melbourne cup day

Today was Melbourne Cup Day!

Until a week or so ago I had never heard of Melbourne Cup, but as soon as I heard about it I knew I was going to like it: you get to wear cool hats.

The Melbourne Cup itself is not just a horserace, but the horserace, and not just the horserace, but an event.

If you’ve seen My Fair Lady, think the Ascot race scene. (Alternatively, if you’ve been to Ascot, think Ascot.) We’re talking out and out fancy dresses, hats and fascinators.

I’d also never heard of fascinators. (Turns out it’s the name of those big, floppy flower things fancy women attach to the sides of their heads in case of, I don’t know, some sort of floral emergency.)

Seeing as I like dressing up, I set out to experience Melbourne Cup Day to the hilt, even going so far as to acquire a fascinator. One has to be culturally alert.

I was the only one dressed up on the bus, and suddenly wondered if it was all some very bizarre joke Australians love to play on unsuspecting Americans. I got to work, though, and found the girls glamorously glitzed and the boys sharp and snazzy.

And so many people had hats!!

I can’t quite say it was The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins, but it was the closest I’d ever come. We pranced around taking pictures for awhile, then got down to business: sweeps.

Maybe other more gamblingly inclined folk are familiar with sweeps, but, like much in Australia, I had never encountered them before. Basically what happens is that everyone puts a small amount ($3 AU, which isn’t so small if we’re considering the current exchange rate) in a pool and randomly draws out one of the horses. (There’s cute little pictures of the jockey’s uniforms in the paper that get cut up for the drawing.) Then, if you win you get, in our case, $35 AU. There’s a bit for second and third, too, and last place gets their money back.

With sweeps taken in in the morning, we set about the arduous task of teaching (odd what they put you through in academic environments) until the blessed hour of 2 pm arrived. There was then a lovely little parade of outfits and hats, complete with prizes for the craziest and best.

From there we trekked to the Shark Hotel (why they call all the pubs hotels is still beyond me) to watch the race in style (which is to say, we provided the style). They had a couple big screens up to accommodate the couple hundred students, teachers and, presumably, other townsfolk who showed up to cheer for their stake in the sweeps.

I had drawn Septimus, who was the favorite for the race, though I decided I’d cheer for Mad Rush since he had the coolest name, though Zipping and Ice Chariot weren’t bad, either.

As the race itself drew near, people across the country huddled around to watch.

I’m still not sure you get how big it is. Literally: in Melbourne, everyone had the day off work. And tons of people dress up. And everybody talks about it all day. I’m not saying it’s as big as, say, Christmas, but it definitely ranks higher than Columbus Day. It’s a come-from-behind-out-of-nowhere holiday: one you’ve never heard of and never contemplated having. It’s a great country.

Though we didn’t have the whole day off in Sydney, the city stopped for three exhilarating minutes to watch. And watch we did, just like they do in movies where everyone kind of leans to one side to follow as closely as they possibly can. We held our collective breath. We did our collective lean. We kept holding our collective breath. We collectively leaned some more. Like I said, it was exhilarating.

And it came down to the wire! Septimus had been rocking around in and out of second and third place, but dropped out somewhere in the last third or so. It all got a bit hazy. They kept passing horizontal lines on the ground and I kept trying to figure out which one was the one until suddenly they were showing replays of the photo finish and announcing that an outsider had won!

Septimus, unfortunately, did not win, place, show or even have the decency to come in last, but I couldn’t really hold it against him. He’d come a lot closer to making it than I had.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is Melbourne Cup Day. The three minutes that stop the hat-laden country flat in its tracks. Till next year.