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.”