years later I find myself teaching Year 11 and 12 Economics at Flemington High School, on the grounds of the Flemington Racecourse. A wonderfully diverse school, some of the students and their parents are attached to the racing industry. Instead of arriving tired in the mornings because they’d been ‘up milking’ before school (as I’d experienced in country schools), students arrive tired as they have jobs of various sorts at the Racecourse and rise before dawn.
I teach Year 12 Economics at Flemington High from 1986 to 1989. The lead up to Melbourne cup provided an ideal time for their end of school ‘graduation’ event each year centred around ‘Breakfast with the Stars’, a champagne breakfast enjoyed by people in the racing fraternity keen to see the Melbourne Cup field in their final track work before the big race. The students dress for the occasion, a ‘graduation’ of sorts, the girls wear specially bought or made dresses, with fascinator hats, the boys’ suits. We gathered in the dark at a gap in the fence between the school and the racetrack, passing carefully through it towards a rather mystical experience in which elegant horses pass by as they move towards the track, then thunder past with petite riders, wearing colours allowed for this celebratory practice, skilfully guiding themI Happy Days!
For various reasons my interest in racing wanes completely, although, two decades later, in 2011 while doing family history, I joyously came to know members of my grandfather’s Miller clan who also have a link to Johnny Miller and the story of ‘Galilee’.
A poem my mother wrote about her sister Joyce, a milliner in Caulfield during the 1930’s and 40’s, reminds me again of my family’s links to the Melbourne Cup….
‘Joy Devitt’ for hats…
Kooyong Road, North Caulfield around 1939-1942
My sister Joyce is a milliner
Her talents beyond dispute
Her hats are quite fantastic
All ages she can suit.
She started in a workroom
That’s where she learnt her trade
Then opened her own business
Her fortune to be made.
Her hats were always special
She really had a flare
They were the latest fashion and
Were easy styles to wear.
She gave up many years ago
Now only does a few
May be just for the family, or
when Melbourne Cup is due!
Paula Lee nee Devitt, aged 97.5, October 2010
Oh…. back to the here and now …. I wonder which horse won this year’s Melbourne Cup? …
It seems that ‘Knight’s Choice has won by a nose in a photo finish’!
Beverley Lee
Tuesday 5th November 2024, ‘Cup Day’ in Melbourne
