Race that starts a nation.

Today's Melbourne Cup will see Incentivise start as the shortest-priced favourite since Phar Lap: in 1930. 

Ben Dorries in the Herald Sun writes: 'During the Great Depression, Phar Lap raised the spirits of a nation ... helped uplift many Australians in dire financial straits, some struggling to put food on the table.'

Coming out of lockdown (in name only; a raft of restrictions apply, vaccination apartheid has created the New Untouchables, and the Victorian government has crowned itself with vast new powers of arrest and detention ad infinitum, North Korea-style), Dorries suggests Incentivise is channelling Phar Lap (or more correctly the punters are) and that '(while) there will never be another Phar Lap ... Incentivise is hauling the nation along with him on a similar magical mystery journey ...'.

Incentivise hasn't won yet. The race is still two hours away.

10,000 people were 'allowed' to attend Flemington today. Some bureaucrat pulled the figure out of somewhere. The Melbourne Cup is described as the race that stops a nation. This year it is the race that starts it again. 

*

'Struggling to put food on the table' is an oft-used expression to describe people in dire straits, but it was literally correct. My grandfather lived two hundred metres from the Flemington track and in 1930 could have heard Phar Lap thunder down the straight as thousands in the cheap flats roared the giant horse into folk history. My mother was two years old that year. Nearly a century later she tells stories about her mother and aunt gathering vegetable offcuts from the Victoria market to make soup in the early 1930s.