The Australian Thoroughbred 



Here now is something of similar origin to the thoroughbred horse of America 

 and England, yet totally different in appearance and character. My kind old employer, 

 Harvey W. Scott, of the Portland Oregonian a long way the best edited newspaper 

 on the Pacific Coast, by the way said to me one day, "Tom, we're living in a world 

 where the next thing is something else." He said it in a half jocular way, but there 

 was in it an awful lot of food for reflection. 



The Australian thoroughbred differs from his British congener more in substance 

 than in size. Mr. R. E. de B. Lopez and I were at Mr. Hobart's San Mateo farm 

 one day about fourteen years ago, looking over his stallion Stamboul, who had more 

 quality than any trotting-bred sire I can remember to have seen. 



"And you tell me that horse has iio thoroughbred blood in him?" queried Mr. L. 



"None that I have been able to fijld,' was my answer. 



"Well, said Mr. Lopez, "you couicroirn that horse into a field of fifty thoroughbred 

 stallions that you and I both have seen ; and you could take the average Australian 

 into that field and tell him there was one stud horse there that was not thoroughbred 

 and it is dollars to doughnuts, as you Americans would say, that he would pick out 

 forty others before alighting on this chap." 



The Sage of Pleasanton spoke truly. The Australian thoroughbred is, in most 

 cases, a heavier and coarser animal than the British thoroughbred or his American 

 congener. I know of but two American horses being taken to that country for stud 

 purposes Washington, by Timoleon, in 1824, and Gilead, by St. Saviour (son of 

 Eolus) in 1897 or '98. Less than a dozen French horses have been taken to those 

 colonies Royallieu (4th in Thormanby's Derby), Reugny and Apremont, the last 

 two to New Zealand. These are about all I can remember off-hand. Abercorn, the 

 handsomest big horse I ever saw, by the by ; Trenton, now at Cobham in Surrey ; and 

 Merman, Mrs. Langtry's marvellous handicap horse, are the exceptions most definitely 

 mirrored "in my mind's eye, Horatio." But for all these effects there must be an 

 origin and a well-explained cause. 



The blackest spot in all England's escutcheon is the early history of her Australian 

 colonies. The cruelties which are told in Marcus Clarke's famous book, "For His 

 Natural Life" (the strongest novel since Victor Hugo's "Les Miserables," by the way) 

 are told with less exaggeration than most readers might imagine. If they were not true, 

 why did the Government, in 1887, send out a secret agent to Australia and Tasmania 

 to destroy all records concerning the transportation of criminals to that country and 

 everything having a bearing on their histories as penal colonies? It was the estab- 

 lishment of penal colonies at Hobart and Sydney (and worst of all, at Norfolk Island) 

 that demanded a thoroughbred horse of different texture and pattern from what we 

 now see upon our modern courses. 



The penal settlement at Hobart was established about 1792, that at Sydney two 

 years later and the "hell upon earth" at Norfolk Island about 1800. The convicts at 



