Book Excerpt: Melbourne Spring Carnival
The following is an excerpt from the Melbourne chapter of my new book, Yank Down Under: A Drink and a Look Around Australia.
The dapperly attired young man in the queue ahead of me is in a sparring match with the ticket vending machine that I am waiting to use here at Flinders Street Station in Melbourne. I’m not sure what the problem is. I’ve bought my train tickets here before and it never felt like I needed an algorithm to solve it. But old mate looks to be a few beers deep, despite the fact that it’s 11:30 a.m., and that could be the source of the holdup. To the right, a group of his mates are good-naturedly urging him to get his shit together. I know this because they are yelling things like, “Get your shit together, mate!”
All, except one, are dressed in suits that fit just a bit too tight, as is the custom in Australia. The odd man out is wearing a dress, a woman’s wig, and lipstick. Either he didn’t get the memo or he’s the lucky bloke getting married and this is his bucks day. Across the way, a flock of twenty-something women are dressed to the nines in high heels, fancy hats, and dresses you might see at a summer wedding.
Today is the first Saturday in November and that means it’s Victoria Derby Day, which will kick off Melbourne’s Spring Carnival of thoroughbred racing at Flemington racecourse, six kilometers northeast of the Melbourne CBD. The Melbourne Spring Racing Carnival carries on throughout the spring, as the name might imply to those of you familiar with the seasons of the year, and people come from across the land, and many faraway lands, to experience it. It’s also a shit show, as the brunch-time scene at the train station might have foreshadowed.
The Melbourne Cup, which will happen on the coming Tuesday, is billed as The Race that Stops a Nation because it actually does bring Australia to a halt. In the state of Victoria, Cup Day is a public holiday. People have the day off from work because a group of equine quadrupeds partake in a three-minute race. Across the country, people stop what they’re doing—even schoolchildren, I’m told—to watch and have a punt (wager) on the race when it goes off at 3 p.m. The Melbourne Cup draws somewhere around 100,000 people to Flemington, even in the rain. Two days later, Oaks Day (on Thursday) draws another 70,000-plus and is the traditional Ladies’ Day at Flemington, though it has jokingly become known as Blokes Day because if it’s ladies’ day, well, yeah, the men of Melbourne are no dummies. Each of these big days on the calendar—Derby Day, Cup Day, and Oaks Day—feature myriad fashion shows and judged competitions for best-dressed attendees, none of which were likely to include the bachelor from the train station.
Five years earlier I spent my very first weekend in Melbourne attending Derby Day with Leighton and some of his mates in a biblical rainstorm that left my shiny black shoes as caked in mud as those on the horses. Despite the rain, the day was a blast, and so was the night that followed. It was a hell of a way to be introduced to Melbourne. Leading up to that first Derby Day experience, Leighton had described the Spring Carnival as “fishing in an aquarium” for single people, and if a more Australian thing has ever been said, I’d like to hear it. Shakespearean prose there from the man who likes to call himself The Wiz.
As I marched into Flemington on that rainy day with 80,000 other well-appointed and reasonably well-behaved (for now) individuals, I remember thinking that I was about to attend the biggest party of my life…all day long…and well into the night, if I could manage. And this proved to be the case. In horse racing parlance, it’s good to be a stayer on days like this. Thankfully, this is one of my talents.
Today, on a partly cloudy but perfectly acceptable Melbourne spring day, we are doing it again—me for the fifth time; Leighton for the umpteenth. As wily veterans of the Carnival, the scene at Flinders Station hardly raised an eyebrow as we boarded the train to Flemington dressed in the traditional Derby Day black and white.
There are a number of ways to enjoy a big racing day at Flemington, and I have been fortunate enough to try most of them. You can get a pass to one of the exclusive branded “marquees” in an area called the Birdcage, where you will drink free alcohol, nibble on fancy canapés (hors d’oeuvres), and watch the beautiful and famous people move about these temporary daytime nightclubs. Or you can get a highly sought-after ticket to sit in the grandstand and watch like a real horse racing fan who studied the racing form the night before. Or you can watch the ponies along the rails until some of the people around you are using the rails to keep themselves vertical.
Or you can do what we are doing today: buy a ticket that gets you into a giant grass car park where you will watch the racing on video screens with the masses. This assumes you have a mate who is kind and dedicated enough to leave home at some absurd morning hour to drive to Flemington and park in his or her reserved spot, thereby hauling all of the food, booze, and whatever else you might want for the day. It turns out, our colleague Matt Sullivan is just such a mate.
Heading into the day, the car park tailgating plan sounded like going to a football game in the US and never going into the stadium or attending a concert and then watching the show on a video screen completely out of view of the stage. As it turns out, spending Derby Day tailgating in a suit and tie while watching horse racing on a video screen a few hundred meters from the track itself is surprisingly fantastic. And even if it’s not, don’t worry; the first time you go to the Spring Carnival, you aren’t likely to remember all of it anyway.
Click here to purchase Yank Down Under: A Drink and A Look Around Australia