Something for the Pain

by Gerald Murnane

  Catherine died on the Thursday before the Blue Diamond Stakes at Caulfield in February 2009. I could have made her task vastly more achievable if I had spent Blue Diamond Day backing only horses at twenty-to-one, but that would have been cheating. I made her task difficult indeed. For some years past, I had been following a select list of horses. I had their names in a ledger—two hundred of them, in several states. They were mostly younger horses with good form. I added two to my list each week and removed two that had disappointed me in recent months. I bet fifty dollars win-only on the tote on every one of my horses at every one of its starts. In the previous five years, I had twice earned a small annual profit. In the other three years, I had lost only very small sums. So, on the first Saturday after Catherine’s death, I was committed to backing the horses that I would have backed in any case, even though none of them might have been at double-figure odds, let alone twenty-to-one.

  About twelve of my select list of horses were engaged on the crucial day. I had starters in several states of Australia, but the only one likely to start at about twenty-to-one was in the Blue Diamond Stakes itself, the rich race for two-years-old horses. Because I kept many smart two-years-old horses on my list, I had to back four in the Blue Diamond. I’ve forgotten the names of three of the four but not their odds. One was the warm favourite, which was trained at Flemington by Steve Richards and had dark-blue and orange colours. Another was at about ten-to-one. Still another was at about forty-to-one. The name of the fourth of my horses is the title of this section. When I backed the horse, it was showing about sixteen-to-one on the tote.

  I wrote somewhere far back in this book that I’m not a mumbo-jumbo man. Before the Blue Diamond, I made sure to tell my friend David Walton about the pact that I had tried to arrange with Catherine. David once told me that he had been an atheist and a materialist since his early childhood. I didn’t tell him about the pact in order to convert him. I merely thought I should have at least one witness if anything significant happened that day. I have no recollection of anything that happened in the Blue Diamond Stakes of 2009 until the field was well into the straight. I was not tense or anxious on account of my two hundred dollars that was riding on the result, but I felt as though something of enormous consequence was about to be decided. My hands could not keep my binoculars steady.

  My first recollection is of Reward for Effort (White, red logo and cap) leading by several lengths at the top of the straight. Next, I saw the favourite, in the dark blue and orange, urged forward in pursuit of the leader. People who have watched races for decade after decade learn to be acute judges of comparative speeds of horses and to estimate precisely the outcomes of races long before the contestants reach the post. I understood at once that the favourite was going to win comfortably. I had not forgotten that I had backed the favourite. If it won, I would have got back most of my outlay on the race. But money was not my concern. During the last minute before the race, I had learned that the odds against Reward for Effort had lengthened somewhat. As the horses approached the two-hundred-metre post, I felt a strange dismay. I felt as though Catherine had tried but had failed. Or, worse still, I felt a fool. The universe itself was mocking me.

  The results of the Blue Diamond Stakes show Reward for Effort as the winner. The stewards reported after the race that the favourite had choked on its tongue in the straight. I recall nothing whatever of Luke Nolen’s bringing his mount back to the winner’s stall or of Peter Moody’s greeting them. I don’t even recall my collecting my thousand dollars and more, but I’ll never forget that the winner paid twenty dollars and a few cents.

  26. They’re Racing in the Antipodes

  I VAGUELY RECALL a comedy routine from the years before television, which were, of course, the years of radio. It was probably a recording that was played occasionally on one or another radio station. The subject matter was a mock radio program. Ads, songs, news items, and much else went forward rapidly. No doubt the stuff was mildly humorous and satirical, but I heard it seldom and I’ve forgotten all except the announcer’s frequently interrupting proceedings with a short, sharp statement. The first words were always, ‘They’re racing…’ What followed was at first mildly provoking: ‘…at Alice Springs’ or ‘…at Oodnadatta’. One of the later statements is still quoted sometimes today by persons who probably never heard the original context but who enjoy the euphony—‘They’re racing at Manangatang.’ As I recall, the last such statement, near the end of the whole program, was ‘They’re racing on Mars.’

  I suppose the statements I’ve quoted might sound mildly amusing even today to persons who haven’t the least idea of the origins of them. Very occasionally, during my childhood, I might have heard some or another actual program interrupted by a radio announcer’s telling us that a race had begun far away. In truth, however, no radio station ever bothered its listeners with reports of races having started at remote venues. Not for the first time some clever scriptwriter had betrayed his or her total ignorance of horse racing.

  I’ve mentioned previously the importance of illegal SP betting in the Great Age of Racing. Those radio stations that once broadcast races—and there were many more then than nowadays—might sometimes have confronted the problem of two races from different venues being about to clash. This would have often occurred during the years before starting stalls were introduced and when fields sometimes spent five minutes or more preparing to jump away. As a service to SP bookmakers, those radio stations would have announced sometimes that a race had begun at Ballarat, let’s suppose, while the field at Flemington had still not been dispatched. Bookmakers betting on the Ballarat race would have been warned to take no further bets. Communications were comparatively primitive then, but perhaps someone might have learned by telephone the result of the Ballarat race and might have backed the winner with an SP bookmaker if the radio station had not made their announcement.

  So, no one in my part of the world ever heard the dramatic-sounding statement that a field of horses was just then on its way at some faraway location. And yet, when I was searching for a title for this section of my book, I could think of nothing more appropriate than a comic radio routine from sixty years ago.

  The comic routine, as I called it, brought to mind a world in which horse races are an ever-present background. No everyday action can go forward without being interrupted by the news that a race is in progress somewhere. This might seem a fanciful situation to many people, but it seems to me a strangely accurate description of what has been going on in my mind for almost as long as I can remember. At an early age, I became aware that a far part of my mind was the setting for a sort of endless race meeting. I seem to have accepted this with no fuss. I seem also to have learned very early that the glimpses of races that I saw in mind or the snatches of race broadcasts that I heard in mind were not derived from actual races that I had seen or had read about or had heard broadcast on the radio. Details of the image-races, so to call them, were not always clear but I understood that they took place on no racecourse that I had ever seen or read about. The site of my image-races was more remote, in a sense, than Manangatang or Mars. The names of my image-horses, even when I heard them clearly, belonged to no horses that I knew. The racing colours, what I could see of them, were all strange to me.

  The turf, as Jack Kerouac once wrote, was so complicated it went on forever. Nowadays, races are run on seven days of the week in Australia. Not only that, but specialist television channels and the internet provide coverage of races in numerous countries overseas, and a person can watch and can bet on some or another race at almost any hour of the day or night. Things were nothing like so hectic in my boyhood, but I still heard or read about races interstate as well as three or four meetings each week in Victoria. And yet, the abundance of actual racing seems never to have been enough for me, to the extent that I was driven to imagine my own private racing world. But perhaps I didn’t imagine it. Perhaps what I’ve been seeing in mind and hearing in mind all these years are d
etails from an alternative universe. Do physicists and astronomers allow for the possible existence of alternative universes? Or, did I pick up the phrase from my non-racing friend Bruce Gillespie, who used to talk to me at length in the 1970s about science fiction?

  One day in 1985, I sketched a map of two large bodies of land separated by a comparatively narrow strait but otherwise surrounded by a vast ocean. The more northerly of the two is not unlike the North Island of New Zealand; the more southerly resembles an enlarged Tasmania. The more northerly is named New Eden; the more southerly is New Arcady. Each is an independent nation with a political status similar to that of Canada in the Commonwealth, but the two use the same currency and are separated by no customs barriers. Each has its own tricolour flag and its own national anthem—‘Oceans foaming…’ for New Eden and ‘In the shade of the world…’ for New Arcady. The two countries are often referred to collectively as the Antipodes. The universe of which they are part differs from our own only in that the entities known to us as Australia and New Zealand have no existence in it.

  I don’t recall my feeling any strong urge or compulsion while I drew the coastlines of my two countries or while I afterwards marked on my maps the mountain ranges, the rivers and lakes, the cities and towns, and the highways. I felt more a sense of relief and also of expectation. I would soon know at last and for certain the names of the horses I had seen as flickering mental images for most of my life. I would soon know the names of their trainers and jockeys. I would soon know the exact details of the racing colours carried by each horse. I would know the names and the shapes of the courses where my flickering races were run. I would know all these things and more.

  I could not do things by halves while I was recording the background of my image-racing. Today, the details of horse racing in the Antipodes are recorded in a dozen folders containing nearly four hundred pages of information, including maps of the forty-two racecourses in the Antipodes. Six hundred race meetings are held each year in the Antipodes, and one of my folders lists the date of each meeting and the major races for each. Other folders include the names and the colours of the fifteen hundred full-time and part-time trainers in the two countries. (These are not the only colours described in my folders. I’ve recorded so far the colours of more than a thousand owners who prefer not to use the stable colours but to design and register their own.) Several hundred jockeys are listed. I could go on.

  The items mentioned in the previous paragraph are stored in the upper drawer of a two-drawer filing cabinet. In the lower drawer are records of the horses themselves and of the races so far run in each of the two countries. For most races, results only are recorded, but for each of about one in ten races, I record not only the results but also the position of each horse at intervals throughout the race. Even recording no more than starters, riders, trainers, odds, and results can take several hours for the one race; calculating the position of each horse at intervals takes three or four times as long. So far, only seven hundred races have been reported in my folders. (Any reader wanting to know how the details of races are calculated is referred to the piece ‘The Interior of Gaaldine’ in my book Emerald Blue, which was published by McPhee Gribble in 1995.) I should have added that about two and a half thousand horses have been so far entered in what I call my All-Horses Index, which lists every horse to have raced in the Antipodes and every one of its starts.

  I’ve written in the above paragraphs about as much as I care to write at present about my Antipodean Archive, as I call it. Anyone wanting to know more will have to wait for a few more years yet. Anyone wanting to know, for example, how Strollaway (trainer T. D. Ivil, rider H. T. Holloway, colours White, grey quartered cap) came to beat Vicious Circle (trainer F. A. Ison, rider R. E. Middlemiss, colours Red, fawn hooped sleeves, white cap) in the Devonport Gold Plate, the richest race in New Eden and in the Antipodes, and how Vicious Circle, three months later, won the New Arcady Cup, the richest race in New Arcady, will have to wait until after my death and then to ask the executors of my estate whether any library was interested enough to acquire what I call my three archives.

  The two-drawer filing cabinet mentioned earlier is not my only filing cabinet—far from it. I have also six four-drawer filing cabinets that I call my Chronological Archive. The twenty-four drawers of this archive are packed with thousands of letters and with diaries, autobiographical writing, and memorabilia from the past sixty years. The third archive is the Literary Archive. This consists of fifteen filing-cabinet drawers—one for each of the books that I’ve written: twelve so far published and three still unpublished.

  My wife seldom intruded on me when I was at my desk of an evening, and I had been working on and off for nearly ten years on the Antipodean Archive before I first showed it to her. She did not look into the details, but she expressed her admiration for the whole and she left the room wondering aloud how I could have found the time to put such a thing together. If she had put the question directly to me, I could have answered it, but perhaps she knew me well enough not to need to ask. I could have answered by reminding her that I hardly ever watched television or listened to radio; that I watched hardly any films; that I had decided in early middle age that most books were not worth reading and that most music was not worth listening to or, at least, that I had read all the books likely to influence me and had heard all the music likely to affect me. Or, I could simply have reminded her that for most of my adult life I had devoted all my free time to minding my own business, in the truest sense of that expression.

  27. Lord Pilate and Bill Coffey

  BY 1988 I had been working for almost ten years as a teacher of creative writing in a college of advanced education. My job was satisfying and well paid, but, of course, it had its hardships and drawbacks. One minor hardship was that the college did not observe as any sort of holiday two of the most important days on the racing calendar: Melbourne Cup Day and the Labour Day holiday in March, when the Australian Cup was run. I usually managed to arrange my timetable so that I had no classes on Tuesday afternoon and could get home early to watch the Melbourne Cup on television, but that required me to take classes on most of Monday, so that I was usually in class when the Australian Cup was run. On Australian Cup Day in 1988, I had a window of opportunity, as they say. The Cup was going to be run during an hour when I was free of classes. This was especially pleasing because the Cup that year promised to be one of the best races of its kind for many years. Two outstanding horses were going to clash in the race: Vo Rogue and Bonecrusher. There were other good horses in the race, but tipsters considered it a match between the two. (Vo Rogue’s colours were Brown and white; Bonecrusher’s were Brown and cream.)

  Early in the day, I went to the room where we stored television sets, technology for language laboratories, and other devices that I could not even have named. (That might have been the time when the first computers were finding their way into our institution and I made my fateful decision to have nothing to do with them.) Anyway, the man in charge of all the technical stuff told me I was welcome to use one of the television sets for a few minutes later in the day. I learned from our brief conversation that he had never heard of the Australian Cup and that I was the only person on the whole campus to have approached him with my sort of request.

  A few minutes before the Cup, I went to the technical room, or whatever they called it, and tuned in my set. I had thought I might find a few other people waiting for the big race, but I was alone in the room. I felt more than ever before that I was an outsider in my place of employment. I had hardly ever been into the staffroom at morning teatime or at lunchtime. This was mostly because I was usually too busy preparing for my many classes or assessing the many assignments that my students wrote, but also because I could seldom join in the conversations among my colleagues. They talked often about what they called issues. A typical conversation arose when someone asked, ‘Who saw that documentary about such-and-such last night on the ABC?’ And then, away they went, each vyi
ng to give his or her opinion. Or, if it wasn’t a television documentary, it was politics. If they talked about sport, it was either football or cricket or, perhaps, tennis. Maybe they talked about racing at Melbourne Cup time, but I was never around to have to listen to their inanities. As I’ve said, I was hardly ever in the staffroom and, while I waited for the Australian Cup, my colleagues seemed more remote from me than ever.

  I was still alone when the field for the Australian Cup was being loaded into the barrier stalls. Then I heard someone enter the room behind me—followed by someone else. So, I was not the only one on the whole campus who could appreciate horse racing! When I looked around, I saw the Buildings Officer, whose name I’ve long since forgotten, and a young man I knew only as Jason, the gardener’s apprentice. (Dandy Andy, carrying Black and yellow squares, green cap, beat the two favourites in the race, but that’s another story.)

  It was not only among my tertiary-institute colleagues that I felt out of place. I haven’t lacked for friends during my life, but I’ve never belonged in any circle or group. For much of the 1970s, my wife and I mixed from time to time in a group that included a writer or two, a few academics and teachers, and a few people connected with the theatre. They were mostly witty people, and we often fell about laughing. I can’t recall ever being bored in their company, but perhaps that’s because I always drank a lot. They might have been fun to be with, but I never felt close to them. I’d had two books published by then, and the people I’m talking about seemed to have assumed that because I was a writer I was like them in having left-wing political beliefs, reading the Age and tuning in to the ABC. Sometimes, I liked to provoke them. Sometimes, after I had drunk a good deal, I used to argue that horse racing had as much to teach us as had Shakespeare and certainly much more than some of the pretentious films and plays that they were fond of praising and discussing. They mostly assumed I was joking, but sometimes they gave me a hearing, and one night I tried to tell them how I had been affected by what I had seen of the owner-trainer Bill Coffey.