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. 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. Few motor vehicles passed along Neale Street or nearby McIvor Road.
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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.īendigo was a quiet place in the mid-1940s. 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. If they sensed already that their eldest child was on the way to becoming obsessed with horse racing, then they were absolutely correct. 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. Those were the years from 1944 to 1948, when I lived in a weatherboard cottage in Neale Street, Bendigo. 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. 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. 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.
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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. I might even become again for a moment the troubled young man that I was when Tulloch was racing. (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 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 would not fail to see an image of Tulloch’s racing colours - Red-and-white striped jacket, black sleeves and cap. Instead, I might recall, for example, the finish of the first race that Tulloch won in Melbourne, on Caulfield Cup Day, 1956, or the newspaper pictures of his elderly owner during the weeks when the old fool dithered over Tulloch’s running in the 1957 Melbourne Cup. 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. During all the countless hours that I’ve spent on racecourses, I’ve never really looked at a horse. The fact is, though, that I’ve never sat astride a horse, let alone urged it into a gallop or even a canter. I might even imagine the race from the viewpoint of a jockey with a straining, pounding horse beneath him. Perhaps if I were a horseman, I would more easily call to mind the horses themselves while I listen to race broadcasts. Mary Christian Murday of the Same Address Something for the Pain: A Memoir of the Turf It is candid, droll and moving - a treat for lovers of literature and of the turf. In this unique and spellbinding memoir, he tells the story of his life through the lens of horse racing. Gerald Murnane is like no other writer, and Something for the Pain is like no other Murnane book.