It’s that time of the year again where everybody is talking about the Melbourne Cup - 'the race that stops the nation' - but what about Sydney’s connection with horse racing? The Dictionary of Sydney website reveals a few surprising facts: The first official horse race in Sydney was run in Hyde Park in 1810, two weeks after the park was formally created by Governor Lachlan Macquarie. It was a three-day event, with a silver cup valued at 50 guineas as the prize and an extra 50 guineas up for grabs for the winners. At the top of Market Street a grandstand was put up near the winning post and the course ran in a clockwise direction toward Macquarie Street, along College Street, around Liverpool Street and returning across Elizabeth Street to the winning post. It’s a little difficult to imagine Hyde Park as we now know it now with its trees, pathways, the Archibald Fountain and the ANZAC Memorial, once being a racecourse! It didn’t last very long though, races were held until 1821 when Governor Thomas Brisbane placed a ban on official racing. Venture south west into the suburb of Canterbury and you might have noticed there’s a racecourse. It turns out horse racing has been popular in Canterbury as early as the 1840s. A man called Cornelius Prout declared a part of his property open for use as a racecourse. Prout was a fairly enterprising individual - he also operated a punt across the Cooks River - much to the annoyance of his neighbours who were forced to pay a toll on a bridge he constructed across the river. Local publicans would organise race meetings to entertain their patrons frequently using their own horses for the races. In 1878, 3,000 people gathered for the races in honour of Queen Victoria’s birthday with many of the people walking from Ashfield train station to the course. In 1884, the place received a makeover and Canterbury Park Race Club was established with a recreation park, racetracks and a grandstand built. It might surprise some that there was a zoo on the racecourse with kangaroos, wallabies, emus, kookaburras and other native Australian animals and operated up until the World War I. During the World War II the course was taken over by the Australian Army and used for various purposes much to the annoyance of racegoers. Canterbury Park Racecourse continued to flourish up to the 1990s, however, it ceased to be used for training in 1998. It may not be the horse racing hub it used to be but next time you go past you’ll now know how it all started! You can read more about the history of horseracing in Sydney in Richard Waterhouse's article on Culture and Customs for the Dictionary and Lesley Muir and Brian Madden's article Canterbury Park Racecourse from 2013. --- Many thanks to Nicole Cama for today's post and radio spot. If you missed our weekly Dictionary of Sydney segment on 2SER Breakfast, you can catch up here.