9 As we commemorate 110 years since Gallipoli and 80 years since the end of the Second World War, we reflect on how the legacy of service is remembered through generations of racegoers, horses and history at Flemington. Can it really be a decade since we gathered around the mounting yard at Flemington on Anzac Day to mark the centenary of the 25 April 1915 landing at Gallipoli? The feature race on Anzac Day 2015 was the VRC St Leger, won by the Victorian-bred colt, Authoritarian. Prince Of Penzance was spelling in a paddock that autumn, ahead of his history-making triumph with Michelle Payne in that year’s Melbourne Cup. Ten years ago. The decades turn, the milestones marked by different generations of champions. One hundred and ten years ago the war was in its earliest months, and most people vainly thought it would be over by Christmas. There was not a 25 April race meeting here in 1915 (Anzac Day races did not begin until the 1960s). In that year, the most recent great event at Flemington had been the 1915 autumn carnival, which ran for four days in early March. An imported American horse, Lempriere, trained by Lou Robertson, won the Australian Cup. The Newmarket Handicap went to Dr A.E. Syme’s Blague (French for ‘Joke’), a top horse who had an Adelaide and a Caulfield Guineas to his name, and later a Goodwood Handicap. The three-mile Champion Stakes, which took some 5½ minutes to run, was won by a genuine New Zealand champion mare, Carlita. She was one of those rare fillies to win the double of the Victoria Derby and the VRC Oaks. Later in 1915 she finished a bold third to Patrobas in the Melbourne Cup, and won the C.B. Fisher Plate five days later. The only real acknowledgement at that autumn meeting that Australia was at war was the VRC donation of £1000 to the Belgian Relief Fund. When news of the heavy toll of death and injury of Australian soldiers first arrived from Anzac Cove at the end of April, the atmosphere changed throughout the nation. ABOVE: The 2024 Anzac Day service conducted in the mounting yard. OPPOSITE: Dawn at Flemington.
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