The recent death of Jock McArthur, a former steeplechase jockey, raconteur, and the man behind the infamous and short-lived Meningoort Cup, held special significance for Matt Stewart.
When I was at boarding school in Geelong, there were two knockabout siblings, John and Robert McArthur, who hailed from a sheep and cattle station I’d soon discover was legendary.
And they had a knockabout father as legendary as the farm.
Jock McArthur, former amateur steeplechase jockey, raconteur and legend, and instigator of a renegade horse race outlawed because the jockeys were all drunk, will be farewelled this week in the shearing shed at Meningoort, his historic property not far from Camperdown in Victoria’s west.
As kids, we would camp at Meningoort and wander about, discovering its long and colourful history of sheep, cattle, slow racehorses and one immortal. Chicquita was bred by McArthur’s father, Sir Gordon Stewart McArthur.
She is commemorated with a plaque, not far from an ancient horse barn at Meningoort plucked from bush racing’s history books.
Robert McArthur, who will deliver a eulogy of old Jock’s greatest and most amusing life hits and misses, says anywhere between 100 and 500 might turn up at the shearing shed.
Jock died at age 85 and many of his generation, the rough and tumble Western Districts gentry who helped turn the Meningoort Cup into a fabled horse race, have long passed.
Some will arrive by car, some by plane. The former Camperdown airstrip is located on the property, alongside an endless, rising grass gallop that made Meningoort the Lindsay Park of Victoria’s west, minus the prized pedigrees.
A decade ago, in a story in the Herald Sun, McArthur explained the origins of the Meningoort Cup.
It lasted less than 20 years, outlawed by the Victoria Racing Club, but is Western Districts' legend, as is McArthur, a daredevil who never stopped chuckling through the hardships of life on the land, and in racing.
According to Robert McArthur, Jock’s final living gesture, just before liver cancer took him, was a hearty thumbs-up.
The first Meningoort Cup was run in 1965, the idea hatched during a wild bucks’ party for a local pastoralist.
Next morning, those of varying riding talent dusted themselves off, plucked some of Jock’s bedraggled racehorses from the paddocks at nearby Meningoort, saddled them up and raced off up the hill.
Meningoort had been around since 1837, passed from generation to generation of McArthurs.
Stewart McArthur, the long-time local member for Corangamite, lived in the big house and Jock and wife Jo in a newer homestead closer to the racing stables.
Fifteen horses and 15 jockeys with very sore heads contested the inaugural Meningoort Cup. There were no rules and no running rails, just a crowd of 30 or 40 that swelled to 800 the following year.
They came from everywhere. John and Amanda Elliott flew in from Toorak and the local pubs were booked out.
Through the 1970s, the race got so big that it couldn’t survive. Rules, damned rules.
The VRC had heard all about it – in fact some of its committee attended it - and decided it needed proper stewarding.
Jock, putting his foot in it, as he often did, told the steward that there was only one rule; the jockeys had to be drunk.
The Meningoort Cup wasn’t the only lawless horse race being run on private properties. The steward told Jock and Stewart McArthur that the VRC was trying to outlaw illegal race meetings and thus the glorious era of the Meningoort Cup came to an abrupt end.
As kids, we would sit around campfires and Jock would tell us about his amazing horse race. It reminded us of stories we’d learned at school from Banjo Paterson, Henry Lawson and Francis William Lauderdale Adams.
None of us knew much about Jock, other than that he ran a farm full of “woollies”, made us laugh and never had much of a filter.
Jock was a permanent fixture of the Warrnambool May carnival and was often a guest of the VRC committee at Flemington, renowned for his ill-fitting clobber, inappropriate stories and a loud chuckle that was the perfect foil to the groomed manners of the hoity toity.
Jock always had one or two slow ones in work, stabled in the historic barn and exercised when the “woollies’’ had to be rounded up. Much later, he took on a co-trainer from Camperdown, a wily horseman called Kieran O’Brien, who’d once ridden slow ones for Jock and returned after 25 years abroad, working for Luca Cumani and Laurie Laxon.
Old Jock and his mate had a flurry of success. They paid $4000 for Beware Of Thestorm and it won three races and $100,000 in stakes. Two others, Maasai Warrior and Maasai Justice, were good winners.
Jock had been a very good amateur steeplechase jockey, according to former Racing Victoria chief steward Des Gleeson, whose career began not long after the curtain fell on the Meningoort Cup.
Gleeson grew up on a farm near Port Fairy, about 100km from Meningoort.
“Jock was a legend down there,” Gleeson said. “He rode as an amateur at the point to points and I’m sure he won the amateur steeplechase on the Wednesday at one Warrnambool carnival. He was a bloody good rider, fearless.
“I’d always have a chat with him down at the carnival. He was an incredible character. Very sad to hear he has died.”
Of the Meningoort Cup, Gleeson said: “My Dad used to talk about it. It was iconic.”
In his eulogy, Robert McArthur will tell of his only childhood memory of his father’s famous race. “I reckon the last one was 1984. All I remember is chasing the field in the back of a ute eating an ice-cream,” he said.
Robert will share with guests how the legendary Bert Bryant nicknamed Jock “Autumn Leaves” because he kept falling off and how proud Jock had been that in the early 1960s he rode in one Grand Annual, tailed the field but never fell off.
He will recall the story of how Jock had many race falls but suffered only one broken leg, when he fell off a bar stool at the Mount Elephant Hotel in Darlington.
He will tell the tale of one particular steeplechase where Jock was instructed to go to the front and lead by a fence.
“I asked him what happened. He laughs and says ‘I got to the first fence and it fell and I got kicked by half the field and dragged to the next fence. I ended up in an ambulance with six other jockeys (because half the field was brought down) and I was so bruised and battered I couldn’t get out of bed for a week’.”
He will also reflect on a father who stumbled successfully through life by not taking it too seriously, and who devoured books and knew more about horses and history than almost anyone he’d met.
In the early 1990s, I had a horse called Ipsambul and it found its way to Meningoort to be trained. Jock’s Scottish strapper dubbed Ipsambul “Fluffy” because he was too woolly to be clipped and a year or so later when then trained at Cranbourne by Deane Lester and his mum Sandra, Ipsambul won a trio of picnic races and races at Seymour and Wodonga.
“Jock was a legend down there. “He rode as an amateur at the point to points and I’m sure he won the amateur steeplechase on the Wednesday at one Warrnambool carnival. He was a bloody good rider, fearless" - former Racing Victoria chief steward Des Gleeson
On a dare, racecaller Clem Dimsey called him Fluffy the entire race, which he won. I told Jock and he keeled over laughing.
Before Fluffy was moved on from Meningoort, where chasing sheep didn’t make him a winner, me, Jock and former star New Zealand jumps jockey Harry Green would stumble out of the Mount Elephant pub at closing, fall into the back of a ute and next morning Green, would yank himself aboard Fluffy and take him up the most famous private gallop west of Geelong.
They were rollicking days and are now rich memories of a fairly recent era that seems so distant. The Meningoort Cup could have been run in Texas or Darwin in the 1850s. It was truly wild west.
Jock McArthur took to life like it was a steeplechase fence.
“Jock never cared about much. As time went on, he became my best mate, not my dad,” Robert said.
“Jock was one of a kind, a very unique and amusing bloke and I had the privilege of being his son.”
