Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  If I never afterwards recalled the exact words of my short lecture, still I recalled that I delivered it in a tone of mock-formality and made needless use of long words. I recalled also that I contrived to address Dorothy Lawler at least once during the lecture and not by her first name, as I usually addressed her, but as Miss Lawler. This was not quite as inelegant as it might seem nowadays. Dorothy and I were not long out of teachers’ college, where lecturers addressed eighteen-years-old students as Miss This or Mister That. District inspectors used the same form of address when conferring with teachers they had not previously met. And even teachers from the same school addressed each other thus in the hearing of students. But why did I thus address the girl I greeted as Dorothy each morning in Leo’s car? More to the point, why did I deliver the lecture in the first place?

  Perhaps I was trying to rebuke Leo for his clumsy attempt at matchmaking. Perhaps I supposed that Dorothy just may have been interested in me. (I was as inept then as I am still today at interpreting the language and behaviour of others, especially females.) If so, then my lecture would have been meant to explain to her why her interest was not returned. Or, was I secretly appealing to Dorothy? Was I informing her that I was without a girlfriend, just as she, for the time being, was without a boyfriend, and that she had only to tell me in the car that afternoon, or next week in the school corridor, that she had never been to a race meeting and would like to learn how horse racing could have such an attraction for a person such as myself? Nudge, nudge; wink, wink, as they used to say long ago.

  Whatever my motives might have been (and I’m hardly better at interpreting my own behaviour than that of others), my lecture achieved nothing, although Leo never afterwards recommended Dorothy to me. I recall that an awkward silence followed the lecture. If I was embarrassed in front of Leo and Dorothy during later days, my embarrassment would have been short-lived. My position at Doveton was only temporary. I was liable to be moved elsewhere at short notice by the clerks in the teachers’ branch of the Education Department, and a few weeks after my lecture I was moved far away indeed. Although I remained a teacher for eight more years and after that a publications officer in the Education Department for five years, I never again saw any of my former colleagues from what I think of as the Illoura period of my life.

  10. Form-Plan and Otto Fenichel

  IN THE LONG-AGO 1960s, I knew a man who claimed to have been helped though a troubled period by his faith in psychoanalysis. When I myself was going through such a period, he urged me to read a certain huge book on the subject. I’ve forgotten the title but I recall the author’s name, which was in gilt letters on the dark-green spine: Otto Fenichel. I read several chapters but I recall today only two short passages. One passage described the symptoms of a man with an obsessive-compulsive disorder. He could never walk more than a few paces forward without obeying an urge to look behind him for any beetle that was lying helpless on its back and needing to be set upright. The other passage was the opening sentence of a section on gambling. According to the learned author, the gambler gambles in order to learn whether or not God has forgiven him for his masturbation. This may or may not be so, but it provides me with an excellent opening to a discussion of systematic ways of betting, or systems, as they used to be called for short. If Fenichel or his followers had ever learned how much time and effort I’ve put into my search for a reliable and profitable betting system, they could only have concluded that I was either the all-time champion Onanist or, at least, the one of all the practitioners of the ancient art who felt the most guilty about it.

  I wish I could recall what first led me to investigate betting systems. In my early years as a follower of racing, I tried to pick winners haphazardly, but in 1952, when I was only thirteen, I began recording the recent form of every winner, hoping to discover some recurrent pattern that would help me predict future winners. In all my life, I’ve never bought a ticket in a lottery or any sort of lotto game with huge prizes. I’ve always believed the odds to be too much against me. And yet, I still today continue the research that I began as a boy more than sixty years ago; I still spend a few minutes each morning checking the results of the latest betting system that I’ve devised.

  If I were to find my golden goose this year, I would make no effort to profit from it. My wants are simple nowadays, and I live in frugal comfort. If my lifetime of research should be rewarded at last, my only pleasure, apart from my knowledge of God’s forgiveness, would come from my leaving the details of my discovery in the folder where I store my Last Will and my instructions for my funeral service. None of my sons shares my obsession with the turf, but all of them would surely be grateful for my leaving them the means for earning a supplementary income.

  Even during the few months in late 1958 and early 1959 when I was sure I had found the Holy Grail of punting, I had no plans for conspicuous consumption. I intended to reinvest my winnings until my betting bank was large enough to supply me with a yearly income of two thousand pounds (about one hundred thousand dollars in today’s currency). This income would enable me to rent a comfortable flat in Dandenong Road, Armadale; to own a small car; to join a middle-level golf club; and to put together a library of a few hundred volumes of fiction and poetry, along with a select collection of long-playing records. I had been much impressed by a few paragraphs in a feature article in the Herald newspaper about the private lives of rails bookmakers. If anyone had discovered the perfect betting system, these men had. So long as they set their books properly and bet equally against all the favoured horses, they could never lose. Those who agreed to be interviewed for the article all chose to remain anonymous and played down the extent of their wealth but freely discussed their interests apart from racing. Many had farms or businesses, yet the man who most impressed me had installed a massive pipe organ in a large, acoustically sound room in his house. He fielded on the rails every Saturday and public holiday but took no other interest in racing. On most weekdays, he spent several hours alone in his chapel-sized room deep among the tree-shaded streets of Toorak, practising his Bach fugues. My way of life would not be quite so austere as that of the bookmaker-organist; I would study each day the newspaper form guides and the results of the previous day’s meetings. However, I would attend the races only when I had to back a horse selected by the strict conditions of my lucrative betting method. On other days, if I wasn’t on the fairways of Riversdale or Commonwealth, I was in my upstairs study overlooking Dandenong Road, with one of Sibelius’s symphonies sounding in the background while I tried to write a poem in the style of Thomas Hardy.

  I should explain that my research into betting systems was mostly theoretical. For much of my life I’ve selected horses according to my own judgement but with a few guiding principles in mind, although nothing resembling the strict rules of the profitable system that I always hoped to find. For example, I bet with moderate success for many years by selecting a horse at single-figure odds to beat the favourite and then backing both that horse and the favourite, so that the favourite would return me my total outlay if it won, while the other horse would show me a profit. My search for the perfect system took place mostly on Sundays or Wednesdays, when I would spread out in front of me the form guide from the previous Saturday together with the results from either the Saturday evening edition or the Wednesday edition of the Sporting Globe. These documents gave me what would be called today instant feedback. Did I want to know how I would have fared on the previous Saturday if I had backed only last-start winners quoted at single-figure odds? I had only to list my hypothetical selections and then to learn their fate from the results in the Globe. What if I had backed only those horses ridden for the first time by the leading jockey or by one of the three leading jockeys? The results in the Globe gave me my answer within minutes. Nor was I so foolish as to suppose that the worth of a betting system or selection method could be assessed from the results at a single race meeting. I kept form guides and Globes for months on end. Although I had not th
en heard the word, I was conducting longitudinal studies of each method that I devised.

  I seem to recall that the advertising of betting systems was made illegal at some time since the 1960s, which might explain why no such ads appear nowadays, although some tipsters are apparently free to offer their services. In the late 1950s, when I saw the first ads for Form-Plan, not only the Sporting Globe but Turf Monthly and other racing publications published ads for systems, mostly boasting results that defied belief and always having as a business address a post-office box in a capital city. I can recall only one system that was advertised continually for year after year; the others disappeared, so to speak, after six months or a year, presumably when disgruntled purchasers had spread the word that their own results failed to match those claimed for past years. Failures of this kind need not prove that the marketer of the system has been downright dishonest. Several times, when looking through past records to check the worth of one of my own systems, I’ve decided to vary one or another rule so that the system would have selected a certain winner at long odds. I might even have done this more than once, only to learn later that the new rules obliged me to include so many losing selections that the profits from the long-priced horse were wiped out. As financial advisers remind us nowadays, past results may not necessarily be repeated in the future.

  I do recall one instance, however, of deliberate deception. The promoter of the system, so I was told, provided purchasers with a plan for backing one or another of the three horses uppermost in the so-called newspaper poll. In those days, several newspapers in both Sydney and Melbourne provided detailed coverage of racing. This included selections from up to ten tipsters and a poll ranking horses according to their popularity with the tipsters. If the deviser of the system had told purchasers which of the various polls he had used to obtain his lucrative past results, then the results could easily have been checked from old newspapers. But the deviser of the system claimed that each user should make up his or her own poll, using the selections of six or seven so-called leading tipsters. This, he assured his hopeful clients, was what he had done in the past. In other words, no one testing the system could claim that certain winners supposedly backed in the past had not been among the top three in any popularity poll; the deviser of the system could simply claim that his own privately assembled poll had most certainly included the said horses. Likewise, if the poor purchaser failed to show a profit from the first few months of betting, he might be told, or he might himself believe, that his choice of tipsters was at fault.

  I had been following the races for nearly ten years when Form-Plan was first promoted. As nearly as I can recall, this took place in early 1957. I had seen nothing like it before: a whole page of the Wednesday Sporting Globe was given over to advertising a betting method alleged to select about fifty per cent winners and seventy-five per cent placings, and to have turned a modest starting bank into a small fortune during the past five years. Apart from the lavish advertising, what distinguished Form-Plan from all other systems that I had read about was that the man selling Form-Plan was doing so under his own name and from his home address. Well, being somewhat older and wiser now than in 1957, I suppose I should write that the promoter of Form-Plan claimed to be named A. T. Maclean and to live at a stated address in Batman Street, West Melbourne. As further evidence of his trustworthiness, he provided a likeness of himself—or certainly of a nondescript man looking studiously through horn-rimmed spectacles.

  I may be writing ironically now, but all this caused something of a stir among my racing acquaintances, who were used to reading about systems peddled from Sydney post-office boxes. I tried to keep an open mind. I would have liked to believe that someone had at last discovered what I had searched for in vain for nearly ten years. My chief query arose from my frequent daydream of what I would do after I had discovered my own equivalent of Form-Plan. The very last thing I would do would be to advertise my discovery to the racing public of Victoria and to provide them with a likeness of myself, with or without horn-rimmed glasses.

  Connected with this was my fear of what might happen if punters in their hundreds or their thousands bought Mr Maclean’s foolproof system and set about using it every Saturday. In fact, part of my concern was that the system could not be used every Saturday. It was clear from the summary of results in the advertisement that Form-Plan selected hardly more than twenty horses each year. If someone following the system were to make more than pocket money from it, he or she would have to bet very large sums indeed on each of the small number of selections. The economics of the system, and even of racing in general, might be altered if hundreds, or even thousands, of Form-Plan followers rushed at the bookmakers whenever a selection was about to race.

  Yes, I had my doubts, and yet a time came when I could hold out no longer. The ads had been appearing in the Sporting Globe every week for much more than a year and yet the economics of racing had seemed unchanged. Mr Maclean would have had to sell thousands of copies of his system to pay for his ads and to make a profit. I could only assume that his clients were satisfied with what they had been sold. The horn-rimmed visage still appeared week after week, and I had read no newspaper account of bricks having been thrown through windows in Batman Street, West Melbourne. Perhaps the followers of Form-Plan were content with modest profits and not yet eager to give up their day jobs, as we say nowadays.

  Form-Plan cost ten pounds. About a year after I had bought my copy, I began work as a primary teacher near the bottom of the salary scale. My first fortnightly pay cheque amounted to thirty-four pounds. A better comparison might be the cost of a good-quality hardcover book at that time: about one and a half pounds. Mr Maclean’s product was at the top end of the market, to use another present-day expression.

  I didn’t actually pay the full price for Form-Plan. In September 1958, I went halves with a fellow student teacher named Graham Nash, whom I haven’t seen or heard of for nearly fifty-five years. Without knowing it, we had bought Form-Plan at the right time. The system selected only two-years-old horses. Races for two-years-old in Melbourne and interstate begin in late September or early October and end in late July. That was our first surprise. From early August we would have nothing to bet on for nearly two months. Nor would our betting be frantic in other months. As the advertised summaries of results had suggested, Form-Plan selected only about twenty horses each year in Melbourne and Sydney combined. This was about one bet each fortnight. I could not easily foresee myself going for two weeks at a time without betting. But I rather admired the selection method itself. Like many other observant punters, I had noticed that races for two-years-old seemed more often won by the favourite or the best-performed horse. I had sometimes skulked around bookmakers’ stands when the clerk was working out the final result for a race, and I had learned sometimes from a betting sheet that a race for two-years-old had resulted in a loss for the bookmaker because punters had wanted to back only the favourite or the second-favourite. Form-Plan selected only top weights in two-years-old races, whether or not they were favourites. A selection had to have won or been placed recently. I forget the other few rules, except that selections had to be backed each way, that is, for both a win and a place. I found this puzzling at the time, and I wonder now whether it was a result of the sort of tinkering that I had mentioned earlier: whether Mr Maclean had decided to recommend each-way betting after having noticed at some point in his past results a frustrating sequence of second and third placings.

  Graham Nash and I had shared the cost of Form-Plan, but we kept our betting separate. I had decided to bet five pounds each way on each selection, which was several times more than the largest bet I had previously had. On the other hand, I intended to bet only on Form-Plan horses, saving my money for a few decisive bets. The first of them was on a filly named Snowflower (Pale blue, tartan sash) at Caulfield on the Wednesday before the Caulfield Cup. Snowflower was narrowly beaten but that was all right for a start, we thought. We had lost only a quarter of ou
r outlay after collecting on our place bets. Our second bet was ten days later, on Moonee Valley Cup Day, as we used to call the day that is now known as Cox Plate Day. Our selection was the filly that had beaten Snowflower at Caulfield: Faithful City (Green, gold Maltese cross, striped sleeves and cap). Faithful City was at the generous odds of four-to-one. The favourite was Ritmar (White, purple stripes), a filly from Sydney ridden by Neville Sellwood. I wish I could remember who rode Faithful City. Ritmar could gallop only at top speed, and the rider of Faithful City, having seen this, held his mount together for a last run at the favourite. Ritmar led by two lengths around the turn. The straight at Moonee Valley is short but uphill. Ritmar began to tire and Faithful City to gain ground. Graham and I were in the old South Hill reserve, almost head-on to the finish. We had no idea which filly had won. The judge studied the print of the photo finish for three or four minutes and then declared Faithful City the winner.

  I have always maintained that a writer achieves nothing by trying to describe feelings; that feelings can only be suggested. I will therefore report only that my feelings, after Faithful City’s narrow win, were mixed. I had in my possession the key to lifelong wealth, but so too had all those numerous unknown buyers of Mr Maclean’s method. How long would it be before half the population of Melbourne heard about Form-Plan and flocked to the races to get their share of the easy money?