Summary

Book published by the Christchurch Press Company in 1927, containing details about race horse bred during the 1926-27 season. Under the entry for the mare Entreaty, it lists an unnamed chestnut colt out of Night Raid. This colt was purchased by Harry Telford at the 1928 Annual New Zealand Thoroughbred Yearling Sales, and was soon named `Phar Lap'.

Description of Content

This book was published by the Christchurch Press Company in 1927, containing details about race horse bred during the 1926-27 season. Under the entry for the mare Entreaty, it lists an unnamed chestnut colt out of Night Raid. This colt was purchased by Harry Telford at the 1928 Annual New Zealand Thoroughbred Yearling Sales, and was soon named `Phar Lap'.

Physical Description

Rectangular book, containing approximately 380 white paper pages with extensive black printed text. The book is bound with thick card covers covered with brown leather, and printed with gold leaf text on the spine.

Significance

Currently the Museum has almost 500 items related to the life and times of one of its most famous icons Phar Lap. These relate to the horse, his career and death, as well as the memorialisation that has taken place in the (almost) 75 years since then. The collection includes racing silks, rugs, knee pads, horseshoes and girths used by the horse and his trainers, with books, photographs, art works, medallions, newspaper cuttings, condolence letters, other souvenirs produced in the 1930s, and more recent material produced around the film 'Phar Lap', various exhibitions, and souvenirs produced to sell in the Museum shop.

As the Phar Lap exhibition is considered a permanent fixture of Melbourne Museum, there is a continuous need for significant displayable items such as these, as conservation requirements mean that many of them can only be displayed for a fixed amount of time. As well as the exhibition, there is an active Phar Lap website, one of the Museum's most frequently visited sites, which also utilises noteworthy and visually appealing items such as these.

The Museum's Public Life and Institutions Collection Policy, under which the Phar Lap collection falls, states that the Museum will `comprehensively' collect Phar Lap-related material, and will include `objects associated with the horse and his career, and the process of memorialisation that occurred after his death. Souvenirs, photographs and memories are all collected, and changes in the way Phar Lap is remembered are being recorded '.

This group of items fall under these parameters, and would be an important addition to the collection as they relate to his career, which is always the most difficult area to source new material. These are particularly interesting as they relate to both the beginning and to the end of his career, and of his life.

All these books are difficult to locate as, being specialised publications, only a relatively small number of copies were produced.

More Information