gambling

My former team-mate Gunna emails that a nag called Candy Rain—my family name is Candy—went round in Race 1 at Hamilton yesterday. He plunges $1 on it each way at good odds and collects $45. I’m glad that my name inspires a windfall for a friend at the gee-gees, although Gunna doesn’t say he risked a dollar because of my name. I’m presuming that.

I’ve never risked a zack betting on anything in my life. I’ve got that sixpence in my hand and the prospect of having two sixpences is no lure. I understand the reasons for my antipathy to alcohol, but not for my opposition to gambling. It just came naturally.

The May races are huge in my home town Warrnambool, especially the Grand Annual Steeplechase. It’s inordinately long and exhausting. Horses regularly stumble to their deaths and the anti-jumps lobby champs and foams at the bit.

One windy May afternoon in the 1950s my mother drives her small son out on a back road behind the racecourse. The Grand Annual Steeplechasers thunder through a paddock and blunder over the steeple built into the roadside fence. Hooves clatter across the bitumen and jouncing rumps disappear on their journey back to the course proper.

One sunny Sunday morning my accountant father takes me to the deserted track. It’s his job to empty the tickets from the ticket booths and audit them against the gate takings. The redolence of cut grass rushes into the nostrils and the white rails stretch away to places a four-year-old can’t guess at.

    

Captivating as they might be, neither the track’s sensuality nor the pounding horseflesh inspire anything in me. Meanwhile a cousin succumbs to the lure of the track and alcohol and is expelled from Wesley for running a book in the boarding-house.

From ages eight to twelve my father rings the TAB and places his bets each Saturday morning before he takes me to Carlton games. Sometimes I look at the turf guide over his shoulder and suggest horses whose names appeal to me. He underlines my choices.

Through the smoke haze at Princes Park, the Lake Oval or Glenferrie he suspends his interest in Carlton when each race result is slotted onto the scoreboard. One afternoon at Footscray my first three picks salute the judge and my father disappears to place bets on the others. None even places.

    

Life, of course, is a gamble. Our parents randomly pool their genes to create us. Later, on spec, we pick and apply for life-defining jobs out of the Saturday classifieds. The job interviewers gamble on who is the best candidate. It’s a raffle.

Every time I throw a leg over the top bar I gamble on every driver coming up behind me having their wits about them and their mobile phone in their pocket not their hand.

My good woman is a psychologist. Her job is to counsel problem gamblers. I don’t bet but I hang on her every word about living life.

Rock on.