RACING IN VICTORIA, FROM THE BEGINNING 1 3 



the site of the present Melbourne. ColHns had formed a convict settlement 

 during the same year at Sorrento, down close to the Heads, but had quickly 

 abandoned the enterprise. Hume, as we have seen, had reached the neighbour- 

 hood of Geelong in '24; Captain Wishart, in his cutter, "Fairy," had entered 

 and named Port Fairy after his little craft in '27; Dutton, on a sealing 

 expedition, had built a house at Portland in 1829, and Mr. Henty had made 

 a permanent settlement there in '34. In May, '35, Batman entered Port 

 Phillip Bay in a schooner from Tasmania, and Fawkner's schooner "Enterprise" 

 navigated the lower reaches of the Yarra in August of that year. He was the 

 son of a convict who had been in Collins' Sorrento picnic party, and was 

 attracted back by his favourable recollections of the place. 



In 1836 the blacks came down from the Goulburn and committed 

 murder, somewhere near to the Werribee. In '37 Messrs. Gellibrand and 

 Hesse, exploring beyond Geelong, were lost, and killed by the aborigines, and 

 life was very unsettled and wild. But now mobs of cattle had commenced to 

 be driven over from Botany Bay to the new settlement, and white men, with 

 the restlessness and energy of our race, were arriving with frequency, for 

 reports concerning the place were distinctly good, and in 1838, so numerous 

 were the inhabitants of Port Phillip, that they decided that the time was ripe 

 in which to inaugurate a race meeting. We are a strange nation; a peculiar 

 people. March 6th was the great day, just eighty-three years ago. There 

 were five hundred spectators present, and four races took place for their 

 edification. Two were won by a mare named Mountain Maid, and two by a 

 gelding, Postboy. Four starters constituted the largest field of the day. The 

 course was right handed, one mile round the she-oak clad Batman's Hill, a 

 rising ground between the present Spencer Street Railway Station and the 

 gasworks. The starting post was at the site of the North Melbourne Railway 

 Station. As you enter the city from Sydney, you can, if you care to, recall 

 the scene. The scrub was thick between the hill and the surrounding country. 

 It was cut by winding, deeply-indented w^aggon tracks, for the ground was 

 soft and boggy. Two carts, sheltered from the sun by old sails, performed 

 the functions of publicans' booths. 



It was a two-days' meeting, but the second helping, like so many second 

 helpings of other things than race days, was a failure, or even, indeed, an 

 utter fiasco. In 1 839 there was again a two-days' gathering on the slopes of 

 Batman's Hill. The racing was poor. Postboy and Mountain Maid again 

 being strongly in evidence, but the attendance was so large that it was- 

 generally agreed that the population must have doubled since the f)revious 

 year. But now the turf world fairly began to hum, and Batman's Hill was, 

 no longer considered suitable for the purposes of racing. The experienced 

 eye of someone had "spotted" the flats by the Salt Water River as being 

 made to order for the sport, and on the 3rd of March,. 1840, the first race 

 meeting at Flemington was successfully carried through. It was a three-days' 

 affair, and for the first time in Port Phillip the riders sported colours. The 

 quality of the competitors must have been very poor, for, if you look up the 

 arrivals, in their chronological order on a previous page, you. will see that 

 fe^v, if any, of their stock can have been taking part in the contests, and, there- 

 fore, most of them must have been nothing better than half-bred hacks. But 

 the spirit of emulation had now caught fire, and all through the country owners 

 were making matches one with another, and metropolitan racing was booming 

 to such an extent that a ruling body called "The Port Phillip Turf Club" was 

 -called into existence. To the deliberations of this body, and their resulting 

 actions, we owe the fact rfiat horses in Victoria now take their ages from the 

 first day of August in each year. 



