A thousand miles away – King Island to Birdsville via Betoota

Three brothers have embarked on an epic road trip with their horses to this week’s Birdsville races, ticking off a bucket-list item. The lesson from their own hometown is that you can never take for granted racing will be there forever.

With the edge of the Simpson Desert as a backdrop, Birdsville has become an iconic racing destination in outback Australia. (Photo: Matt Williams – Supplied by Birdsville Racing Club)

In Australia, our determination to race has never been curtailed by hostile geography.

Wedged near the juncture of two states and a Territory sits a little barren dot in the desert called Birdsville. Burke and Wills perished not far from there, near the famous Dig Tree, unable to cope with the heat and vast emptiness of the interior.

The first race meeting was held at Birdsville in 1882, 19 years after the bodies of Burke and Wills were discovered down by Cooper Creek. Explorers perished, but a race meeting somehow sprang to life and became an Australian icon.

In 143 years, the two-day meet – run this weekend, amid a tinge of sadness – was curtailed only three times: once by flood, once because of horse flu and once because of COVID-19.

Sixteen hundred kilometres south of Birdsville is King Island, infamous throughout history for its many shipwrecks, including the devastating loss of the Cataraqui in 1845, Australia’s worst-ever nautical disaster. Four hundred people perished.

King Island was also known for its castaways, sealers and farmers who faced the lonely challenge of life on one of Australia’s most hostile and wind-ravaged outposts. The roaring forties make the trip to King Island from Moorabbin or Essendon by plane an adventure even to this day.

Yet despite its remoteness, they managed to conjure up some horse sports on King Island. A decade after 150 stockmen and land owners first galloped through the dust in Birdsville, a day’s ride from the Dig Tree, a similarly enthusiastic group started racing on “KI”.

First prize for the first-ever race was a wallaby pelt.

The Australian resolve to race, no matter how challenging the environment, does not mean the races and race-day institutions, like Birdsville’s famous boxing tent, are timeless.

Ironically, despite the conveniences of the modern world, isolation will likely lead to the demise of racing on King Island.

The summer season has been abandoned, and the future is far from assured. There are not enough people or horses. The island population has aged. A barge from Port Welshpool in Victoria takes 24 hours to reach it.

Birdsville racing faces no imminent threat. It seems to get bigger every year. In the 2009 Q150 celebrations, the Birdsville races were declared one of the Q150 Icons of Queensland.

But just as the farmers who’d train a nag or two on King Island to keep the sport going have become too old, so too has Fred Brophy.

The Fred Brophy Boxing Troupe has been part of Birdsville and outback folklore for over 40 years.

Brophy’s team of mostly indigenous fighters would travel from dusty town to town, setting up their tent, Brophy banging on his drums, inviting big lads from farms or brave travellers to step into the ring.

There was an element of wild west pantomime in these fights. No one ever really got hurt, bar the odd bloodied nose and bruised ego.

Fred Brophy’s Boxing Troupe has been part of the Birdsville races festivities for four decades. (Photo: Matt Williams(Photo: Matt Williams – Supplied by Birdsville Racing Club)

The Brophy tent, from Thursday night through until Saturday, was the irreverent heart of the annual Birdsville races.

But Brophy is now 73 and worn out, and this year means curtains for one of outback racing’s great sideshows.

Brophy told the Birdsville Races website that “Birdsville was the first major event we committed to so it deserves to be the first place we say goodbye”.

The loss of the boxing tent will hit hard, as will the near-certain demise of racing on King Island. For sustenance, racing leans heavily on history and folklore.

“Fred’s departure is going to be a big loss to punters. It won’t be the same without Fred’s rally ringing out across Birdsville each night after the races,” said David Brook, Birdsville Race Club president.

The Miners Rest Cup proved more of a flurry than a solution for racing on King Island. After two years, the band of Ballarat trainers who put teams of horses on the Welshpool barge could not sustain it.

Their tours provided some lucky guests with the experience of a historic race meet that would soon be gone. Bruce McAvaney was on the first trip and said it would probably be his most special racing memory.

The crowd will be bigger than usual over the Birdsville weekend. News of the demise of the boxing troupe spread far and wide. More horses than usual have been balloted because of a surge of entries.

Ken, Robert and John Keys grew up on King Island. Robert is still listed as training at Currie, the largest town on KI, while Ken is based at Cranbourne and John is down in Hobart.

They know that history is not a guarantee of survival and wanted to experience the legend of Birdsville, the Brophy tent before it was folded up for good.

This last fortnight, the Keys boys set themselves an unusual goal – run horses at three far-flung bush meets in three weeks.

Birdsville’s two-day meeting attracts racegoers from all parts of Australia. (Photo: Matt Williams- (Photo: Matt Williams – Supplied by Birdsville Racing Club)

They each had runners at Betoota last weekend – no wins – and each have runners in just one race at Birdsville on Saturday. The final meet, next weekend, is at Bedourie, halfway between Birdsville and the Boulia Camel Races.

Legendary bloodstock advisor Tubba Williams and Forbes trainer Bill Hayes have tagged along. Both were strong supporters of the Miner’s Rest Cup on KI, an experience that impressed on them the importance of Australia’s grassroots racing, and its future.

Hence, Birdsville.

Hayes first suggested the road trip and Robert and John committed when John returned to KI from Tasmania last Christmas for what may have been the last season of racing on the island.

“We somehow managed to talk Ken into it. So it grew in momentum and the closer we got to it, we had to pull our fingers out,” Robert Keys said.

The Keys boys met in Gisborne with a truckful of horses. They connected with Hayes and his truck at Tarcutta and headed northwest.

They camped overnight at the Bourke racecourse, then a night at the pub at Two Pine, where the horses were kept in day yards at the polo cross grounds. 

Then Betoota for two nights and one day of racing where eight horses trained by the three brothers never won a race.

“Bill’s horse won, someone trained a second and I trained two fifths; then set off for Birdsville Sunday and here we are,” Robert said.

Birdsville has been described in many ways: schoolies for the over fifties, the wild west, history preserved.

Planes fly in from all over Australia. Back in the day, the planes formed a carpark. Big tarps would be draped over the wings as makeshift tents.

Later, a more organised tent city popped up.

There are little or no amenities. The racehorses who’d been trucked in from all over the Northern Territory, Queensland and South Australia – and Victoria and Tasmania in the case of the Keys boys – camped on one side of the river, the campers the other.

The pub was always chockers, drinkers invited to play the barrel game, where they’d run around a barrel before being flung off into the crowd, dizzy, as up the road the young farm hands would cop blood noses from Brophy’s agile boxers.

Birdsville has been a magnet for anyone and everyone, including Hall of Fame trainer Peter Moody and Sharon Chapman, one of Australia’s great horse racing photographers.

Some of Chapman’s best work has been at Birdsville “where the light and the dust make it a dream for photographers”.

“Covering it that first year for Sports Illustrated … I fell in love. I thought ‘oh my God this is photography heaven’,” Chapman said.

Birdsville in outback Queensland is one of Australian racing’s most remote locations. (Photo: Matt Williams – Supplied by Birdsville Racing Club)

Moody was born and raised in the outback. Attending Birdsville was inevitable.

“I’ve been a handful of times, it’s the last of the frontiers,” he said.

“It’s one of those iconic piss-ups. You get people from all walks of life and they come literally from all over the world.

“I heard it was Freddie’s last year with the boxing tent. It will put a big dent in things. The boxing tent was really part of Australian history. I honestly don’t think you’d be able to get one licensed anymore.”

Ken Keys says he and his brothers have been hard at it and “not had time to get hangovers” but Robert Keys has found some time to reflect on horse racing and its place in the Australian conscience.

He encourages others to tick off their bucket lists because there will come a time when it’s too late. Robert is the only sibling who remains on King Island.

“I can’t see it, and that’s being honest,” he said of the future of racing on his beloved King Island.

“It’s just the way it is. Every small town is crashing in Australia. The communities are ageing, everyone leaves.”

The outback was too severe for Burke and Wills but nothing has yet threatened the Birdsville races. For 134 years, they assumed they’d race forever on King Island. You may have to wipe it from your bucket list.