May Rachel Brown Gambles And Drinks Lots Of Beer

" I gambled a lot of my commission and drank a lot of beer.”

So Rachel Brown went and hung out at the track close to full time for two solid weeks, and stayed in their world for a few more, talking to people, going to their homes, attending morning trials. “I went walking with them in the mornings, I went to their homes and saw how they kept their dogs, how they kept their retired dogs, what they talked about what they didn’t. I gambled a lot of my commission and drank a lot of beer.”

People love having their story told, she suspects, but believes that what really convinced them to let her into their world was her attention to detail. “There’s this weird kind of thing where the dog world has got this old Catholic, Irish heritage; working class, working’s man’s sport,” she explains. “So there’s all this slang that comes with it, which I automatically assumed I’d have a handle on because I’m Australian and middle class, but no I didn’t. It was like they were speaking a different language.” 

The richness of this new language presented some amazing opportunities for dialogue. “There’s meaning in rhythm, and a race call has great rhythm. And the way people will talk during a race – yelling at the fields, yelling at their dogs to go faster – that has a shorthand and a slang as well, when people are under that pressure. It was really fun.”

At her time at the races, Rachel Brown learned that dog racing is intergenerational. Families will have dogs two, three generations back and the people who grow up in gambling families are educated financially in gambling, and learn that gambling is how you cope when you’re in a bind.

The Dapto Chaser is about such a family. “It’s a family that I suppose suffers from intergenerational poverty and intergenerational gambling addiction. And it’s not necessarily that the sons of the father in the play are addicted to gambling, but because that’s been the culture of the family, when they find themselves in a tight spot, that’s their only alternative. I suppose it’s about the trap of gambling.”