On all Australian courses the ring is kept well away from the enclosure.  Last year the V.R.C. obliged the bookmakers to take out licenses to ply their craft at all on the course.  And this brings me to the subject of betting and gambling generally.  If the Australians are a racing community, so also are they a gambling community.  The popularity of the Melbourne Cup is largely due to its being the great gambling event of the year.  Every township in the remote bush has its guinea sweepstake over the Cup, every town hovel its half-crown one.  The bookmaking fraternity muster strong on all racecourses, and apparently make an uncommonly good living out of their avocation.  All kinds of laws have been made against gambling, but they have proved utterly useless.  It is estimated that over a million of money changes hands annually over the Cup.  Everybody backs his fancy, if only because, unless he is a strict Methodist, it would be peculiar not to do so.  One of the peculiar features of this gambling mania are the numerous guinea sweepstakes got up every year by a man named Miller and his imitators.  Miller last year had L120,000 entrusted to him for thousand and two thousand guinea sweeps in the Cup alone.  He takes ten per cent. for management, and the rest is divided into so much for the winner, a fair sum for second and third, and the balance amongst runners and acceptances.  Even those who draw a horse at all get something.  Miller has many imitators, two of whom have bolted with the money entrusted to them; but deriving so liberal an income from them—­something like L5,000 a year he is hardly likely to be dishonest.

Passing from racing to horses generally.  The riding capacities of the Australians are well known.  Nearly every one born in the colonies learns to ride as a boy, and not to be able to ride is to write yourself down a duffer.  Horseflesh is so marvelously cheap, that it is not taken so much care of as at home.  In outward appearance, the Australian horse has not so much to recommend him as a rule, but his powers of endurance rival those fabled of the Arabian.  A grass-fed horse has been known to go as much as 100 miles in a day.

In 1796, i.e., only eight years after the establishment of a convict settlement at Botany Bay, the Victoria Theatre, Sydney, was opened with the famous prologue—­

’True patriots all, for be it understood
We left our country for our country’s good: 
No private views disgraced our generous zeal,
What urged our travels was our country’s weal;
And none will doubt but that our emigration
Was proved most useful to the British nation.’

The author was an ex-pickpocket; the actors were all convicts, and the price of admission was the same all over the house—­one shilling, payable in flour, wheat, or liquor!  Such a first night must have been unique in the history of the drama.