Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  The second of the other two interesting things that Louis told to Joe Rowan and me was an account of how Jack Casamento had come to be the owner-trainer of Pavia. Louis had heard the story from one of Jack’s acquaintances and said he had no reason to doubt that it was essentially true.

  Until 1956, the few horses that Jack Casamento had owned and trained had been bought cheaply from small-time owners or trainers like himself. Early in 1956, Jack decided on a new and bold policy. His business had prospered, and he planned to buy a well-bred yearling at the autumn sales. He might have chosen his yearling at the sales in Melbourne or Adelaide, but he was even more ambitious. He obtained a catalogue from the famous Trentham sales, in Wellington, New Zealand, and set about drawing up a short list of possible purchases. His price limit was a thousand guineas or thereabouts. (A guinea was twenty-one shillings or one pound and one shilling. As a unit of currency it was no longer used except at horse sales. I believe the custom was for the company in charge of the sale to take a shilling from each guinea as commission. This would have equalled 4.76 per cent of the sale price.) A thousand guineas was by no means a trifling sum—the average race at a Melbourne meeting in the late 1950s had total prize money of a thousand pounds. Jack studied the catalogue long and hard, so the story went, and compiled his short list. Equal at the top were two colts by the sire Khorassan. One was from a mare named Royal Battle; the dam of the other was named Florida.

  The next part of the story had several variations. Depending on who told the story, Jack chose his purchase after looking at the colts themselves, or he decided to let the colt from Florida pass because bidders were few and he supposed he might have overlooked some fault that other buyers had noticed in the animal. Perhaps Jack himself was unable to recall afterwards exactly why he bought the Royal Battle colt for a thousand guineas while the Sydney trainer Tommy Smith bought the Florida colt for seven hundred and fifty. Certainly, Jack would have had no cause to reflect on the reasons for his purchase until at least six months after the sales, when the colt that Jack named Pavia was being prepared for racing and when the colt that had been named Tulloch had won, at Randwick in early October 1956, the first of the thirty-six races that he would win during his illustrious career.

  I suppose sometimes that I should have felt an overwhelming pity for Jack Casamento after learning how close he had come to selecting the horse I rank second only to Bernborough from those that have raced during my lifetime. I felt instead a sort of annoyance. How could a shrewd horseman sift through a thick sales catalogue and come within a whisker of choosing a future champion of champions, only to fumble at the last moment? Or was I secretly supposing that God had found a subtle but agonising means of punishing for the rest of his life the keeper of a harem?

  I could never forget Tulloch’s career, but I’ve forgotten what became of Pavia after the day when I first saw him win at Warrnambool. I have a vague recollection of his winning a few restricted races in later years. I clearly recall seeing him carry the dark blue and pink in a steeplechase at Flemington towards the end of his career. I’m not sure that he wasn’t killed in a jumping race or put down after being severely injured. If that happened, then I would have felt only sympathy for Jack Casamento.

  It seems unthinkable now that anyone but the master-trainer Tommy Smith should have had Tulloch in his stable, but I sometimes tried to get my uncle Louis speculating on the subject of what would have happened to Tulloch if he had begun his career with the name Pavia and in the care of Jack Casamento at Warrnambool. Louis had only one answer. ‘Jack would have poisoned him.’ Louis meant, of course, not that Jack would have intentionally done away with the potential champion but that, in his eagerness to make a good thing of Tulloch alias Pavia, he would have ruined the horse’s health with immoderate dosages of what are called nowadays performance-enhancing substances.

  14. Basil Burgess at Moonee Valley

  ONE OF THE many colloquial expressions that I enjoy hearing or using is the description of some or another man as having short arms and deep pockets, meaning that he pays for his shout or buys a raffle ticket reluctantly, if at all. I’ve always considered myself a prompt payer and generous with money, and perhaps I am, but I learned at several racecourses during the last months of 1974 that I’m a punter with short arms and deep pockets.

  In the early months of 1974, my salary was higher than ever before and higher than it would be until nearly twenty years later, when the college of advanced education where I then worked became part of a university and I became a senior lecturer. In early 1974, I was the assistant editor in the Publications Branch of the Education Department of Victoria. I was second in charge of a staff of about twenty and could expect to become editor in five or ten years, depending on when my boss chose to retire. The work was pleasant enough, but my heart was not in it. Telling twenty people what to do and trying to keep up with my boss, who was driven by a manic energy, left me in no mood to write fiction during my evenings and weekends. I had been writing fiction in my free time for nearly ten years. My first book was on its way to being published, and I had begun a second, but I could not foresee myself keeping up my double life for much longer.

  An unlikely solution suggested itself. House husbands, as they later came to be called, were unheard of at that time, but my wife and I decided that I should become one. We were not trying to bring in a new social order; we simply did what suited us both, even though our household income was somewhat reduced. My wife had been confined to the house with our three small sons for four years and wanted to resume her career. I was used to helping with housework and shopping and child minding, and I looked forward to spending the day in a quiet house instead of a stressful office. The new set-up worked well for a few years, until our sons’ upbringing began to cost more than my wife’s income alone could provide, but that’s another story.

  I knew better than to expect much money from the sales of my books of literary fiction, but I hoped to earn a modest income from betting—yes, betting on racehorses. Despite my father’s dismal record and my own lack of success in earlier years, I still believed I could beat the odds. I had a new approach to punting. Since I had started to bet, in the year after I left school, I had gone to each race meeting with a small sum, hoping to turn it into a large sum. My new approach, in the 1970s, seemed much more businesslike. I would set myself up with a comparatively large betting bank; I would have a few large bets each day; I would expect a profit of only twenty per cent of my turnover. And where was the comparatively large bank to come from? Well, superannuation in those days was not as regulated as it has since become. I had been on the payroll of the Education Department for nearly fifteen years, first as a primary teacher and then as a publications officer, and had had deducted from my salary the maximum permissible amount of contributions to the defined-benefits superannuation scheme of the state government. On my resignation, I would have all my contributions returned to me—not rolled over but paid to me in cash, no questions asked. My wife’s father had escaped the Great Depression by finding employment with the Department of Agriculture as a stock inspector and had more reverence for superannuation than the ancient Israelites could have had for manna. If he had learned that I was cashing in my superannuation to use as a racing bank, he would have horsewhipped me. I forget how we kept him from finding out. I was paying for some large life-insurance policies at the time, and we may have lied to him that I used my super to buy more such policies. Anyway, when the Education Department had paid up, there I was with perhaps twenty-five thousand dollars in today’s money for use as my racing bank.

  I divided the money theoretically into a hundred betting units. I planned to have five bets at each meeting that I attended. I would watch the bookmakers’ boards and would back well-supported horses or shorteners, as they were called, at average odds of about five-to-one. I would count on one of my five horses winning, which would return to me a profit of one unit per meeting. I hoped to attend about eighty meetings each year—
most of them metropolitan meetings but a few at nearer country courses. (One of our neighbours, a young mother herself, was eager to be paid for minding my sons when I went to the occasional country meeting.) If my estimations were correct, I would earn each year about eighty betting units, or about eighty per cent of my bank. This would be a useful addition to my wife’s salary. She, by the way, had no objection to my scheme. I was not even required to explain it to her. She was a spendthrift with no patience for budgets or any sort of investments. She also trusted me. I’d had only trifling bets for as long as we had been together and had managed the family finances prudently. Unlike her father, she hardly understood what a superannuation scheme was.

  The first two meetings of my new career were at city courses. I felt reluctant to rush into betting. Instead, I told myself I would bet in only small amounts as a sort of warm-up or induction program. On each day I backed my hoped-for winner and made a minuscule profit on my small bets. I still felt no eagerness to bet on my intended scale, but I no longer had any excuse for delaying my career as a professional or, at least, a semi-professional punter.

  The next meeting was at Werribee, only a short train trip from Melbourne. Werribee was more a country town than a suburb then, and the race trains used to stop at a special platform beside the course. I strode from the racecourse platform towards the betting ring with a hundred dollars in what I thought of as my racing pocket. Each of my five bets would be twenty dollars straight out, that is, win-only.

  The first two horses that I selected and backed were beaten—one thoroughly but the other only narrowly. I had lost forty dollars, or about five hundred in today’s currency. Having a large bank is meant to keep a punter calm during losing runs of ten or twelve. I had backed only two losers but I was by no means calm. I let two races pass, telling myself the betting gave me no clear indication. Before the following race, one horse was clearly being backed by men in the know. Its odds shortened from eights to fives or sixes. This was the horse that I had to back.

  I have never been able to recall the horse’s name. I recall that it was trained at the old Epsom course in Mordialloc and that the rider wore mostly black with markings of green and yellow. My not recalling the name tells me that I must have been under considerable strain at the time. I won’t try to describe how I dithered and hesitated or how I went past one after another bookmaker with my twenty-dollar note in my hand until something caused me to push my way out of the betting ring and to go to the totalisator and bet five dollars win-only on the shortener, which, of course, won with ease.

  I had no more bets that day. I had to stay until the last race because my only means of getting home was by race train. If the meeting had been in Melbourne, I would have gone home at once by train or tram. I was neither angry nor upset. I was bemused by what I had learned about myself that day. Unlike my father, who seemed to lose all sense of the value of money when a race was in the offing, I seemed to have a built-in regulator that would not allow me to bet more than a certain amount. I might have said that whenever I stepped onto a racecourse my arms became short and my pockets deep.

  What surprises me nowadays is that I had not already learned my limitations as a punter nearly fifteen years before, on the day when Basil Burgess brought his two horses, On Parade and Agathis (both carrying Red, royal-blue sash) to a meeting at Moonee Valley. Many New Zealanders brought their horses each year to Melbourne for the spring carnival, but Basil Burgess had crossed the Tasman in midwinter and each of his two horses was entered in a minor race.

  The New Zealanders fascinated me—the owners and trainers, I mean. For one thing, their country had legislated bookmakers out of existence decades before. The only legal form of betting was with the totalisator. To launch in New Zealand the sort of betting plunges that took place in Australia would have been counterproductive—the greater the sum invested, the less the win dividend. How, I often wondered, did the many smart men in New Zealand profit from their smartness or their inside information? I supposed that their policy must have been secrecy at all costs; that knowledge of a horse’s prospects must have been shared among the fewest possible people; that a stable’s commission was launched not by three or four well-known identities in full view of other punters but by one person alone—perhaps someone’s nonchalant-looking wife or mother-in-law—with instructions to wait until three minutes before the race before discreetly handing over a bundle of notes at a tote window.

  Whether or not as a result of their having only the tote to bet with, the New Zealanders seemed to me even less predictable than the shrewdest of their Australian counterparts. I recall an example of New Zealand acumen at work. At a Caulfield meeting not long before the Cup itself, a New Zealand trainer had two horses engaged. When interviewed by a racing journalist on the Friday, the trainer talked up the chances of one of the horses, which was a leading contender for the Caulfield Cup. The other horse was not mentioned in the interview. Even if the journalist had asked about the horse, the trainer must have claimed it was not worth writing about. On the Saturday, the Caulfield Cup hope ran fourth at short odds. The other horse, named either Cybeau or Sybeau, and carrying dark-green-and-white stripes, ran in a minor race on the program. The horse was leading the field by three lengths when they passed me in the old Guineas stand and was even further in front at the post. It had been friendless in the betting, as the saying goes, and had started at forty-to-one.

  On the evening before the meeting at Moonee Valley, I spent much time and effort in trying to anticipate Basil Burgess’s moves. I was convinced that one of his horses would win or go close to winning while the other would be saved for another day. On Parade was third- or fourth-favourite in an early race on the program while Agathis, which had very poor form, was an outsider in a later race. I had such an exaggerated opinion of the cunning of men such as Burgess that I arrived at the course almost persuaded not to back On Parade and to have two pounds—my standard bet at the time—on the unfancied Agathis. I might have followed this extreme course of action, except that On Parade seemed unwanted in the betting before the race. I could not resist the ten-to-one on offer and had what I would have considered a half-bet on the horse: ten-pounds-to-one, win-only. On Parade won easily.

  As the time for Agathis’s race drew near, my thinking was tangled indeed. I was trying, or so I thought, to outguess a man who made a living, or so I thought, from conduct that was unguessable. The most obvious possibility seemed to be that Basil Burgess had achieved his goal for the day and that Agathis would finish in the ruck and would be worth backing at a later date. But I began to question this line of thinking about fifteen minutes before Agathis’s race when Frank McCann, easily the biggest bookmaker in the old South Hill enclosure, was betting thirty-three-to-one against the horse. These were lucrative odds for a horse trained by a cunning New Zealander. I began to consider the possibility that Basil Burgess was putting into practice that day what I have since heard described as reverse psychology. What if the New Zealander was demonstrating his cunningness by behaving without any seeming cunningness? What if suspicious punters such as myself were tying themselves in mental knots in an effort to anticipate Burgess’s plans while he himself was behaving with transparent honesty? In short, I came around to the conclusion that Agathis was worth backing.

  If I’d had the courage of my convictions—if I had dared to back my assessment of the deviousness of Basil and his fellow countrymen, then I should have bet all my winnings from On Parade on the stalemate in the hope of winning more than three hundred pounds, which would have been a small fortune for me. The thought of risking my ten pounds, however, caused me to question my own judgement about the degree of Basil Burgess’s cunningness. My doubts multiplied as the time for the race approached. Before I left the ring, I had half a pound, or ten shillings, on Agathis at thirty-three-to-one. The other nine and a half pounds of my winnings stayed at the bottom of one of my deep pockets and well out of reach of my short arms while Agathis completed a winning doub
le for owner-trainer Basil Burgess at Moonee Valley.

  15. P. S. Grimwade in the Central Highlands

  I’VE MENTIONED THAT racing is for me what religion is for another sort of person, and that this is a serious matter. Racing provides me with a set of beliefs and a way of life. Racing also, like many a religion, has its saints. These are, for me anyway, legendary rather than historical figures. The legends surrounding the saints are all of my own making. This could hardly be otherwise, given that mine is largely a one-man religion with myself as bishop, priest, congregation and, in this instance, hagiographer.

  In the years when I was mastering the art of reading, we had few books in our house but I got plenty of practice with headlines in newspapers, captions on advertisements, word balloons in cartoons and comic strips, and labels on packets, cans, and bottles. I don’t know why my father kept a bottle of hydrogen peroxide in the bathroom. Did he clean his teeth with the stuff? Put drops of it into his ears to dislodge wax? Anyway, I saw the bottle often. The glass was brown. The label had a border of green and was dense with black words on a white ground. I would have read the words often, although many were surely beyond my comprehension. I remember three today: the three surnames comprising the business name of the company that had bottled the stuff. The three were Felton, Grimwade, and Guerin.