THE RACEHORSE IN AUSTRALIA 



By Dr. W. H. LANG. 



Chapter I. 

 The Pre-historic Days. 



THE History of the Racehorse in Australia is such a short one that you 

 might, with reason, imagine that the entire narrative could be con- 

 densed into a very small space when committed to print. But you 

 would be utterly wrong. On the contrary, an historian, with his heart 

 in the business, could reel off a number of fair-sized volumes, and still 

 his work would not be fulfilled to his entire satisfaction. A little ancient 

 history may be useful to us before we commence to study the subject. As 

 you know, there was no trace of the genus horse on our island continent before 

 the coming of the white man. In America, on the other hand, although there 

 was no horse as we know him, before the advent of the Conqueror Cortez, 

 in 1518, yet the fossilised remains of the Eohippus, the Protohippus and Hip- 

 parion are so numerous and w^ell distributed on the great American continents 

 that these wide lands seem to have been the most favoured home of the great 

 race of equidae, in the far-off days before the ice. 



The whole species was then cut off, to a horse, possibly by an epidemic, 

 or by the ravages, more probably, of some insect or microbe, and its history 

 in that quarter of the globe recommenced with the Conquest. In vivid contrast 

 the tale of our own Australian horse, and all our other domestic animals, begins 

 as late as the I 0th day of January, 1 788. Governor Phillip brought with him 

 from the Cape of Good Hope, where he had called to obtain supplies on his 

 voyage hither with his first fleet of convicts, a stallion and three mares with 

 foals at foot, a few cattle, and in all 500 head of live stock, but which con- 

 sisted for the most part of poultry. 



The new Colony had a good deal of bad luck at this time. The four- 

 footed animals, owing to the negligence of a convict herdsman, strayed away, 

 and although one has reason to believe that the horses were recovered, there 

 is no certainty on that head. With the cattle there is a different story to tell, 

 and on the very day upon which I am writing this, I read, in "The English 

 Sporting Magazine" of 1797, the story of their loss and recovery. A boat's 

 crew sought a bay on the coast whilst searching for fresh water. At the spot 

 where the men landed they fell in with a convict who had escaped five years 

 before, and who had joined the blacks. This man showed them where the 

 lost cattle had made their home, deep in some fertile valley, and in the course 

 of their nine years of liberty they had increased in numbers to sixty-one head. 

 It was a valuable find for the struggling colonists, who, from drought and 

 flood, had lost a large portion of their property. 



In the very early years of "the Colony" there was exceedingly little 

 need for the assistance of light horses in the daily work of the place, whilst 

 the desire to possess an animal more speedy than that owned by a neighbour 

 had not yet arisen at all. You will, perhaps, recollect that, until the year 

 1813 or thereabouts, the only portion of our vast continent which was being 

 made use of by white men was a little strip of soil between the Blue Mountains 

 and the sea, some forty miles by eighty, and the few horses which had now 

 been brought over from the Cape, or out from the Old Country, were simply 

 beasts of burden, or, at the best, perhaps, hacks and harness horses. 



It was on the 31st day of May of that year that Blaxland, Wentworth 

 and Lawson burst their way through the hitherto impenetrable ranges and scrub 

 into the limitless lands beyond, and it was upon that same day that the use 

 for a swift and long-enduring saddle horse was discovered by the inhabitants 



