Something for the Pain Read online

  PRAISE FOR GERALD MURNANE

  ‘Something for the Pain is Gerald Murnane at his best. His meticulous exploration of his lifelong obsession with horse racing is by turns hilarious, moving, and profound. If Australian writing were a horse race, Murnane would be the winner by three and a half lengths.’

  Andy Griffiths

  ‘Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today.’

  Australian

  ‘Murnane, a genius, is a worthy heir to Beckett.’

  Teju Cole

  ‘He is an artist of such rare and single-minded originality—as well as being the greatest sentence-maker Australia has ever seen.’

  Wayne Macauley

  ‘Murnane is a careful stylist and a slyly comic writer with large ideas.’

  Robyn Creswell, Paris Review

  ‘[The Plains] is a distinguished, distinctive, unforgettable novel.’

  Shirley Hazzard

  ‘Murnane is quite simply one of the finest writers we have produced. He is a master stylist.’

  Peter Craven

  Gerald Murnane was born in Melbourne in 1939 and spent part of his childhood in country Victoria. He has been a primary teacher, an editor, and a university lecturer. His debut novel, Tamarisk Row, was followed by nine other works of fiction, the most recent of which is A Million Windows. He has also published a collection of non-fiction pieces, Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs. Murnane has won the Patrick White Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, and the Adelaide

  Festival Award for Innovation. He lives in western Victoria.

  Also by Gerald Murnane

  Tamarisk Row

  A Lifetime on Clouds

  The Plains

  Landscape with Landscape

  Inland

  Velvet Waters

  Emerald Blue

  Invisible Yet Enduring Lilacs

  Barley Patch

  A History of Books

  A Million Windows

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © Gerald Murnane 2015

  The moral right of Gerald Murnane to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published in 2015 by The Text Publishing Company

  An earlier version of the first section appeared in Seizure

  Cover & page design by W. H. Chong

  Typeset in Granjon by J & M Typesetting

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

  ISBN: 9781925240375 (paperback)

  ISBN: 9781922253187 (ebook)

  Creator: Murnane, Gerald, 1939– author.

  Title: Something for the pain : a memoir of the turf / by Gerald Murnane.

  Subjects: Murnane, Gerald, 1939–. Authors, Australian—Biography.

  Horse racing.

  Dewey Number: 798.40092

  Contents

  1. Something for the Pain

  2. The Drunk in the Dance Hall

  3. A Bernborough Finish

  4. We Backed Money Moon

  5. Gerald and Geraldo

  6. A. R. Sands, Demigod

  7. Miss Valora and Pat Tully

  8. The Two Maikais

  9. Illoura and Miss Lawler

  10. Form-Plan and Otto Fenichel

  11. Lickity and the Eccentric Aunt

  12. Orange, Purple Sleeves, Black Cap

  13. Pavia and Tulloch

  14. Basil Burgess at Moonee Valley

  15. P. S. Grimwade in the Central Highlands

  16. Who Saw Rio Robin?

  17. Palatial, the Dream-Horse

  18. There Was an Emperor Napoleon

  19. Targie and Ladies’ Pants

  20. Elkayel and the Enzedders

  21. Summer Fair and Mrs Smith

  22. Sir Flash and the Borderers

  23. Sacred Heart Cathedral, Bendigo

  24. Mary Christian Murday of the Same Address

  25. Reward for Effort

  26. They’re Racing in the Antipodes

  27. Lord Pilate and Bill Coffey

  1. Something for the Pain

  MACHINERY AND TECHNOLOGY have always intimidated me. I did not dare to use a motor mower until I was in my fifties with sons old enough to help me start it. I bought a mobile phone fifteen years ago and have carried it ever since in the boot of my car. I make a call occasionally but have never even learned to store numbers in my machine. My previous car had a facility for playing audio tapes, and I succeeded in mastering it. However, the car that I bought four years ago plays only compact discs. I have a few discs that I listen to occasionally at home but not enough to warrant my struggling with the thing in my dashboard. I can use the radio in my car but, because I live in a remote district, I can pick up only a few stations and their programs fail to interest me. Luckily, I can pick up the station that broadcasts horse races from all over Australia and even, sometimes, from New Zealand. I still call the station 3UZ, although it acquired a fancy new name some years ago.

  Only a few years ago, the Herald Sun published every day the fields and riders and form for every race meeting covered by the Victorian TAB. Nowadays, only a few meetings appear in print. No doubt the details of all the other meetings are available on some or another website, but a man who can’t use the CD player in his car is hardly likely to be able to use computers. And so, when I’m driving on some lonely road in the far west of Victoria and I switch on my car radio, the names of the horses in the race being described are likely to be names that I’ve never seen in print. The course where the race is being run is likely to be far away in the vast part of Australia where I’ve never been. What, then, do I see in mind while I’m listening to a rapidly delivered report of the changing positions of horses unknown to me in a place I’ve seen only on maps?

  Writing has for me at least one advantage over speaking. While I’m writing, I pause often to make sure that the words I’m about to set down are truly accurate. I may have told someone in conversation that I often see in mind, while I’m driving alone, a field of horses approaching a winning post at Gunnedah or Rockhampton or Northam. But I’m not about to write that I see any such thing. I ought rather to write that a radio broadcast of a horse race brings to my mind a swarm of vague, blurred images, a few being images of horses with jockeys up but most having no resemblance to horses or jockeys. The images are accompanied by feelings, some easy to report—such as my willing one or another horse to win—and others difficult indeed to describe.

  Perhaps if I were a horseman, I would more easily call to mind the horses themselves while I listen to race broadcasts. I might even imagine the race from the viewpoint of a jockey with a straining, pounding horse beneath him. The fact is, though, that I’ve never sat astride a horse, let alone urged it into a gallop or even a canter. During all the countless hours that I’ve spent on racecourses, I’ve never really looked at a horse. When I recall some of the famous horses that have raced in front of me—Tulloch, Tobin Bronze, Vain, Kingston Town, and the like—I see in mind no images of bays or browns or chestnuts or whatever, with distinctive heads or conformation. Instead, I might recall, for example, the finish of the first race that Tulloch won in Melbourne, on Caulfield Cup Day, 1956, or the news
paper pictures of his elderly owner during the weeks when the old fool dithered over Tulloch’s running in the 1957 Melbourne Cup. I would not fail to see an image of Tulloch’s racing colours—Red-and-white striped jacket, black sleeves and cap. I would see also the features of the jockey who often rode Tulloch, Neville Sellwood, the same man who deliberately stopped Tulloch from winning the 1960 Melbourne Cup, just as he stopped the favourite, Yeman, from winning the 1958 Cup. (I can’t prove these claims, but for me they are facts of history.) As well as seeing these things in mind, I would feel again the feelings forever bound up with those remembered images. I might even become again for a moment the troubled young man that I was when Tulloch was racing. But I don’t want to go there just now. I’m supposed to be writing about my present self, alone in my car on an empty road and hearing a report of a field of unknown horses on some faraway racecourse.

  Many people seem to believe that what passes through their minds is a sort of mental film: a replay of things that have already happened or of things that might happen in the future. Perhaps some people do have films running through their minds, but most of the sequences in my mind are more like cartoons or comic strips or surreal paintings. Often, the sounds of a race broadcast will cause me to see in mind what I saw during the first years when I heard such sounds. Those were the years from 1944 to 1948, when I lived in a weatherboard cottage in Neale Street, Bendigo. I would have liked, during those years, to sit in the kitchen with my father of a Saturday afternoon and to listen with him to the radio broadcasts of races from Flemington, Caulfield, Moonee Valley, or Mentone, but both my parents discouraged me from doing so. If they sensed already that their eldest child was on the way to becoming obsessed with horse racing, then they were absolutely correct. If they sensed that he would one day gamble recklessly, crazily, on horses as his father was often apt to gamble, then they were wrong. And if they thought that their banning him from listening to race broadcasts would take away his interest in horse racing, then they were likewise wrong.

  Bendigo was a quiet place in the mid-1940s. Few motor vehicles passed along Neale Street or nearby McIvor Road. Even halfway down the backyard, among my pretend-landscapes of farms and roads and townships each with a racecourse on its outskirts—even there I could hear as much as I needed to hear of the sounds from the mantel radio in the kitchen. What I heard were not distinctive words but vocal sounds: a chant or a recitative that began quietly, progressed evenly, rose to a climax, and then subsided again. I had never seen a horse race, but I saw every Wednesday the centre pages of the Sporting Globe. That thriving publication was always printed on pink newsprint, which made the dim reproductions of black-and-white photographs even more grey and grainy. The centre pages of the Globe, as everyone called it, were filled with results of the Melbourne race meeting of the previous Saturday. Around the margins were detailed statistics, and on either side of the central gutter were the pictures that I pored over: two pictures for every race, one of the field at the home turn and the other of the same field at the winning post.

  The pictures, as I wrote above, were grey and grainy. As well, several of the racecourses of Melbourne were so arranged that the winning post was overshadowed by the grandstands from mid-afternoon onwards. As a result, anyone wanting to see in the Globe the images of the horses themselves had to strain to distinguish them from the murky background. This never troubled me. I learned all that I wanted to learn from the names of the horses, which were clearly printed in uppercase letters in the upper half of each illustration. Each name was enclosed in a boldly outlined rectangle, and from some part of the lower margin of each rectangle a shape like a curved stalactite led down to the head of the horse denoted by the name in the rectangle.

  I recall still, nearly seventy years later, some of the first racehorse names that I read in the Sporting Globe. More than that, I recall the effect on me of my reciting those names in the way that the racing commentators recited them. So strongly do I recall the effects of some names that I am able nowadays to put out of my mind the dictionary meanings of those names and to see the clusters of images that they promoted long ago and to feel the moods connected with the images. I did not know, for example, the dictionary meaning of the word HIATUS or even whether the word was to be found in any dictionary. Whenever I saw the word above the blurred image of a racehorse in the Globe, I saw at once an image of a bird in flight above a deserted seashore or estuary. Not until many years later did I learn who were the ICENE or who was TAMERLANE. The word ICENE above the blurred image of a racehorse brought to mind a long silver-white robe worn by some notable female personage and the pleasant sound of the train of the robe as it swept across a floor of cream-coloured marble. TAMERLANE denoted for me a grassy pathway overhung by rows of tamarisk trees. Many names, however, failed to impress me or even repelled me. (It seemed to me then, and it seems still, that most racehorses are poorly named.) I can recall from the 1940s such drab names as LORD BADEN, CHEERY BOY, and ZEZETTE. The bearers of such names fared badly in my early imaginary races, which were invariably won by horses with appealing names.

  I have hardly begun to describe the complexity of what I saw and felt during those imaginary races. Vague shapes of horses were in the background, but the foreground included more than names in uppercase letters and the imagery arising from those names. Hovering nearby were shadowy images of persons, most of them men in suits and ties and with grey felt hats low on their brows.

  In the 1940s, and for several decades afterwards, racehorses in Australia were owned usually by one man alone, and all trainers and jockeys were men. Nowadays, syndicates predominate, many with ten or more members, but I grew up believing that the typical owner of a horse racing in Melbourne was a wealthy businessman or grazier, or a medical or legal practitioner. The typical trainer may have lacked the social standing of the owners, his clients, but he looked hardly different, and if he was one of those described by racing journalists as shrewd or astute he might have been even wealthier than they. Since no well-dressed or wealthy men were to be seen in the back streets of Bendigo, the image-men in my mind must have been derived from illustrations in newspapers. As for the men’s histories or personalities, I seemed to have understood already that these were of little account on a racecourse; an owner or a trainer was defined by the performance of his horses.

  My image-horses had image-jockeys, but these were mostly inscrutable. The nearest I had come to seeing an actual jockey was my standing beside my father at the Bendigo Showgrounds on a cold evening during the Easter Fair while a few harness horses paraded before the race that was run as part of a program of foot races and cycling races and axemen’s contests. My father called out to a driver that he knew, and the man walked his horse to the outside fence, leaned back in his sulky, and exchanged a few words. While horse and driver were approaching us, my father had told me that the driver was Clarry Long and the horse Great Dalla. Clarry, like many Bendigonians, was of Chinese descent and his mostly expressionless demeanour made him seem to me more self-assured than myself or my father. Clarry was wearing the first set of racing colours that I had seen, and the same weak light from atop the nearby stanchion that made his face seem waxen worked also on the satin of his jacket. I have for long surmised that Great Dalla’s colours were Brown, pale-blue stars and cap, but such was the play of light on the star shapes, on that long-ago evening in faraway Bendigo, that I sometimes decide that the stars on the brown background were not pale blue but silver or even mauve or lilac.

  The meagre details reported in the previous half-dozen paragraphs all went into the making of the complex imagery that appeared to me whenever I heard from the backyard the sounds of a race broadcast. At different times while the chanted sounds reached me, I was aware of images of greyish-pink horse shapes, of horse names in uppercase letters, of spectators looking out anxiously from under hat brims, of jockeys with mask-like faces and vague-coloured jackets. I was aware, too, that much was at stake while these images jostled and vied.


  The human voice is a marvellous instrument, and the ear that interprets it is hardly less so. I seem to have learned during my first days as a listener to race broadcasts that a caller is sometimes able to signal to his listeners, even when the field is a hundred metres or more from the winning post, that one or another horse will almost certainly win. In some such races the likely winner may have broken clear from the rest; in many a race it may be some distance behind the leaders but gaining noticeably. Whatever the situation, the caller is able to utter the relevant name with such emphasis that his listeners are spared any further suspense. In the dusty backyard, I was often unable to make out a single name but still able to detect the emphatic utterance that signalled in advance the result of a race and to hope that the name thus emphasised was one that I would have deemed worthy.

  Driving alone nowadays and hearing reports of the progress of horses unknown to me, I often choose from a number of names the one that most appeals to me. I then suppose myself to be one of the owners of the horse so named or to have backed it to win a large sum. Then I listen intently, hoping to hear my chosen name uttered with the certain emphasis that I learned, nearly seventy years ago, to recognise. On one such occasion recently, the invisible horse that I aligned myself with had a name that appealed to me greatly but the horse itself was always toiling at the rear, to use one of the many stock expressions of race callers and racing journalists.

  Even as a dreaming child, I had no wish to be a caller of races. I must have understood that I could never be cool enough or impartial enough during the running of a race to be able to report its developments accurately. And yet, I’ve been for most of my life moved often to hear in mind or to whisper under my breath or even, sometimes when alone, to deliver aloud a few phrases or a single word from a broadcast of some or another race never yet run on Earth. I was thus moved on the occasion mentioned above, after the horse with the appealing name had finished among the tailenders. I was driving at the time on a back road with bitumen wide enough for only one vehicle. I would have felt at liberty to express myself not just once but several times, except that I saw from the rear-vision mirror that a huge truck was close behind me. Apparently I had slowed down while I was preoccupied with racing matters, and the driver of the truck was now anxious for me to get back to the speed limit or to pull over into the gravel and let him pass.