THE MELBOURNE TOWN PLATE
I n the days before the Melbourne Cup (first run at Flemington in 1861), the most important and richest race at the annual Melbourne Races was traditionally the Town Plate. There had been Town Plate races in Sydney and Parramatta since the 1820s and in Van Diemen’s Land (Tasmania) since the 1830s. Any decent sized Australian town had its Town Plate. At Melbourne’s first formally organised race meeting in March 1838 at the so-called Batman’s Hill course, the main race was a Town Plate, at set weights, worth £25 to the winner. The first Melbourne Town Plate to be run at Flemington was at the very first race meeting at the course in March 1840 when Mr Wood’s mare Mountain Maid won the prize in two heats in a field of six. She was, according to the press, “in splendid racing condition and won with ease.” Petrel was the great hero of the Melbourne Town Plates at Flemington from the mid 1840s, first winning the race as a three-year-old in 1845. Petrel continued racing, well, to the age of 14. In that long career he passed through the hands of many different owners. He won the race in 1846 and 1848 when it was extended in distance to three miles. There are mysteries about his pedigree and stories about his past. We know he was “a dark chestnut” under 16 hands in height, “of great substance and length”. Petrel was Melbourne’s first equine idol. The Melbourne Town Plate continued as an important race at Flemington into the 1860s. Archer won the two-mile Plate in 1861 the day after he won the Melbourne Cup and repeated the dose in 1862. But the Cup was by now worth much more than the Town Plate and immediately supplanted it as Melbourne’s – and Australia’s – greatest race.
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