Racing In Australia

This little article has been in draft form for most of this year - time flies alright! We've all heard of Black Caviar and the big race of the year, the Melbourne Cup, but unless you live in Australia, you probably won't know much else about the country's racing scene. But with a stake in Raining Dollars now, it's time to talk a little about racing Down Under, so things will hopefully make more sense in the future.

The Australian Racing Board, established in 1998, oversees the racing business, which is basically split into eight regions to make logistics that much easier - after all said and done, it's a big country! As such, we have New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, Western Australia, Southern Australia, Tasmania, the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) and Northern Territory each having its own administration.

Raining Dollars is in the Queensland area, with Brisbane (with its prestigious Eagle Farm and Doomben facilities), Toowoomba (Clifford Park), Caloundra (Sunshine Coast), Gold Coast, Ipswich, Cairns (Cannon Park), Mackay, Townsville and Rockhampton as the main racecourses, augmented by an awful lot of smaller facilities. If one goes through the whole list of tracks for all of Australia - and there are several hundred - one will notice that lots of tracks have the same name as English racecourses, which is obviously a throwback to the colonial days, as is the racing itself, I guess...