🔒 🔒 From ‘old news’ to Group 1 headlines – how Cliff Brown found his way back into Australian racing

After training almost 600 winners in Singapore, Cliff Brown returned to Australia in 2021 and had to rebuild from scratch.

“It was very much starting again,” Brown told The Straight. “I thought it would be very difficult because we were old news.”

Thirteen years away had changed the landscape he was coming back to, with established stables facing a new generation of powerful operations and Brown having to restore his stable, his ownership base and his standing among the Australian training ranks.

He had left Australia with an outstanding reputation as the youngest trainer to prepare three Derby winners at Group 1 level. He spent the next 12 years enhancing his name in Singapore.

During his time at Kranji, Brown trained 567 winners, including 13 Group 1 victories.

Brown established one of Singapore’s elite training operations with record-setting exploits to match his Australian achievements.

He became the first to train five local Group 1 winners in a season.

Returning home meant bringing that experience and standing back to an Australian industry that had changed in his absence, along with a select team of horses owned by clients happy to continue the journey.

Few guarantees came with his relocation during the pandemic in 2021, as it became clear Singapore racing was heading towards oblivion.

“I was very fortunate that I had some people I’ve trained for over a long time in Australia and Singapore, all came back with me,” he says.

“We started just with the Singapore horses, and they did a great job … I won a Group race, just got beaten in a Group 1 with The Inferno, and the rest won races.”

“They did really well, but it was about waiting for that next group of babies to come through.”

The Singapore imports gave Brown something to work with while he prepared for the next phase of a rebuild, but they could never be the entire answer.

That wait has taken time, although Brown had been warned it would.

He remembers John O’Shea telling him it would be about five years before he properly re-established himself, a prediction that has proved remarkably accurate as Brown enters his fifth full season back in Australia.

Brown has resisted a temptation to rely on volume to accelerate the transition.

His stable runs around 25 horses, a deliberately modest operation that keeps him closely involved and lets him enjoy the strategising required to get a small team to its best.

“I like the hands-on. I do enjoy that aspect of it … planning a lot,” he said.

It is an approach that has worked before, and there is something familiar about the way Brown has gone about his second Australian act.

He has never been a trainer dependent on buying huge numbers of expensive yearlings, instead generally picking “four or five each year” and hoping to find enough quality among them.

The strike rate on those purchases is enviable, with Sepals and Von Hauke central to how well the selection process has worked.

Sepals, though, has become the horse that most clearly charts the stable’s headway.

Bought as an Inglis Classic yearling for $80,000, the Calyx gelding progressed quickly through the grades before winning the Sir Rupert Clarke Stakes at Caulfield last September, giving Brown his first Group 1 victory since returning from Singapore.

If Sepals supplied the breakthrough, Von Hauke has helped demonstrate that it was not a one-off.

A latecomer, Von Hauke is only now reaching his peak at seven, having already collected five wins in 29 starts.

Both Sepals and Von Hauke return to racing in the Sir Rupert Clarke on Saturday after they filled the minor placings in the Stradbroke Handicap at Eagle Farm in June.

While Von Hauke is considered the more forward of the two, Sepals will attempt to defend his title with 4.5kg more than he carried in 2025 as a forerunner to a potential Group 1 Champions Mile bid during the Melbourne Cup carnival.

Their presence will signal an end “to a quiet winter” for the stable that has allowed Brown to run his eye over a dozen unraced horses.

“There’s plenty coming through,” he says. “It’s just a matter of where they end up and how good or bad they are.”

That uncertainty is part of the attraction for a trainer who knows how quickly racing can change direction.

“You never get ahead of yourself,” Brown says. “This is one business where as soon as you think, ‘oh, I’m going pretty good here’, it will bite you as quickly as anything.”

“It’s been a slow burn, but now the stable is in a really good spot.”