It was a two-days’ meeting, but the second helping, like so many second helpings of other things than race days, was a failure, or even, indeed, an utter fiasco. In 1839 there was again a two-days’ gathering on the slopes of Batman’s Hill. The racing was poor, Postboy and Mountain Maid again being strongly in evidence, but the attendance was so large that it was generally agreed that the population must have doubled since the previous year. But now the turf world fairly began to hum, and Batman’s Hill was no longer considered suitable for the purposes of racing. The experienced eye of someone had “spotted” the flats by the Salt Water River as being made to order for the sport, and on the 3rd of March, 1840, the first race meeting at Flemington was successfully carried through. It was a three-days’ affair, and for the first time in Port Phillip the riders sported colours. The quality of the competitors must have been very poor, for, if you look up the arrivals, in their chronological order on a previous page, you will see that few, if any, of their stock can have been taking part in the contests, and, therefore, most of them must have been nothing better than half-bred hacks. But the spirit of emulation had now caught fire, and all through the country owners were making matches one with another, and metropolitan racing was booming to such an extent that a ruling body called “The Port Phillip Turf Club” was called into existence. To the deliberations of this body, and their resulting actions, we owe the fact that horses in Victoria now take their ages from the first day of August in each year.