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 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, keen on the sport of kings, intensively studies of the form guide of the Melbourne ‘Sun’ and listens 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 and 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 brother tells a 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, Canada, 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 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), I find students arriving tired as they have jobs of various sorts at the Racecourse and rise before dawn.
The lead up to Melbourne Cup provides an ideal time for the Year 12 end of school ‘graduation’ event 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 wearing specially bought or made dresses, with fascinator hats, the boys’ suits. We gather in the dark at a gap in the fence between the school and the racetrack, passing carefully through towards a rather mystical experience in which elegant horses pass by as they move towards the track, then thunder past skilfully guided by petite riders wearing colours allowed for this celebratory practice.
Happy memories!
For various reasons my interest in racing wanes completely, although, two decades later, in 2011 while doing family history, I came to know members of my grandfather’s Miller clan who also have stories about Johnny Miller and ‘Galilee’.
Oh…. back to the here and now …. I wonder which horse won this year’s Melbourne Cup?
It seems that ‘Knight’s Choice won by a nose in a photo finish’!
Beverley Lee
February 2025
(Story idea from Tuesday 5th November 2024, ‘Cup Day’ in Melbourne)
‘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 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, keen on the sport of kings, intensively studies of the form guide of the Melbourne ‘Sun’ and listens 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 and 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 brother tells a 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, Canada, 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 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), I find students arriving tired as they have jobs of various sorts at the Racecourse and rise before dawn.
The lead up to Melbourne Cup provides an ideal time for the Year 12 end of school ‘graduation’ event 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 wearing specially bought or made dresses, with fascinator hats, the boys’ suits. We gather in the dark at a gap in the fence between the school and the racetrack, passing carefully through towards a rather mystical experience in which elegant horses pass by as they move towards the track, then thunder past skilfully guided by petite riders wearing colours allowed for this celebratory practice.
Happy memories!
For various reasons my interest in racing wanes completely, although, two decades later, in 2011 while doing family history, I came to know members of my grandfather’s Miller clan who also have stories about Johnny Miller and ‘Galilee’.
Oh…. back to the here and now …. I wonder which horse won this year’s Melbourne Cup?
It seems that ‘Knight’s Choice won by a nose in a photo finish’!
Beverley Lee
February 2025
(Story idea from Tuesday 5th November 2024, ‘Cup Day’ in Melbourne)
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