The Oakbank Easter Racing Carnival is a horse-racing meeting held over two days by the Oakbank Racing Club at the Oakbank Racecourse located in the Adelaide Hills in South Australia. The carnival is a mixture of flat and jumping races with between two and four jumps races on day one and two feature jumping races on day two.
Day one is held on Easter Saturday and is one of the highest attended race days in Australia. The Von Doussa Steeplechase takes place on day one and is a preliminary to the Great Eastern Steeplechase held on Easter Monday. A "classic" hurdle race takes place on Monday as does the feature flat race, the Onkaparinga Cup.
The meeting is conducted by the Oakbank Racing Club and is popular with families and groups. Although ostensibly a horse race meeting, Oakbank is an event in itself with carnival rides, picnics and other activities. Many families camp for the whole weekend in the paddocks adjacent to the track, and some have done so all their lives.
Patrons travelled by train from Adelaide to nearby Balhannah station from 1884. When the branch to Mount Pleasant opened in 1918, a special platform was constructed adjacent to the course, permitting special race trains to run direct to the course the following Easter. The line to Mount Pleasant closed on 3 March 1963, thus the race trains ran no more.
A notable horse to have raced at Oakbank was Zama Lad, who won the Harry D Young Hurdle four years straight in the 1980s.
Famous quotes containing the words easter, racing and/or carnival:
“Why wont they let a year die without bringing in a new one on the instant, cant they use birth control on time? I want an interregnum. The stupid years patter on with unrelenting feet, never stopping—rising to little monotonous peaks in our imaginations at festivals like New Year’s and Easter and Christmas—But, goodness, why need they do it?”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)
“Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don’t get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goat’s cheese ... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)
“Looks like some carnival lost a good act.”
—James Gleason (1886–1959)