• Herald Sun
• October 11, 2014 9:00PM

Glen Boss onboard Who Shot Thebarman. Picture: COLLEEN PETCH

Or perhaps spirits.

If Who Shot Thebarman gets away with the Caulfield Cup next weekend, the barmen at the course had better look slippery or there’ll be a riot among the visiting Kiwi contingent.

The extended O’Leary clan and half the Wanganui district are crossing the Tasman to see the local hero take a tilt at the rest of the world. Win, lose or draw, they’ll be thirsty.

“Aunty Julie” died “maybe 10 years ago”, about the same time as her brother Humphrey O’Leary, father of the dairy-farming brothers who milk a few thousand cows between them so they can afford to feed a galloper.

Aunty Julie was famous in the family for demanding “Who shot the barman?” as soon as she walked through the door at Christmas or birthdays or the like, expecting to be met with a glass of something to her taste.

For years her four O’Leary nephews and their three sisters saved the signature phrase as the name for a halfway decent horse. It looks as if they picked the right one.

When the plain bay with the catchy moniker won the Auckland Cup at just his ninth start in March, there were about 40 O’Learys in the stand, all wearing their (ahem) orange ties and caps to match the family racing colours. As one delighted racing writer noted, the “hooting and hollering” O’Learys poured down the steps “like lava” after the race.

The big clue that the horse is special was that the family matriarch, Joan O’Leary, was there in her wheelchair that day — the first time she’d been to the races in nearly 20 years. Joan was a McCashin before she married into the O’Leary tribe and the orange and white spots and cap worn by Who Shot Thebarman’s jockey are the old McCashin colours her forebears used.

Her son Michael points out fairly plainly that “being Irish” (despite a century or so of farming in New Zealand) the family never call their colours “orange”. They prefer “tangerine”.

When Michael and Danny and Shaun and Humphrey junior were kids — along with their sisters Eileen, Marie and Joan — they used to canter their ponies around the local roads with their father as he exercised a racehorse.

“Dad” O’Leary called the farm Kerry Gold Stud in honour of his ancestors in the old country and always kept a steeplechaser for the same reason. He loved jumpers and stayers and infected his children with the bug. One of the neighbours had won the Auckland Cup with Ruata in 1961 and the horse became a local legend. Michael recalls: “We’d ride past and Dad would say ‘Look under the trees in the yards there and you’ll see Ruata’.”

The boys grew up racing each other around the paddocks on their ponies and it left them with an itch to scratch. The family has had a few good gallopers, including a jumper called Fontera who went to Japan to run in the rich Nakayama Grand Jump in 2005. But they suspect Who Shot Thebarman is the horse of a lifetime.

Michael claims to have selected the horse on pedigree, sight unseen. He tells the story that he called the breeder Wayne Stewart to ask if he had any youngsters for sale by Yamanin Vital, an old and fairly unfashionable horse that stood for a humble service fee of $6000 and produced a string of tough stayers and jumpers before he died four years ago. Stewart’s stud is deep in the South Island, a huge distance from the O’Learys’ home district in the North, so they did the purchase by telephone.

Stewart told O’Leary he had a paddock full of young horses and promised he had selected the best-looking one for them. When he told Michael the colt’s mother was the third foal of the oddly-named Ears Carol, it sealed the deal. The O’Learys have a theory that a mare’s third foal is her best. Besides, they liked her bloodlines. And they especially liked the price because Scots aren’t the only ones to love a bargain.

Michael recalls doing the deal for “eight grand”. Wayne Stewart says it was “$10,000”. They are both right: in 2009, 10 Kiwi dollars was worth about eight Australian. Either way, it wasn’t much for a horse that would win half a million dollars on his way to a run in the Caulfield Cup that could well get him into the Melbourne Cup.

One thing they are sure of is that if “Thebarman” can handle the tight Caulfield course to win, he’ll “get the distance” at Flemington on the first Tuesday in November.

AGAIN, the O’Learys have a theory. Most modern racehorses are raised in tiny stud paddocks, but they let the colt grow up in a big cow paddock, the way New Zealand horses were traditionally reared early last century.

“In big paddocks they can run as far as they like because they don’t have to stop at the fence line,” says Michael, who suggests small paddocks have led to the current rash of sprinters in Australasia and the consequent domination of the Cups by European raiders.

Their horse is six but has had only 14 starts. He didn’t have his first start until early last year. Banjo Paterson’s galloping rhymes might not be quite as well-known in New Zealand as they are here but one of them, Father Riley’s Horse, might have a new burst of life around Wanganui this week.

It’s about a race in a bush district where “the folk were mostly Irish round about” and had all backed a dark horse “lent” to the local priest by a scallywag horse thief, Andy Regan.

Paterson wrote about the mystery horse:

“…the hopes of all the helpless, and the prayers of all the poor,

Will be running by his side to keep him straight.”

Which is exactly what will be happening all over New Zealand and parts of Caulfield racecourse next Saturday. Much betting and praying will be followed by much singing and drinking.

Racegoers who see a herd of over-refreshed Kiwis wearing loud ties and caps late that afternoon should remember one thing. That colour … it’s tangerine.