For over 100 years the Melbourne Cup has run on the first Tuesday of November and the great American humorist, Mark Twain, while visiting Australia in 1895 observed that the Melbourne Cup was the Australasian National Day:

“It would be difficult to overstate its importance, it overshadows all other holidays and specialised days. Cup Day and Cup Day only commands an attention, an interest and an enthusiasm which are universal and spontaneous, not perfunctory. Cup Day is supreme, it has no rival. In America we have no annual supreme day, no day whose approach makes the whole nation glad. I think it must be considered that the position of Cup Day is unique, solitary and likely to hold that high place for a long time.
Commenting on the social specaacle, Twain added, “Their clothes have been ordered long ago at unlimited cost and without bound to beauty and magnificence and have been kept in concealment until now. And so the grandstands make a brilliant and wonderful spectacle, a delirium of colour, a vision of beauty. The champagne flows, everybody is vivacious, excited, happy, everybody bets and gloves and fortunes change hands right along all the time.

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