The Melbourne Cup is a deeply rooted Australian ritual. It has always had something slightly anarchic about it, perhaps tracing back to an ancient conflict between the worship of the Goddess of Chance and the service of the Siren of Productivity. Bosses used to complain about workers who took sickies on Cup Day.
But teaching institutions had a bob each way. They had class as usual. From the early days of radio, many schools would halt for a few minutes while the Cup was broadcast through the class rooms. In at least one theological college, where the exams were held during Cup week, the invigilator would silently write the name of the Cup winner on the blackboard.
The mixture of pretension to respectability with a touch of raffishness has characterised other aspects of the Cup. Betting on races was once confined to the better-off who could attend or who had accounts with bookmakers. But any of us who played cricket at Peanut Farm in St Kilda and other suburban grounds would have noted the constant stream of punters putting SP bets at the oval fence.
The Cup, too, offered an occasion to celebrate high fashion and social distinction at the racecourse and to immortalise it in newspapers and magazines. But the conventions of high fashion have also often been undercut in Melbourne Cup Week, once memorably by visiting English model Jean Shrimpton whose simple shift left everyone else looking massively overdressed.
More recently the classy dressers in the hospitality tents of the Bird Cage have had the Micky taken out of them by youngsters in the carparks, dressed in tuxes, tennis shoes and op-shop specials.
In the Catholic world racing and betting were seen as forgivably disreputable because of their earlier association with the Goddess of Chance, seen as a rival of the theologically favoured Divine Providence. But by tribal Catholics a Catholic Melbourne Cup winning jockey was feted as highly as a Catholic Collingwood football captain.
Indeed, in one huge 1950s devotional event at the MCG, Jack Purtell and Phonse Kyne each recited a decade of the Rosary. The practical parcelling out of what was owing to Caesar and what was owing to Mammon was precisely stated by a devout Catholic lady who explained that, though prayer was undoubtedly important, it was no substitute for a day at the races.
"As in so much of Australian life, the pastimes of little Australians are colonised and exploited by big corporations."
More recently, though, Mammon has dominated the Melbourne Cup. It has been targeted by wealthy owners and stables who snaffle the most likely stayers in order to buy the result. It has also been used by corporations to fuel their engines of misery that suck money and life out of many Australian families: once big tobacco, then big grog, and most recently big gambling.
As in so much of Australian life, the pastimes of little Australians are colonised and exploited by big corporations. For many people from impoverished and migrant backgrounds the Melbourne Cup is now of no interest. It belongs to an unattainable world of ready money and corporate excess. They dream rather of satisfying their addictions at the Crown Casino.
But as a festival of chance the Melbourne Cup turns its back on the pomps of wealth and power as much as it once spurned the austerities of religion. A sunny Melbourne day gives way to a wild storm that blows over marquees, puts hats to flight, soaks dresses and turns dining tables into stables that need mucking out.
If chance puts down the powerful from their thrones, so from time it also raises the lowly, and exalts people who are real and values that are true. The sun shines on the beauty of the rose gardens, and attention turns from celebrities to the well-groomed horses and the strappers who care tenderly for them.
From time to time, too, a disregarded horse at a hundred or so to one will split the field and win the race. When the horse is ridden by a woman, attended by her brother who was born with Down syndrome, and one of a tight knit family who had suffered many hardships, then all the ambitions, calculations and triviality that line the commercial face of the Cup are seen for what they are. Simple human habits and values street the field.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.