ANZAC reflections at Flemington

Can it really be a decade since we gathered around the mounting yard at Flemington on Anzac Day to mark the centenary of the 25 April 1915 landing at Gallipoli? The feature race on Anzac Day 2015 was the VRC St Leger, won by the Victorian-bred colt, Authoritarian. Prince Of Penzance was spelling in a paddock that autumn, ahead of his history-making triumph with Michelle Payne in that year’s Melbourne Cup. Ten years ago.

The decades turn, the milestones marked by different generations of champions. One hundred and ten years ago the war was in its earliest months, and most people vainly thought it would be over by Christmas.

There was not a 25 April race meeting here in 1915 (Anzac Day races did not begin until the 1960s). In that year, the most recent great event at Flemington had been the 1915 autumn carnival, which ran for four days in early March. An imported American horse, Lempriere, trained by Lou Robertson, won the Australian Cup.

The Newmarket Handicap went to Dr A.E. Syme’s Blague (French for ‘Joke’), a top horse who had an Adelaide and a Caulfield Guineas to his name, and later a Goodwood Handicap. The three-mile Champion Stakes, which took some 5½ minutes to run, was won by a genuine New Zealand champion mare, Carlita. She was one of those rare fillies to win the double of the Victoria Derby and the VRC Oaks. Later in 1915 she finished a bold third to Patrobas in the Melbourne Cup, and won the C.B. Fisher Plate five days later.

The only real acknowledgement at that autumn meeting that Australia was at war was the VRC donation of £1000 to the Belgian Relief Fund. When news of the heavy toll of death and injury of Australian soldiers first arrived from Anzac Cove at the end of April, the atmosphere changed throughout the nation.

By the end of the war the Club had channelled tens of thousands of pounds into patriotic funds. That war dragged on, in Europe and the Middle East, until late 1918. It became the Great War, later the First World War, and it left the world changed forever. Australian deaths alone exceeded 60,000 servicemen and nurses, all of them volunteers. It was to honour them, and those who also served, that Anzac Day as a sombre national holiday was initiated.

It is 110 years since Gallipoli. This year marks also the 80th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, where our soldiers again fought in Europe and the Middle East, and in Africa, and in bitter battles in Papua New Guinea and the Pacific, where our sailors and aviators were in heroic action, with terrible losses, where thousands of service personnel became prisoners of war, enduring horrific conditions, and where our own shores came under attack.

During that world war, it became a more urgent question as to whether the sport of racing should continue. It was in fact dramatically curtailed for much of the war, which stretched from September 1939 to August 1945. Many country and city meetings ceased, as did racing in South Australia for a time. Caulfield became a military training camp and its race meetings through to 1944 were held at Flemington instead. Williamstown, a major city track, was also requisitioned by the military and never reopened.

The autumn carnival 80 years ago was a season for longshots. In the Newmarket, Three Wheeler at 33/1 (ridden by Bill Williamson) beat Wonder Bird at 100/1. And the grey mare Spectre, hitherto a maiden, put in a form reversal to win the Australian Cup at odds of 33/1 – ridden by the 17-year-old apprentice and future champion, Ron Hutchinson.

Twenty years later, who were the hero horses of 1965? The classy mare Ripa won the Newmarket, Craftsman the Australian Cup. In the spring, Light Fingers won the Melbourne Cup, a first victory in the race for Bart Cummings and Roy Higgins.

It was in that year, 1965, sixty years ago, that the Menzies Government first committed an infantry battalion to serve in Vietnam, arguing that a communist victory there would be a direct military threat to Australia. The rights and wrongs of that commitment have been debated ever since, and the Whitlam Government on taking office in 1972 withdrew Australian forces. By that time the official Australian military death toll in Vietnam was 521, with some 2400 wounded.

All of these service personnel, their families and descendants, are the ones we mourn and honour at the Anzac Day races today, along with those who have served Australia and suffered in other conflicts. Lest We Forget, the phrase runs, but there is no forgetting while the world continues, in one theatre or another, to be endlessly at war. Peace in our time? Maybe next year.