Where is he? Friend Tony is having a drink in one of the many track saloons and watching the race on TV.
"Tony," I say to him when I next get the chance, "Tony" (he is of Italian/American extraction, so I always place imaginary cotton wads in a Godfathery mouth), "Tony, why you go alla way Melbourne see da Cup and then watcha on TV, whicha youse can do without a-leaving town in da first place. So Tony, why is this for, Tony?"
The race itself is incidental, he explains. After all, when you've seen one bunch of horses with bobbing jockeys barrelling along in the far distance mainly obscured by the rails, then you've pretty much seen them all. Sure, there's a bit of action up the home straight, but not enough worth getting your eye poked out by an inebriated punter with a $5 place bet who's mistaken a front-runner for his/her nag back in the caboose.
No, it's all about the atmosphere, Tony explains. Like the Muslim pilgrimage to the Hajj, Cup Day is a Mecca for a multitude simply, like himself, inexplicably bonkers about horse racing. Being there to inhale the heady ozone is a sacred duty.
When unable to make the trip, Tony and good lady dress up in their finest, hats and all, and settle down on the sofa at home with a magnum of champagne to watch the TV broadcast.
Polls show the three identities that Australians feel best define the Ocker character are Ned Kelly, Don Bradman and Phar Lap. Phar Lap's origins aside, it's appropriately symbolic that a bushranger and a racehorse share the podium. The Australian racing industry, in particular, is pretty shonky.
Its history is littered with jack-ups, ring-ins, nobbling and doping, collusions, corrupt racing authorities, cattle prods ... you name it.
Like many industries where fast, big money is to be made, there's a sinister underbelly extending all the way up to extortion, mutilations and murder. An expose by Australian journalist Mathew Benn makes for sobering reading. Its title is short and apt: Fixed.
The drug issue is pervasive. As with human professional athlete counterparts, the main race now revolves around the dopers' chemists keeping one stride ahead of the testing regimes. Among the doping, over-stressing and general breakdowns, the equine death toll can be horrendous. The Australian record so far is 174 deaths in January 2008 alone. And racehorse deaths are notoriously under-reported.
Horses are often just so much red meat to be bidden and ridden to the nth degree. And ultimately, if they're not up to it, knackered. But where man's inhumanity to animals is often only exceeded by man's inhumanity to man, a seemingly innocuous flutter on a Cup sweepstake might seem small change.
For those lamenting the loss of their couple of bucks, though, spare a thought for Kerry Packer. In three days at a 1991 Easter Racing Carnival, poor Kerry dropped a cool A$55 million ($107m in today's money). Unsurprisingly, his bookie promptly retired.
"The sport of kings" it may be. Some choose to add ... "and the business of knaves".
