Big Breasts In Scone

I finished off my ramblings in the Hunter with visits to Amarina, Baerami, Brooklyn, Byerley, Edinglassie, Emirates, Glastonbury, Goodwood, Lomar Park, Reavill, Turangga and Vinery, so, all in all, I’ve managed to get a few hundred yearlings under my belt before facing the onslaught at the Coast. I begin my trek up there on New Year's Eve.

There’s one consignor in the Upper Hunter I can never get to see. I always seem to pick days when there’s something on at his place – x-raying, photos, Sirecam or all the staff having to dash up to Tamworth because suddenly the other farm’s got flooded. The same bloke is always the first to hassle me to see his horses when I arrive at the complex.

With no kids or missus to come home to, not for a lack of trying, I can take my time, and generally do. Breathe in the scenery. There are some fantastic vistas especially out in the Sandy Hollow/Baerami direction. Out in Patinack country as it soon will be. Does it mean anything that they’re setting up a pre-training facility in a place named Broke? I enjoy visiting the occasional vineyard on my journey with my trusty James Halliday under my arm. I’m trying to like Hunter region wines. The rivet-jolting roads around Pokolbin are still a disgrace. Perhaps under Kevin 737’s Infrastructure Australia crusade they might get around to it before my jalopy disintegrates.

Gai was also in the area and one night I was her guest for dinner at her Scone hideaway. Another night I visited Canter, the relatively new licensed restaurant in the space near the railway station where once lived Quince. Canter gets the thumbs up for a good feed in tasteful surroundings. The herb encrusted chicken breasts were the size of Maria Venutti’s. Both look like they were fed on growth hormone. On another night I was enticed by a billboard outside one of the pubs on Kelly Street proclaiming their “new summer menu”, so I thought, 'this looks promising, I’ll give it a go'. If you think there is no way you can completely bugger up something as simple as a Caesar salad, think again. It was so bad it was Seizure salad. Never again. I proclaimed last year that McDonald’s was going to be the culinary salvation of Scone but nothing appears to be happening on the building site, which also includes a servo, at the north end of the town just under the speed camera.

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Excuse me if I don’t read the newspapers much, particularly when I’m away in places like the Hunter, but what’s happened to John Messara? One day proclaimed a dictator-in-waiting, next day nowhere to be seen. Gone from Aushorse, gone from TBA, presumably in readiness for the board of RacingNSW? But he’s not one of the Gang Of Five, so what happened? Is it correct that he was appointed to the Board but couldn’t live with some of his would-be bedfellows and withdrew before the announcement? I missed all the excitement! I’m only acquainted to any degree with two members of the Board, Alan Bell and Arthur Inglis, so I have no opinion on the appointments overall. Bell is a hard man from way back and Inglis has come to light in latter times as a harder man than some might have thought. John has got much more to offer than just continuing to make Arrowfield the brilliant success it is, so how do we tap into him without all his jealous enemies out there getting up in arms about it?

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Greg Childs handled his exit from riding with pure class, the guy is an exemplar of his profession. He’s a Kiwi so he had a head start. He was actually born on New Zealand Day or Waitangi Day as it was then known, February 6. Seems like only yesterday he was a budding apprentice from Taranaki, a region famous not for its sheep but for its cows, its mountain and John Wheeler. The local joke is that if you can’t see Mt Taranaki (Mt Egmont) because of the clouds, it’s raining, and if you can see it it’s going to rain. Childs had a marvelous career winning more than 40 Group 1s in Australia, throwing his leg over several of the epochal horses of the late 20th century. That group of NZ jockeys who filtered over to Australia from the mid-70s onwards had a major impact on racing here, guys like Garry Willetts, Midge Didham, Brent Thomson, Nigel Tiley, Bruce Compton, Greg Childs, Shane Dye, Jimmy and Larry Cassidy, Brian York and Grant Cooksley (I’ve probably missed a few, sorry) and even the women of that period like Maree Lyndon, Dianne Moseley and Linda Jones proved a point or two. It’s hard to fathom why those times, now more than 20 years ago, should have unearthed such a strong group of NZ jockeys capable of making cut-through in Australia where, up till then, it had been a national sport, cheer-led by those boorish, self-aggrandised old pressmen, to savage NZ jockeys at every opportunity. Since that intake which ended about the time of Childs's arrival, there have been more Kiwis who have tried their luck but none has made the same penetration.

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That's not a Hunter Valley scene, above. It's Heron Island at sun-up.

See you at church on the 25th. Outside.