If you ever find yourself on the streets of an Australian town centre, you might get to witness a very Australian shopping phenomenon: businesses attempting to drum up trade by employing some hapless assistant to stand outside with a microphone announcing the various bargains and discounts on offer. I’ve seen this before, on my previous two trips to the country, and I’ve always found it rather amusing, in a low-budget, 1970s kind of way. Still, wasn’t quite what I was expecting as I stepped off the plane at Tullamarine airport, but sure enough, there opposite the walkway was a woman greeting us with “some fantastic offers” on various alcoholic beverages available in the duty free shop. “Some really great savings to be made today”, she said. Frankly, whiskey is probably the last thing I want to think about after spending the best part of 24 hours in the air, but there you go.

The first week of our stay over here was dominated by the Spring Racing Carnival, Melbourne’s annual racing festival. It’s big, around these parts. In fact, it was so important to Sal that it caused her to set off early and beat me to the country by just over a day in order to attend Saturday’s Derby Day. For my first taste of the racing, I had to wait until Tuesday, which saw the arrival of Australia’s biggest race, the Melbourne Cup. With Sal’s house stuffed full of friends and relatives attending their barbecue, we ate, drank, and gambled. At three, we left the fuzzy tv in the garage on which we’d been struggling to follow the action up to that point, and headed inside to watch the main event on a tv where you could actually see what was happening. With the BBQ sweep running at $70 for first place, and a stack of betting stubs from the TAB sitting on the kitchen table, the stakes were certainly high.

In terms of the national impact, the Melbourne Cup is a bit like an Australian version of the Grand National–everyone puts a bet on, and everyone pays attention to the result, whether they care about racing or not. Unlike the National, the Melbourne Cup does provide the interesting bonus that, lacking fences as it does, there’s a fairly good chance that your horse will still be running by the end of the race. Not that it makes much difference to me, of course, because it’s spectacularly unlikely that any horse I’ve backed will be anywhere near the front, even if it can get to the finish line.

On the off chance that the event didn’t mean quite so much to the rest of the world as it apparently did to the state of Victoria, I should perhaps mention that, much to the delight of the local media, what was apparently the most important and exciting and relevant thing in the history of everything happened, as the horse that had won for the last two years won the thing again. Far be it from me to suggest that the hyperbolic reaction from the local tv and press was perhaps disproportionate to the shock occurrence of one of the horses in the race winning it, but it seems that history was made. And no, I’m not just bitter because of the fact that my horse cantered over the line in eighth place. It’s just that a later check of the international news websites revealed that the historic event merited little more than a tiny article in the depths of the racing pages. At one point one of Sal’s relatives asked if we usually watched the Melbourne Cup back home. I didn’t have the heart to explain that it isn’t even televised in the UK…