As a new bdb blogger takes her first steps blogging on WordPress, the question is always, ‘Will this work?’ After a heartfelt blog that took hours (read at least 15 minutes) to compose with some truly inspiring and witty commentary, that I thought uploaded some days ago, I realise now that the blog is lost in the cosmos somewhere. So, not wanting to waste any more words, here is my test blog to see if it works this time. If not, I’m taking my virtual bat and virtual ball and going home…

I was wandering around our server and I found Mitch Vane’s gorgeous little dog living in a folder so I took him out for a walk.

Meet Karen Tayleur and Heath McKenzie the author and illustrator of Halloween in Christmas Hills: The Legend of Stingy Jack at the Eltham Town Festival!

Eltham Town Square on November 7 at 2.35pm for a book reading and signing!

But the fun doesn’t end there!

Design and make a spooky hat and join in the hat parade for your chance to win prizes

For all enquiries please contact

ELTHAM bookshop

970 Main Road

p: 03 9439 8700 or

e: elthambookshop@bigpond.com

Congratulations Carole!

On Wednesday it was announced that Garden of the Purple Dragon, part of the Dragonkeeper series, won the KOALA Award for Older Readers!

This much loved (and awarded) series is loved by readers all over the world and is available now.

To find out more about the award visit their website at http://www.koalansw.org.au/

On occasion, even the more banal elements of the horseracing experience—those matters of official procedure often settled in austere meetings far away from the romance of the racetrack itself—can come to resemble something of a soap-opera.
The 2007 spring carnival became engulfed in a storm of controversy when quality colt Pillar of Hercules, a leading contender for the Victoria Derby, was sensationally stood-down from racing amid concerns that he was secretly part-owned by Horty Mokbel, brother of convicted criminal Tony Mokbel. The Purana Taskforce, charged with investigating so-called ‘gangland’ activities in Melbourne, successfully applied for a restraining order in the Supreme Court under section 18 of the Confiscation Act 1997 to have Pillar of Hercules banned from racing until the colt’s bona fide ownership could be authenticated, with the three-year-old eventually sold at public auction for $1.8 million.
Similarly, but without such lingering undertones of criminality, the true ownership of 1873 Melbourne Cup
winner Don Juan remains a cause of considerable mystery to this day; a labyrinth of paperwork suggestive of a bizarre game of thoroughbred ‘pass the parcel’ making it difficult to definitively ascertain just who owned the four-year-old when he galloped to his emphatic six-length Cup win. In an intriguing story that has largely served to take much of the spotlight away from the race-day particulars of Don Juan’s sensational victory, a Mr W. Johnstone was officially listed as the lucky Cup-winning owner, though the weight of evidence appeared to point elsewhere.
Originally owned by South Australian John Baker, many believed that Don Juan actually commenced his career racing for bookmaker Joe Thompson, though the horse was not raced under Thompson’s name. This sentiment was supported by the fact that Thompson had backed Don Juan at long-odds to win substantial amounts of money on the Melbourne Cup, prompting many to suspect him of purposefully concealing his involvement in the horse to ensure a longer price. The plot only thickened from there, with renowned grazier Mr Joe Inglis purchasing Don Juan for £300 having seen the horse listed for private sale by Mr Johnstone just days before the Melbourne Cup. The sale was not officially recorded, so immortalising Johnstone’s name in Cup annals, but the first-prize of £1,360 garnered from Don Juan’s win on that Thursday in November almost certainly went into the pocket of Mr Joe Inglis. Bookmaker Thompson’s true interest in the horse remained a point of conjecture thereafter, and the fact that he would later come to name his magnificent East Melbourne mansion ‘Don Juan House’—built from the proceeds of his gambling winnings—only served to cloud the issue further. A subsequent inquiry into the contracts of sale pertaining to Don Juan failed to detect any impropriety, though the uproar in the local press following the race saw many maintaining that the public had been somehow duped.
Convoluted paper-trails aside, Don Juan’s Flemington romp would certainly have provided a great thrill to his proud owner (whoever he may have been). As the field flew past the abattoirs adjacent to Flemington, jockey James Wilson Jr, riding under instruction from his father, made his move, having settled well-back during the early running. In a flash the pair put paid to Dagworth and Horatio, the 3/1 favourite romping home to one of the more emphatic Cup victories of all time. Amazingly, trainer James Wilson revealed after the race that in the days preceding the Cup, Don Juan had experienced a mild form of heart attack. That the four-year-old was still able to win the race spoke volumes to his tremendous resilience, though cruelly, it appears that the mighty effort took its toll; Don Juan suffering a fully-blown fatal heart attack just months later.

In the lead-up to the big race, punters were unable to split Red Handed and the well-fancied General Command, with neither horse budging from a rock-solid 4/1 throughout the day. That is, until Bill Waterhouse saw Felipe Ysmael enter the betting-ring. In a courageous bluff, Waterhouse stared provocatively at ‘The Babe’ for a moment before casually winding out Red Handed’s quote from 4/1 to 9/2, virtually daring his prey to take the inflated odds. Suspecting a rat—Ysmael promptly strode up to ‘Big Bill’ and instead plonked his $250,000 on General Command, a stern poker-face no doubt concealing Waterhouse’s delight.
Taken hook, line and sinker by Waterhouse’s audacious con, ‘The Babe’ could only look on in horror as Red Handed, his original selection, kicked strongly to win by a neck with General Command’s mediocre sixth leaving the $250,000 firmly in ‘Big Bill’s’ bag. Ysmael was reportedly never the same punter again, the huge loss irrevocably damaging his nerve for the big-stake investment.
Originally a cheap purchase at the Trentham yearling sales, the lop-eared chestnut Red Handed amazingly gave trainer Bart Cummings his third consecutive Melbourne Cup, joining Light Fingers and Galilee on the honour-roll. The strong lead-up form that so convinced Bill Waterhouse that Red Handed was a ‘sure-thing’ in the Cup constituted two brilliant seconds to the mighty Tobin Bronze in the Toorak Handicap and Caulfield Cup, before a satisfactory tune-up 4th in the Mackinnon Stakes. Much credit for Red Handed’s Cup victory went to his star jockey Roy Higgins, who used all his vigour to summon one final effort from Red Handed and lift the five-year-old home by a neck over Red Crest, having looked a vanquished and tired horse with a furlong to run.

The ‘first to blink’ mind-games that constitute the interaction between punter and bookie have surely never been played out with such dramatic effect as on Melbourne Cup day 1967. That year, Filipino industrialist Felipe Ysmael and bookmaker Bill Waterhouse engaged in a betting-ring stand-off for the ages. The sense of theatre generated by the hostile union of gambler and satchel-swinger has always been one of the great drawcards of a day at the races—two individuals sure of knowledge and nerve locked in an arduous day-long test of will, wallets and courage.
In the lead-up to the big race, punters were unable to split Red Handed and the well-fancied General Command, with neither horse budging from a rock-solid 4/1 throughout the day. That is, until Bill Waterhouse saw Felipe Ysmael enter the betting-ring. In a courageous bluff, Waterhouse stared provocatively at ‘The Babe’ for a moment before casually winding out Red Handed’s quote from 4/1 to 9/2, virtually daring his prey to take the inflated odds. Suspecting a rat—Ysmael promptly strode up to ‘Big Bill’ and instead plonked his $250,000 on General Command, a stern poker-face no doubt concealing Waterhouse’s delight.
Taken hook, line and sinker by Waterhouse’s audacious con, ‘The Babe’ could only look on in horror as Red Handed, his original selection, kicked strongly to win by a neck with General Command’s mediocre sixth leaving the $250,000 firmly in ‘Big Bill’s’ bag. Ysmael was reportedly never the same punter again, the huge loss irrevocably damaging his nerve for the big-stake investment.
Originally a cheap purchase at the Trentham yearling sales, the lop-eared chestnut Red Handed amazingly gave trainer Bart Cummings his third consecutive Melbourne Cup, joining Light Fingers and Galilee on the honour-roll. The strong lead-up form that so convinced Bill Waterhouse that Red Handed was a ‘sure-thing’ in the Cup constituted two brilliant seconds to the mighty Tobin Bronze in the Toorak Handicap and Caulfield Cup, before a satisfactory tune-up 4th in the Mackinnon Stakes. Much credit for Red Handed’s Cup victory went to his star jockey Roy Higgins, who used all his vigour to summon one final effort from Red Handed and lift the five-year-old home by a neck over Red Crest, having looked a vanquished and tired horse with a furlong to run.
Known as ‘The Babe’, Ysmael was a fearless punter with a reputation for betting big, and he had Bill Waterhouse firmly in the cross-hairs. Word had spread around the traps (as it so easily tends to do in racing circles) that Ysmael had settled on the Bart Cummings-trained Red Handed as the winner of the Melbourne Cup, and intended to back the gelding for a collect of $1 million. Unfortunately for ‘The Babe’, ‘Big Bill’ Waterhouse decided that Red Handed was unbeatable in the Cup, so setting the scene for a classic high-stakes duel the outcome of which could make only one man a fortune.

extract from ‘Winners of the Melbourne Cup’ by Costa Rolfe.

For more details about the book go to the Red Dog Books website

Next week will be Melbourne Cup week for us here at  black dog books blog!

Join us every day from Monday until Cup Day as we run an extract from Costa Rolfe’s book Winners of the Melbourne Cup 2nd Edition published by our good friends at Red Dog Books. This is your chance to look smart in front of all your friends as we give you the inside story on some of the cup winners!

Plus we will also be running a competition on twitter starting on Tuesday at 2pm (Melbourne time). We will tweet ten different years at random and the first ten people to correctly name the winning horse from that year will win a copy of the book.

Winners of the Melbourne Cup is available in bookstores now!

Big congrats to Sue Lawson for her shortlisting in the Children’s Peace Literature Awards for Finding Darcy.

Darcy Abbott is forced to live with her grandmother and great-grandmother – who she calls Misery and Batty – for three months while her mother retrains in the city. Darcy is horrified by the prospect of living with these two unhappy women and worse still, no TV after 9.30pm and no internet access!

While researching a project at school she discovers a mystery surrounding the disappearance of her great-grandfather, Darcy Charles Fletcher, during World War II – and a secret that has wreaked havoc in her family for generations.

Finding Darcy is available now.

Join Karen Tayleur and Heath McKenzie, the author and illustrator of Halloween in Christmas Hills, for some fun on Halloween.

First stop: The Little Bookroom.

Join us at 10.30am at the Little Bookroom, 759 Nicholson Street Carlton North, for a spooky Storytime session. Dress up and join the creepy fun (and who knows you might end up winning a prize).

and then join us at Readings Port Melbourne at 2pm for a Halloween party.

Come along to Readings 253 Bay St, Port Melbourne for a listen to kreepy Karen Tayleur read the book and some drawing fun with the horrific Heath McKenzie. Dress up and join  our frightening fashion parade.

Both events are free!

See you there!

Exciting news from the kennel – Carole Wilkinson has been shortlisted in the NSW Premier’s History Awards!

Carole is shortlisted for The Night We Made the Flag the beautiful story of the women that came together in secret to make the Eureka flag.

The Night we Made the Flag is available now!

Good luck, Carole!