Our AGM/Speaker Series, 7.30pm Wed 28 July 2021 via Zoom features a talk by historian Andrew Lemon

“A New Look at the History of the Caulfield Racecourse”

Click here to register for the Zoom link

Few Melburnians have ever complained that the great acreage of Flemington Racecourse had been set aside from the earliest colonial period as a public racecourse. It has long been seen as an asset and ornament to Melbourne, and It rightly has a place on Australia’s National Heritage List. 

Yet Caulfield Racecourse, whose history is almost as long, and which is nationally recognised as one of the great racecourses of Australia and has made the suburb famous, has always been a bone of contention, particularly in its own neighbourhood. Over the decades, in the imagination of some, ‘the heath’ could better have been used as a cemetery, a thoroughfare, a housing estate, a university, public park, swimming baths, anything….  And yet Caulfield Racecourse endures. More recently its future as a centre for the training of racehorses has been under question.

In this talk, racing historian Andrew Lemon – author of the three volume The History of Australian Thoroughbred Racing  –  will look at the long history of Caulfield Racecourse and its place in the Australian story, and will reflect on the numerous campaigns and controversies surrounding this piece of crown land in the heart of metropolitan Melbourne.