Something for the Pain by Gerald Murnane

in the early 1960s. He and I were on the old Hill, watching the finish of a weight-for-age race. Three outstanding horses were fighting out the finish. Dennis would have backed one or another of the three; he could never watch a race without having a small bet on it, although he had to give up betting when he was appointed assistant judge for the VATC. But betting was always for Dennis and me only a small part of the marvellous pageant of racing. When the leaders were about fifty metres from the finish and the result was still impossible to predict, I heard Dennis say—not to me but to himself, and in the same tone that he and I as Catholic schoolboys had formerly used for our prayers in classroom and chapel—‘Racing at its best!’
    David Walton is my oldest friend. We met up in the school ground at De La Salle College, Malvern, in February 1952, when we were both in short trousers. David’s father was a bookmaker, but David seemed uninterested in racing during our schooldays. He and his wife, Yvonne, spent more than twenty years in the Middle East and, after their return to Australia in the early 1990s, they and my wife, Catherine, and I sat together in the members’ stands of all four Melbourne racecourses on almost every Saturday until my wife was no longer able to go to the races. What most unites David and me as racegoers is our interest in the people at the races. I have seen David sometimes turn away for a moment from watching a field of horses in the straight in order to watch a nearby person or a group of persons that he knows to be among the owners of one of the horses. Likewise, when most spectators are watching the winning horse and rider returning across the mounting yard, David will have his binoculars trained on the stalls at the edge of the yard where the owners and trainers of the placegetters, each in his or her unique way, register elation or ruefulness or downright disappointment. In the language of pop psychology, David is trying to relate to the people around the stalls or to empathise with them. In the language of his and my childhood, the language that I call backstreet Australian, he is stickybeaking. It’s a harmless but salutary exercise, and I join him in it often, even if our other racing interests don’t always coincide.
    Timothy Doyle and I went to the races together every Saturday during the late 1980s, and we still meet occasionally at Caulfield. Timothy appreciates most of the pleasures of racing but nothing as much as backing a winner at long odds. If it were permitted to write doctoral theses on topics related to racing, Tim would have written long ago, and would have been awarded first-class honours for, a thesis with the title Form Reversals: The tendency among favourites that have run unplaced subsequently to return to winning form at longer odds, and the degree of predictability of this phenomenon of the turf . Tim is ever alert to the humour of racing, but he and I did not meet until I was well past forty, and I find it hard to share with him many of my formative experiences from my early years as a racegoer.
    Because my surname is Irish, some people have foolishly described me as an Irish-Australian, whatever that might be. Of my eight great-grandparents, the only Irish person was the man whose surname I’ve inherited. The other seven were all English—and Protestant, if they were anything. I was much more influenced as a boy by my father’s relatives than by my mother’s, but the Murnane men were far from resembling the square-jawed cartoon Irishmen who brawl and booze and burst often into sentimental song. My father and his brothers were teetotallers who neither smoked nor swore nor told off-colour jokes. If not for their interest in racing, they could have been called Catholic wowsers. Even their talkativeness and their wittiness came more, I suspect, from their mother, a Mansbridge with a Sussex father, than from dour Thomas Murnane, their father, who was, in any case,