Chapter VII.. The Early Records.

The Early Records.

Of course, there was no Turf Register in these very far-off days, and for some time the newspapers of Port Phillip were very few and far between. Just a couple of months prior to the running of that first race around Batman’s Hill, John Pascoe Fawkner had published “a rag,” a veritable “rag,” “The Port Phillip Advertiser.” It was in manuscript, and its “days were few, and full of woe.” Indeed, it was all but stillborn. There are no race records contained in its thin leaves. From January, 1838, until 1846 there was a succession of news sheets, “Port Phillip Gazettes,” “Patriots,” “Heralds,” “Figaros,” and what not, all of them weekly and weakly, squabbling, screaming, quarrelsome, puny infants, finding early deaths. The “Argus” was founded in 1846, and on June 2nd of that year its first number was printed. The racing news reported during the early years of its existence was meagre in the extreme, and was occasionally printed under the heading of “Domestic Intelligence.” But so mushroom-like was the growth of population in the later ’forties—and very much more so in the early ’fifties—that not only had a daily paper become a very flourishing concern, but the want of a weekly publication, of a purely sporting character, became so urgent that Bell’s “Life in Victoria” was established somewhere about 1855, and continued to exist until, in 1866, “The Australasian” came along with its sails bellying before a favourable breeze, and swept it out of sight. From 1860 until its disappearance, “Bell” had brought forth a little annual volume containing a list of all the principal race meetings of the past year, and “The Australasian” continued the publication under the title of “The Australasian Turf Register.” This was a thin little volume bound in red cloth, but nearly double the size of its diminutive predecessor. It has continued in an unbroken succession ever since.

The production of 1866–67 ran to two hundred and twenty-three pages. The stout, good-looking, substantial volume of 1920, with its blue boards and letters of gold, contains twelve hundred and thirty. And so, in proportion, has our racing and our horse flesh waxed mightily and increased in volume. Has the quality of our sport, and the excellence of our racehorse, grown during the fleeting years to as marked an extent? We will talk about that ere we wind up the clue of the argument.

But now the gold rush was affecting every portion of inhabited Australia, and the entire country was in a fever. People were too busy endeavouring to become rich quick to trouble very much about the importation of fresh blood stock, so that the list of arrivals between 1850 and 1860 was not nearly so extensive an one as might have been thought or desired. For 1851 was the “annus mirabilis” of Victoria. A Golden Age had dawned. On February 12th of that year Hargraves had washed his first shovelful of dirt near Bathurst, and had found gold in extremely payable quantities. The discovery had stimulated the early prospectors of Port Phillip, and the metal was soon being extracted from the earth by the ton at Clunes, Buninyong, Warrenheip and Ballarat. In September Her Majesty Queen Victoria had signified her assent to the Bill which granted separation of Port Phillip from New South Wales, and the province had now entered upon her career as a separate State. The only skeleton at the feast was the recollection of that dreadful day at the commencement of the year, when the world seemed to be on fire, and the end of all things might possibly be at hand. Black Thursday, February 6th, was a day ever to be remembered.

But when the first outburst of the gold fever had somewhat subsided, racing soon began to be more popular than ever before. With quantities of money and loose nuggets to fling about, with a well-developed and constantly indulged in itch for gambling, and with a natural sporting instinct, the diggers soon made things hum in the horse racing line. And now it was that there grew up the absolute necessity for keeping stud records. We have already noticed how inefficiently the stud careers of great mares such as Manto, Cornelia and others had been noted, and how, at this particular period in the history of the turf, it was more urgent than ever that a system should be adopted for preserving all information concerning each brood mare and her progeny, and of maintaining the breed as pure as it was possible to do under the peculiar conditions inseparable from a new country. For things were still what we, in our modern parlance, would call “pretty mixed.” The horse was the main means of progression, railways were short in their mileage, and their branches were scattered and few. The stage coach, buggies and horseback were practically the only means by which the country was traversed, and stock were of necessity still to be driven immense distances to market. With horses in profusion, with paddocks extremely large, with population scattered over a tremendous breadth of lonely country, horse “duffing” was a very tempting proposition to those people whose notions of “meum and tuum” were inclined to be careless and slack. To pick up a good-looking brood mare, in foal or with foal at foot, for nothing, was a temptation impossible to be resisted by many with such a weakness, as they travelled on horseback through the wild, outback places, behind their mobs of cattle and droves of sheep. The bushrangers, those unfortunate “gentlemen of the road,” too, required a constant supply of horse flesh, and the better looking, and the better bred, their cattle were, so much the more advantageous it was for them.

Troubadour, Mr. C. M. Lloyd’s well-known racing stallion, is reported to have been stolen by Ben Hall on three separate occasions, but was always recaptured. So many skirmishes had the old horse been in when ridden by Hall that, on the death of the horse, a post mortem was held, when seven bullets were discovered in various portions of his frame. Everyone has read Rolf Boldrewood’s inimitable book “Robbery Under Arms.” The story of horse stealing and cattle duffings is splendidly told in its pages, and the description of the stock concealed in “The Hollow” by Starlight and his gang is well calculated to make the mouths of all thoroughbred enthusiasts water, and almost to cause the best of us to covet our neighbour’s horse. Sappho, the greatest and most successful colonial-born brood mare that has ever been seen, was “lifted,” I have been informed, on at least three occasions, and Mr. George Lee had many long, weary rides whilst tracking the footprints of those that led her captive. Some of the most distinguished matrons of our stud book were either stolen or strayed mares whose owners never recovered them, and whose new masters, as a matter of course, dared not acknowledge their pedigrees, even if they had them. There was “Black Swan, by Yattendon from Maid of the Lake (bred by Captain Russell, of Ravensworth, but whose pedigree cannot be ascertained).” Her stock, inasmuch as they can win at all distances, at weight-for-age, and can stay, are palpably from no half-bred strain. There was Dinah, bought, it is believed, out of a travelling mob by the late Mr. James Wilson, of Victoria, and certainly as clean bred as Eclipse. Her descendants include, in a long list, Musidora, Newhaven, G’naroo and Briseis. There was Mr. C. Smith’s Gipsy, said to have been by Rous’ Emigrant, but whose dam was never identified. There was Lilla, whose granddam was a mare by Toss, “bred by the Rev. W. Walker, near Bathurst,” and there was Sappho herself, “by Marquis, her dam a grey mare by Zohrab, granddam a brown mare of unknown pedigree.” And then, too, there was Old Betty. Breeders would give untold sums of money to discover, with no possibility of error, the blood lines of these famous mares. It is to be feared, however, that it is an impossibility in each of these cases cited here, and every year that glides past adds to the apparently insurmountable difficulties which lie in the way. But it was to prevent such occurrences in the future that the first volumes of the Victorian, the New South Wales and the New Zealand Stud Books were compiled. Mr. William Levy essayed the task in Victoria in 1859. In N.S.W. the first production saw daylight at about the same time, and in New Zealand, breeders followed suit.

Mr. Levy’s volume ran to 40 pages, all told. There were one hundred and thirteen mares whose produce he recorded, and of these twenty-eight were owned, or partly owned, by Mr. Hector Norman Simson, of Tatong, near Benalla.

The second volume of the Victorian Stud Book, also edited by Mr. Levy, was published in 1865, and was even more meagre in its information than its predecessor, but volume three, compiled by William Yuille, junior, in 1871, was a much more ambitious effort, and volume four, the last of the series, was also edited by him. After this the need of an Australian Stud Book, apart from a mere provincial work, was so apparent, that Mr. William C. Yuille, the father of the Editor of the third and fourth Victorian records, and who had, unfortunately, died in the meantime, took over the great task. This first volume represents an enormous amount of work and of research. It is peculiarly interesting to the student of breeding, and is only surpassed in value by the second volume of 1882, a huge tome for those days, of over five hundred pages, a work which was undertaken by Mr. Archibald Yuille, assisted by his friend Mr. Francis F. Dakin. It was a splendid achievement. Thereafter, volume after volume was produced at fairly regular intervals, for many years, by these two enthusiastic experts, and after Mr. Dakin’s sudden death, in Sydney, by Mr. Archibald Yuille and his brother Albert. In 1913, however, the tenth volume was “compiled and published under the direction of the Australian Jockey Club, and the Victorian Racing Club.” It is a great work. The twelfth volume, published in 1919, runs to over nine hundred pages, and the information contained therein is complete and entirely satisfactory. The present Keeper of the Stud Book is Mr. Leslie Rouse, a member of a very old house which has been intimately connected with Australian racing and horse breeding, with all its traditions, ever since the beginning. Nothing has been left undone in order to place the Australian Stud Book on the same high pedestal of completeness and accuracy which distinguishes its great prototype, “The General Stud Book.”