Something for the Pain (23 page)

Ring-in or not, Sir Flash took much money from the bookmakers that day, and the horse's connections got their share of it. They would have taken their winnings in a north-westerly direction. After the race, one of my father's acquaintances, annoyed that he'd had only a small bet on the horse, jabbed his finger at the printed summary of Sir Flash's form in the race book. What sort of jumping races had the horse contested, the man wanted to know. By what right had this dashing flat-racer got himself entered in a race for jumpers? He read out the information that Sir Flash had started most recently in a jumping race at Apsley, in far-western Victoria, and before that in a similar race at Penola in South Australia. My father's friend was not alleging that Sir Flash was not the horse that had finished unplaced in two weak jumping races. What he seemed to be saying was that jumps at Apsley and Penola were lower or easier than at other courses and that the connections of Sir Flash had somehow cheated their way into the race at Warrnambool. He seemed to be blaming a bunch of Borderers for doing what any horse's connections would have done if they had had half the chance.

After my wife had died, a few years ago, I moved to a small town in what some would call the north-west of Victoria but I like to call the far west. The town lies outside the pointy triangle made by joining up the places where Concito had three consecutive starts many years ago—but not far outside. This is definitely Border Country. And yet, the Borderers are not like the folk I imagined in the years when some of their number brought horses to the summer meeting at Warrnambool. Since I moved here, I've been to race meetings at Mount Gambier, Penola, Naracoorte, and Bordertown in South Australia, and at Edenhope, Casterton, Horsham, Nhill, and Murtoa in Victoria. I've seen much good racing. I've heard, while leaning on the fence of many a mounting yard, absorbing exchanges between owners and trainers and jockeys. What I've seen and heard, however, seems to suggest that most connections can only hope for success. No trainers or owners in this far-reaching district seem even to plan, let alone bring to fruition, the sort of coup that my Borderers of long ago brought, or were supposed often to bring. Even the betting is on a much-reduced scale. I've watched owners or trainers walk from the mounting yard after their horse has gone onto the track and bet twenty or, perhaps, fifty dollars on it with one of the few bookmakers fielding. For heaven's sake! Fifty dollars today wouldn't equal a pound in 1960, when I began as a primary teacher. I used to take five or ten pounds to a race meeting. My bet would be ten shillings or a pound. That's either twenty-five or fifty dollars at least in today's money. But I was so ashamed of my small bet that I would never have approached a leading bookmaker with my miserable stake. And now I see owners or trainers betting what I was ashamed to bet as a young teacher who lived from pay cheque to pay cheque.

I've learned much about racing from the meetings I've attended here in Border Country. I've seen tough-looking men and women brushing away tears after their horses have won maiden races with a first prize of only five thousand dollars. I've seen part-time trainers or owner-trainers lovingly grooming and then leading back towards the car park some horse that has started thirty times for one win and a few placings. I've seen much more that I feel privileged to have seen, but I've seen hardly anything of what I would have expected to see if someone could have told me in the 1950s that I would one day live among the Borderers and would observe them from close at hand.

So, this section of my book is just another variation on the old theme of the grass's being greener on the far side of the hill—or, is it? In 2012, the publisher Michael Heyward, whom I've known for thirty years, expressed an interest in visiting me here, near the border. He wanted not just to see how I was surviving here but to observe the district and some of the people who live here. Michael arrived here in the hot days of late January with his wife, Penny Hueston, and William and Anna, two of their adult children. I was pleased to show them Lake Ratzcastle, to take them to the top of Mount Arapiles, and to serve them each a drink in the tiny clubhouse of our local golf club, where I'm bar manager. Then I had a brainwave. Driving around the district, my guests and I had seemed mostly to be looking from the outside inwards. It was time to look at the district from the inside, so to speak.

I phoned my friends Andy and Clare Robertson. Yes, they would be happy to show me and my Melbourne visitors around Pleasant Banks. The visitors and I drove a few kilometres along the road that leads to South Australia. I had driven often past the huge property of Pleasant Banks but had never seen the homestead, which is far back from the road. I had never seen the sprawling stone building, with its long verandas overhung by wisteria and grapevines, but it was exactly as I had seen it in mind when I had looked north-west from the coast sixty years before, imagining the way of life of the border dwellers.

After morning tea, Andy and Clare offered to show us around the many-roomed house. The visitors from Melbourne followed Clare around, but I got no further than the first room along the hallway. It was called the billiard room, but I took no notice of the green-topped table or the rack of cues. I went from wall to wall, peering at the dozens of framed photographs. Six generations of the Robertson family have farmed in this district, first on the old Mortat pastoral run and later at Pleasant Banks. They were not only farmers but breeders and owners of racehorses. On the walls of the billiard room were pictures taken at racecourses all over southwestern Victoria and south-eastern South Australia and showing winner after winner owned by Andy's father, Peter, and other family members. The family colours went back for several generations—Gold, purple sleeves and cap. In later years, the Robertsons' trainer had been K. G. Davis from Naracoorte in South Australia. And yes, in answer to my hesitant question, Andy had assured me that his father had liked a bet, preferably at each-way odds.

I had long ago admired the connections of Sir Flash for their daring raid on Warrnambool. The Robertsons of Pleasant Bank had raided as far away as Melbourne. I saw a black-and-white photograph of a hurdle racer owned by Andy's grandfather. The photographer had caught the horse in midair, soaring over an old-style batten hurdle. It was the last hurdle of the race, and the Robertson horse had a winning lead at Flemington ten years before my birth and in the great days of the Borderers.

23.
Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo

SURELY A DOZEN
years at least have passed since I last saw Bendigo. Maybe I'll never see it again. If I do, though, I'll be sure to spend some of my time there as I've spent some of my time whenever I've visited the city since I left it nearly seventy years ago—I'll call at the Sacred Heart Cathedral in Golden Square; I'll enter the building from near the main entrance in Wattle Street; and I'll sit for a few minutes in one of the back pews, not meditating and certainly not praying but just watching whatever images occur to me. And, if no images occur to me at once, or if an overly long interval occurs between the appearance of one or another image and its successor, then I'll simply look around me at the amazing light inside my favourite building.

I've sometimes wondered whether my childhood experiences in Bendigo are largely responsible for my never having wanted to travel. How else to explain why I've never been on aeroplane—why I've never been further from Melbourne than Murwillumbah, in New South Wales, to the north; Kettering, in Tasmania, to the south; and Streaky Bay, in South Australia, to the west? My wife and I had serious differences in many matters, but she and I were united in our dislike of travel or tourism. Sometimes, after our three sons had left home, and when the month was January and half the people of Melbourne seemed to have found somewhere better to be, Catherine would ask me whether we should go away for a few days. Even if we failed to enjoy our few days away, she would explain, we could at least tell our friends and neighbours that we had
been
away, instead of having to explain, as we usually had to, why we never took holidays. My answer was always the same: the only place that I had any desire to visit, apart from the racecourse that was the venue for the next Saturday meeting in Melbourne—the only place that tempted me to leave my desk was Bendigo.

Occasionally, we did take a daytrip to Bendigo. Catherine had a friend there, a woman who had been widowed in early middle age. Catherine's friend sometimes offered to show us around the city, but I would always put her off. All I wanted to do in Bendigo was to sit for twenty minutes in Sacred Heart Cathedral. Once, I consented to stroll with Catherine and her friend under the elms in Rosalind Park, the same trees that I had walked beneath on memorable days of my childhood. Yes, the trees were the same, but the motor traffic in Pall Mall and View Street and Williamson Street kept me from feeling any connection with the mostly quiet city where I had lived from 1944 until 1948.

Even the ordinary sunlight on a fine day in Bendigo could set me daydreaming, but the light inside Sacred Heart Cathedral was something else again. It was a refinement or a distillation of the light outside. On the day when I first arrived in Bendigo in January 1944, I made a fanciful connection between the strange new light all around me and the gold that had been responsible for the founding of the city and its continuing prosperity. I supposed that the special quality in the light above Bendigo was somehow the result of the sunlight's having been reflected from the countless specks of yellow in the quartz pebbles strewn on the footpaths of all the back streets of the city.

In earlier years, I could not have found words to account for the influence on me of the light in the cathedral; I was only able to feel a sort of pleasant suspense, as though about to experience something that was more than daydream but not so unalterable as actuality. In more recent years, my way of responding to the light has been to hear in mind, or to see in mind, as though on the page where I was startled to read them for the first time when I was nearly forty, the words attributed to Paul Éluard:
There is another world, but it is in this one
. And then, because no abstraction, no matter how seemingly profound, can satisfy me for long, my mind is occupied by imagery. I sometimes wonder what sort of imagery was in Paul Éluard's mind whenever he pondered on his profound statement. It was probably very different from the stuff that fills my mind on such occasion. I've never read that Paul Éluard was the least bit interested in horse racing.

One Sunday morning in September 1948, I was kneeling at intervals and at other times standing or sitting while solemn high mass was being celebrated in Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo. My father was beside me. My mother and my two younger brothers were at home. Perhaps they were attending one of the masses at St Kilian's, which was our usual church. I don't remember. Two things should have puzzled me that morning, but I seem not to have given them much thought. First, I should have wondered why my father and I had walked two kilometres from our house in Neale Street to the cathedral when St Kilian's was only half that distance away. The other matter was that my father had often declared that he disliked the tedious ceremony of a high mass. My father was a faithful Catholic but hardly a devout one. The nearest he ever came to advancing a theological argument was his occasionally arguing that God was surely more pleased to be honoured by the simpler ceremony of the so-called low mass than by the music and incense and the bowings and scrapings of a high mass. He also lacked the docility and the obsequiousness that so many Catholics of that era accorded the clergy. He approved of priests who visited the sick and the poor but had little admiration for those who hobnobbed with the doctors and lawyers of their parishes.

And yet, there we were, he and I, on that fine spring morning, sitting through a high mass that was interrupted often by the organ and the choir and by the to-ings and fro-ings of the several sumptuously robed co-celebrants, one of whom might have been the bishop himself—probably not frail old McCarthy but his truculent coadjutor Stewart. (I should never speak harshly of Stewart. He was derided in later years as an archconservative but it was he who oversaw the work that made the cathedral complete. When I lived in Bendigo, and for many years afterwards, the building still awaited its spire.) I was sometimes devout as a child but more often lax, although never tempted to rebel or to disbelieve. During my devout periods, I would try to pray during mass; during my lax periods, I would daydream. I was daydreaming for much of the morning while my father and I were in the cathedral.

My daydream took the form of a narrative. I had read few books at the time. The sort of narrative most familiar to me was the radio drama. On many a night, after having asked my mother's or my father's permission, I was allowed to listen to a fifteen-minute or thirty-minute program on 3BO in which the voice of a narrator and two or three other voices enacted a dramatisation of what had probably started as a chapter in a book of popular history or an item in an encyclopaedia. I can recall hearing a dramatised account of the mystery of the
Mary Celeste
and another of the discovery of anaesthetics. Medical history seems to have been a fertile source of such dramas. I recalled just now my hearing an account of William Harvey's cutting up of the family parrot in his search for proof that blood circulated rather than lay around as one of the four humours. Anyway, while the bishop sat in his canopied chair beside the altar, or while the other two priests were wielding the thurible or the aspergillum, I was composing a radio drama having as its subject my father, Reginald Thomas Murnane, of whom I was rather fond and whose many flaws and faults had not yet become apparent to me.

Music was an important part of every radio drama, and I may even have been moved to set about composing my own drama after having heard some especially plangent passage from the huge cathedral organ. My theme was my father's progress from an insignificant babe-in-arms to a person of considerable importance, which was what I took him for at the time. I knew hardly anything of my father's life story. I knew he had been born at Allansford, which is now almost a suburb of Warrnambool but was then a mere township on the Hopkins River and the last station on the railway line from Melbourne to Warrnambool. I knew he was the third of nine children and the oldest boy among them. His younger brothers had never left the district around Warrnambool, but my father had left home and had travelled all over Australia before marrying in his mid-thirties. When I, his oldest child, was born, he had been a warder at Pentridge Prison. He had moved to Bendigo to be the Education Department's attendance officer for the city and for much of northern Victoria. It was a modestly paid post, but it required him to visit many large schools, to inspect the attendance rolls, to confer with head teachers, and to interview the parents of truants. Many of these he had to summons to court, and on the day of their court appearance he had to act as prosecutor. He was a talkative, affable man who made friends easily. Another sort of man might have crept into and out of the head teacher's office in the many schools that he visited but my father enjoyed taking morning tea with the whole staff in most of the many schools in his jurisdiction. There was also his career, so to call it, as a racegoer and punter. I knew hardly anything about his losses, but I recalled the many evenings when he had come home with crayfish and ice-cream and the family had feasted after one of his big wins. While I passed the time in the cathedral, I merely noted rather than organised the wealth of subject matter available for my radio drama and tried to imagine the powerful impression it would make on its many listeners. As I've said, I was daydreaming.