Gerald Murnane - Something for the Pain - A Memoir of the Turf

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.

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.