What started out as three weeks of casual employment has become a lifetime career for Menangle Park harness racing track curator, Owen Mulligan.
The cheerful Mulligan was called in by some football mates for a bit of part-time work mowing and whipper-snipping in the 1980s – and 40 years later, he’s never left!
In fact, the Menangle Park curating team is a model of long and dedicated service – Mulligan has been working for harness racing for 40 years, with his supervisor, James Chang, just a shade less, at 37 years.
The pair have certainly seen their share of change over almost four decades since they began at Harold Park.
“I remember when I first started, a lot of the time we would have the track like a highway,” Mulligan said.
“Everyone believed a hard track was a fast track, which of course was later found to not necessarily be true. But we would actually use a roller to compact it and get it hard, like a highway. For the Miracle Mile, especially, during the 1980s, it would be roll, roll, roll,” he said.
But as thinking and research evolved, and American influences began to permeate the Australasian harness racing scene, the first of the dramatic innovations that began at racetracks in the early 2000s.
“We had a flat track at Harold Park when I started, but the thinking changed, a lot of it because of what was happening in America. Dan Coon was a leading curator and track designer who was in charge of the Red Mile and Lexington tracks and he originally banked Harold Park,” Mulligan said.
“I clearly remember pulling out a string line from the inside of the track to show where the banking would run and I couldn’t believe the angle on it – I thought it would be like a velodrome. I was sure the surface would be rolling down to the inside!”
Mulligan’s doubts were dispelled, though, and the Harold Park times continued to quicken. Then Coon’s expertise was again called in for the design of the state-of-the-art new Menangle complex, which opened in 2008.
Owen Mulligan and James Chang close the gates to Harold Park for the last time in 2011.
Mulligan made the early move to Menangle, while Chan remained on as curator of Harold Park, while it was still running until 2010.
Harold Park was 804.5 metres in circumference, compared to Menangle’s 1400 metres.
“Menangle just changed things completely, but certainly it’s been change for the good,” Mulligan said.
“The times speak for themselves and over the years things have done a complete 180 degrees on how we manage the track. We’ve gone from using the roller at Harold Park to scarifying the track at Menangle every morning, then perhaps another scarifying later in the day, or we run over it with a mesh,” he said.
“There were only a handful of horses that worked at Harold Park – but here, they never stop. We like the surface in the morning to be a bit fluffy, which is best for the horses’ comfort and safety.
“But we need to race on that same surface, so on racedays we close the track at 10 and we can have it ready by about 1pm for racing.
“With the camber that’s on the track, the surface does start rolling down to the pegs, so once a week or so, we run the grader over it to shift it back up where it should be.”
Mulligan said track curating was something of an art form.
“We don’t always get it right. Sometimes we’ll get caught out by rain, and other things can happen. But it’s a very good surface. For example in February when there was something like 200 mm of rain in parts of Sydney, we didn’t lose a day of racing.”
Mulligan and his colleagues did dabble in the participant side of the sport, with a young trotter named Ten Commanders – named in honor of the syndicate of 10 curators and grounds staff who owned him.
“It was a great – he won quite a few races for us and we sent him to Victoria to race as well. It was a lot of fun, and good to experience the other side of the fence, I guess,” he said.
“I’ve made great friends over the years, work colleagues and people who come and go from here, and I’ve also got to know a lot of lovely trainers and drivers.
“It’s a great industry to work in. Although I suppose I’m not really qualified to say that because I haven’t worked in too many others!”
Terry Gange
NewsAlert PR Mildura