Histories of Green Square - City of Sydney

Chapter 9 – A Course of Action
Chapter 9 A Course of Action:
Working Class Sporting Culture
at Victoria Park Racecourse,
between 1908 and 1943
9.1 Introduction
This chapter explores the sporting and popular culture of the
residents of Green Square (the suburbs Waterloo, Zetland,
Alexandria, Rosebery and Beaconsfield) by looking at the
history of the Victoria Park Racecourse between 1908 and
1943. Victoria Park Racecourse was a proprietary, or privately
owned, track, one of many which dotted this region of Sydney
in the early twentieth century. Its history tells us about how
the people of the Green Square area enjoyed and defended
their leisure time in the first half of the twentieth century.
The history of the racecourse and the various activities that
occurred on the site are important in themselves, of course,
but to understand its real significance, we need to see it in
a wider social and cultural context. So this chapter will also
examine the general gambling culture of the working class
© Erik Nielsen
Erik Nielsen
and the particular type and style of racing that took place at
Victoria Park. It emerges that this racecourse was in fact a site
for tense class relations, a battleground for control not only of
working conditions, but of popular culture, and particularly
working class people’s leisure time and activities. When faced
with a challenge from outside their own social group, working
people here adapted their culture on their own terms and for
their own purposes.
The days of racing at Victoria Park ended many years ago. But
the legacy of this site lives on, because the racing culture that
emerged from this period is not a ‘dead’ culture. If anything,
it is dynamic, constantly adapting to new developments and
requirements.
What happened to the site after the closure in 1943? The final
part of this chapter takes the story of the Victoria Park Race-
Fig. 9.1 ‘Psalmist’ wins a race at Victoria Park in 1935.
(Source: Sam Hood, ‘Psalmist’, Hood Collection, courtesy of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales.)
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