The Lucky Country

The phrase ‘lucky country’ evokes Australia’s weather, lifestyle and history. Nowhere is it more apparent than through the experience of Emirates Melbourne Cup Day, billed as ‘the race that stops a nation’. Each spring thousands of Melbourners, dressed in their Sunday best, venture to Flemington to try their luck on the track. What ensues has been satirically depicted in the artists’ painted renditions: the hoopla, the exuberance, the celebration, the disappointment, the disillusion, the consumption and the waste, waiting to tantalize the senses.