Cover image courtesy of Racing Queensland
The tale of Darby McCarthy is one that has long been celebrated by Australian racing. An Aboriginal race rider, born in 1944 and rising to the top of a white-soaked profession… it was the stuff of Hollywood.
And all of it is true if McCarthy’s story is recounted on mere fact. Born behind the sandhills of Cunnamulla in outback Queensland, “somewhere between the dump and the sewer”, he was an iconic jockey of 1950s and 1960s Australia, winning Stradbrokes, Brisbane Cups, Doomben 10,000s and, on the same day in 1969, the AJC Derby and Epsom H.
But the story of Darby McCarthy is so much more than that.
It’s a social thread of the sad circumstances behind an Aboriginal upbringing. At that time, indigenous Australians weren’t considered citizens. They couldn’t vote, they often worked for food and board, and segregation and racism was alive and well.
Darby McCarthy | Image courtesy of the Victoria Racing Club
For McCarthy as a kid in Cunnamulla, that was just the way things were, and despite poverty and suppression, he grew up spirited and lively. At the age of seven, he left the dusty township for Thargomindah, where he moved into the service of the Easton family at Yakara station.
It was here that he was given the name ‘Darby’, in honour of the ‘Demon Darb’ Darby Munro. In fact, McCarthy’s full name was Richard Laurence McCarthy.
McCarthy spent those earliest years learning to ride finely on rough bush horses. He was a tremendous talent, sitting light in the irons with good hands. A jockey “with light hands and balance like Darby, well, all the horse wants to do is get on with it and race. You could put somebody else on the same horse and they wouldn’t run out of sight in a fog.”
“(A jockey) with light hands and balance like Darby, well, all the horse wants to do is get on with it and race. You could put somebody else on the same horse and they wouldn’t run out of sight in a fog.”
For McCarthy, racehorses were a ticket to a better life, which is just what they proved to be. The young rider rode his way out of his upbringing, and in Brisbane in 1950, he finished second in what would now be the apprentice jockeys’ premiership. The following two years, he claimed the dux award.
What followed was probably a traditional tale of a young apprentice climbing into professional stardom. It’s not unlike a lot of other jockeys in history, except that Darby McCarthy was black in an unforgiving white era.
If professional race riding was hard for everyone, it was especially hard for an Aboriginal youth, but McCarthy’s spirited apathy served him well. Before long, he was mixing it with Neville Sellwood and George Moore.
McCarthy became only the second rider in history (after Mel Schumacher) to ride the AJC Derby-Epsom H. double on the same day. He rode in New Zealand, England, Ireland and America, and, when in France, he enjoyed the anonymity of his identity. “They don’t give a stuff what you are,” he later said.
Darby McCarthy on Divide And Rule who won the 1969 AJC Derby | Image courtesy of Racing and Wagering Western Australia
Back home, his fame grew to the point of his Aboriginality being part of his publicity. Sadly, the reality was that he was a novelty. Aboriginals just didn’t realise this level of fame, so McCarthy was unusual and he went against the grain of what much of white Australia assumed of black Australia.
Like so many in his profession before and since, McCarthy’s personal life was a rollercoaster of women and booze. Much of the time he got the better of them, and other times they got the better of him.
By the 1970s he couldn’t sustain the brilliance of his youth, marred by injury, accident, disqualification and self-destruction. Unofficially, he was out of the saddle by 1984 and training horses, and he opened the Darby McCarthy Riding School in Toowoomba. It lasted only three years when it should have lasted his lifetime, and, after a brief return to riding, he officially retired in 1991.
He spent much of the rest of his life championing the Aboriginal cause. He was inducted into the Australian Racing Hall of Fame in 2021, and received an Order of Australia (OAM) in 2016 for his services to racing and his work with indigenous youth.
Darby McCarthy holding a copy of his book | Image courtesy of Sportpix
He died on May 6, 2020, at the age of 76, by then very famous and much loved. His biographer, Lauren Callaway, had his measure perfectly.
“I would love to say that Darby was the poor little black kid who made good, but like most true accounts, it is not that simple,” she wrote. “He has never seen himself as a victim because he is black – he does not identify with the rhetoric. He is a battler, that’s for certain. And he has earned my admiration.”
