Foreign News: Situation Wanted

Australia may have a shortage of productive workmen, but it has no shortage of bookies (who, in Australia, are highly respectable gentry). Aussies, who hate to miss a chance to get a lot for a little, play the horses heavily. In sports-mad Brisbane, the favorite race-track bet is a long-shot version of the U.S. daily double—a combined long-odds bet on two races. Some bookmakers, known as "doubles fielders" will not accept bets of any other kind.

Doubles-Fielder Wally Northcott, wanting to cut his son Kefford in on this easy money, entered his name on the bookmakers' waiting list of the Queensland Turf Club. Informed that there were already 120 names on the list (and only three new bookies added each year), Wally Northcott said his son could stand to wait since he was only two days old. "My son," he explained, "was born June 21st, the shortest day of the year. I figured he would be naturally lazy, so the only thing to do was to make him a bookmaker."