Tradition.

23 November 2001

It's evening after a warm, rainy, muggy day and I'm sitting alone in the Rupert Clarke Grandstand at the Caulfield Racecourse, waiting for my wife who is downstairs attending her Year 12 students' graduation mass. The sun has come out just in time to light up the horizon before sunset and the entire racecourse is alight in green and gold, so peaceful and expansive. The Year 12 formal dinner dance is tonight, and as the function centre staff quietly busy themselves preparing the room, I try to imagine thousands of people cheering as they watch thundering hooves and raw, thoroughbred muscle pound the turf outside as the horses streak past on a sunny afternoon.

I've never been to the horse races, and I never imagined the spectators' area to be so luxurious as this room. This is the members' area I'm told, and the average punters get to stand outside amidst the sound and smell of open air and wild beasts. I'm not sure which sounds better. But this room is quite something. They say that horse racing is the sport of kings, and it's not hard to imagine it would take a royal mint to keep this place running. You could fit an entire small town on the grounds of the racecourse alone. A solitary tractor sits idle in a central paddock; surely there must be more. It would mow your front lawn in one pass, but here it would be like trimming your entire yard with a pair of nail scissors.

The D.J. has arrived and is setting up his equipment. A funky song fills the air as I grow hungry and thirsty and wonder when mass will be over. Hundreds of students and teachers and food and drink and a beautiful sunset as the room comes alive with the noise of celebration and gossip and good cheer and young people letting loose, marking this rite of passage with perhaps a little too much alcohol and too little judgement.

Ah, but this is tradition. Years of rules and now they are finished, eighteen years old, allowed to drink legally, and no longer bound by the forced discipline of religious schooling. They are beautiful, young, nervous in their grown-up evening wear, excited to be here, and I hope they will be able to remember this night fondly. For the teachers, it's another year gone by, another group of students on their way into a world where money makes rules and horses go round and worthy traditions, like the art of teaching, sometimes get forgotten. But perhaps one or two things will stick, and these students who are becoming adults will remember the dedication that brought them this far.