AT FIRST glance, the rundown stable at the back of a block in French Lane, Kogarah, did not look particularly interesting.
But now there is some nostalgia after the demolition of an old house on the block next door has exposed the stable to the public eye for the first time in many years. John and Carol Maguire, Dawn and Jack Coutts — all horsey people — looked past the earthmoving machinery going about the business of development to see Kogarah as it was back in the old days.
It was a horse town back then, they said. Every second house had stables; there were horses in every paddock; trainers were everywhere. Horses took up the road, swam at the beach, were loaded on and off the train at Kogarah railway station and raced at Moorefield Racecourse.
Opened in 1888, the racecourse hosted its last race in 1951. The building work which turned it into Moorefield Girls High School, James Cook, St George College of TAFE and housing estates did not start until about 1956.
The industries built around horse racing continued for several years afterwards.
The Maguires and the Coutts, some too young to have attended race meetings at Moorefield, were born into the local racing culture.
John "Piggy" Maquire, 74, grew up opposite the racecourse and left school at 13 to train as a jockey.
Mr Coutts, 86, from a show business family in Carlton, married Dawn Bulfin, from a horse family in Kogarah. She was probably the district's first female trainer.
Dawn got a trainer's licence in 1962 and worked in the business until 1965.
"I was always interested, so when I got married I said I've got to be a trainer — so we leased a horse," Mrs Coutts, 79, said.
She kept some of her horses in Carol Maguire's dad's stables, trained them along the beach at Botany Bay and at Canterbury for fast trackwork.
The stables, believed to be the last in Kogarah, had belonged to Pop Edler and originally took up three house blocks.
Important trainers in the area included the Polson and McCurley families and Bob Mead whose son Tom was this paper's founding editor.
Sir Frank Packer is said to have kept a few horses in local stables.
As the demolition machinery churned up the mud on the development site you could almost smell the dung from the old days. So the conversation turned to dung pits, visited by gardeners for compost and used by jockeys to lose weight.
"If a jockey had to knock off a few pounds he would run around with a plastic raincoat, and if that wasn't enough he would hop into the dung pit," Mr Coutts said.
Mr Maguire remembers the experience as hot and somewhat smelly.
"We'd steam in the dung pit to take off the weight and we'd also take Ford pills — that's what you did in those days," Mr Maguire said.
The group was joined by Anne Field, 60. A former teacher, Kogarah councillor and horserace woman, she is writing a history of Moorefield Racecourse.
Do you have memories of the Moorefield Racecourse and the stables?
