view raw text
RACING IN THE AUSTRALIAN BUSH. The wildest and most remote race meeting in the world is probably that held, annually at Gregory Downs, wheh lies 1,500 miles from Brisbane, Australia. On the occasion ofa meeting invitations are sent by the Downs Race Club committee to all within a 120 mile radius. The company consists of station bands, boundary riders, and cattlemen of all sorts; station managers, station owners, and their wives and families, prospectors from the neighboring ranges, and black boy servants. The nearest township, Bnrkctown, which is between seventy and eighty miles distant, sends a contingent of its 300 inhabitants, and, in fact, generally provides the city men who run the totalizator. The races are principally from half a mile to a mile for grass fed horses; and, however good they may be, they are almost at the end of their tether at a mile and a quarter, although they will carry their owners for seventy or eighty miles a day at a moderata pace. Frequently the course is as hard as granite, but that apparently Is a trifle beneath the notice of a buslimans horse. The times made are so good as to make one doubt the excellence of the watches not ofk the horses. There are five or six races each day.
