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"If horses were stupid, they'd bet on humans," someone once said. But i'll bet (would you take three to one...two to one...evens?) that saying it didn't stop that same someone bunging another wodge of hard-earned notes on the next nag tipped as a 'sure thing.' Gambling good money on which of a bunch of horses high-tailing it around in circles is going to nose across a finish line first doesn't make much sense from the point of view of economics. Horses have a habit of falling over, or shedding their jockeys or just losing interest in the whole galloping lark. And more than one bright nag seems to have worked out that if he romps home at spectacular speed in a few races as a youngster and then starts coming in midway down the field from then on, he's going to be out to stud with nothing to worry about but a long life of eating and sex faster than you can say "...and they're coming into the straight...and...oh! oh! oh!..yes...there's a faller at the last fence."

Betting on horses, or on anything for that matter, is never going to be a fast track to riches for amateurs like me. For a start we're laying bets against bookies...professionals who make a living, a good living, out of knowing which horse not only can run the fastest but more importantly is actually going to run the fastest on any given outing. I don't know about you, but if I had a professional plumber in to fix a leaking cistern I wouldn't be standing there reckoning that I could do the job better than him, and I feel the same way about the knights of the step ladder and Gladstone bag.

Still, however illogical it seems, I do end up laying bets here and there, in the delusion that i'm smarter than the bookies, trainers, jockeys and, indeed, the horses, all of whom are conspiring against me getting an 8-fold return on a ten quid stake. Because, the truth is I enjoy racing for itself and look on betting as both a bargain price for top entertainment, and as way of heightening the, already great, excitement of watching some of the most impressive athletes in the natural world thundering over the turf. What you can say about racing is that a day on course is a lot more fun than buying a lottery ticket will ever be. And with much, much better odds.

Still, however much I like racing, i've rarely gone far out of my way to get to a course. No annual pilgrimage to Cheltenham or Galway, no regular trips to Goodwood or Kentucky. I take my racing where I find it. The last meeting I stumbled across might well be the remotest race card run under rules in the world. Just to get to Innamincka in South Australia for its annual 'picnic races' entailed flying by bush plane for a fair few hours, skirting the Simpson desert in a 4X4 jeep for a day and bobbing around in a boat for half an hour on Cooper Creek. There was also an all night drinking session, en route, in the famed Birdsville Hotel.

For a small settlement, Innamincka carries a bit of history, whilst living there is something of a challenge. It's very, very remote. What stock rearing there is in the area depends on the unreliable rains over the border in Queensland filling two rivers to send water down the Cooper Creek. Flying down from Birdsville in an eight-seater plane, I looked down on a land as blank and brown and bleak as a sheet of parcel paper stretched to the horizon in all directions. Innamincka is where the explorers Burke and Wills died in the 19th century after gambling - now there's a serious bet - on finding water there. They lost.

There were a group of us headed to the races, Most of our party were equally hung-over from 'doing the Birdsville' the night before. So, we stopped in the Innamincka Hotel for a drink to break the short journey between the airfield and the race track. A very large pig, the height of a Shetland pony and with the proportions of a hippopotamus, came over to join us. 'Greg' seemed a particularly bad tempered porcine, possibly because she would have preferred a more feminine name. Her main interest in life seemed to be in Hoovering up cigarette butts off the ground. A sign above the bar promised that misbehaving children would be fed to 'Greg.' Which may have accounted for her size.

'The hotel's 'beer garden' was enclosed by a waist-high wall constructed entirely of empty bottles. A poster tacked to a wall advertised the Innamincka Race Weekend, and I was sad to see that we had missed the previous day's gymkhana with its sack race, 'go and come back,' bending competitions and ladies' hack event. A mental picture of the town's men and women, who were doing sterling duty at the bar, bobbing along in feed sacks whilst dragging Brumbies at full rein-stretch behind them cheered me up hugely. A note at the bottom of the race card announced that skull caps must be worn, and that jockeys 'ideally' should wear colours.

At the entrance to the races I was given an enamel Innamincka Race badge, a true collector's item for anybody given to dangling racing tat off their binocular case. Once up against the rails, the atmosphere was remarkably like that of an Irish point-to-point, though without the rain. A mix of good fellowship, interest in horses and a determination to have a good day out. But there were some differences. The bar was 'outback sized,' with harassed staff opening bottles of VB beer as if in a race to fill the Cooper Creek, whilst shots of rum were dispensed from a pistol-triggered cattle drencher. And unlike Ireland there wasn't a blade of grass to be seen. Rather there were forty shades of beige and the odd grey leaved eucalyptus tree. Dust kicked up from the ground hung in the air like warm snow.

A race was in progress as we arrived. The field had started from a distant point and were running half of an oval to finish in front of the bar. One could track the race's general progress by a whirling cloud of dust looping through the bush towards us, but the progress of individual runner's was hidden in the fog. The commentator made a brave stab at commentating, deducing the placing of the runners by the occasional flash of a jockey's colours, or by who had fallen behind and so out of the dust cloud, but then he wisely gave up. There was a thunder of hooves, and some half hearted cheers and encouragement, as the riders sprinted ahead of their pursuing contrail of dust. A clear winner swept past the finishing post.

Horses for the next race were led out. I ran my eye over them. There seemed an obvious contender, a possible winner, so I made my way to the bookies to put a few dollars on the likely contender. It seemed that the bookies thought my way. Odds on Gold Habit were 1/2. I worked this out; it meant that if I put $2 on I stood to win a dollar back. Actually, the bookies were far more interested in taking bets on the races being run in Sydney which were being shown on a generator-powered television balanced on a couple of beer crates under an awning.

Gold Habit romped home well ahead of the rest of the dust clouds. On the next Innamincka race the bookies weren't even taking bets. Apparently there was a rule of thumb for predicting which horse was going to win: any Cormack-owned horse ridden by Jenny Cormack was, seemingly, going to win. She was wearing colours, for a start, whereas more than one of her challengers was wearing jeans. Strangely, the bookies were not in the mood to give away money on a sure fire winner, nor were punters inclined to put money on certain losers. Impasse. It seemed that i'd found a race meeting without betting.

I went down to the weighing-room to try and find out how it all worked. The jockey's sat in a tin shack waiting for their rides. Jack Mills, the Chief Steward, broke off from writing down names and weights in a small note-book to shake my hand. "Oh, yes, the races would be the biggest social event of the year in Innamincka, good lord, yes," he assured me. He paused for a long moment, before adding, "...in fact you could say that it's the only social event of any significance in the area." He could remember when there had been 20 race meetings up in the far north of South Australia, "but there are three now, just three or four." Innamincka Racing Club had been in existence for twenty years or so, and perhaps owed its survival to its position in the calendar, just a week before the Birdsville races, a few hundred kilometres to the north, which could attract 5,000 people or more and from all over Australia. Quite a few people came a week early to catch the Innamincka as a sort of hors d'ouvre.

Innamincka attracted the same owners year after year, most of whom bought up horses who hadn't made the grade elsewhere. Form, it appeared, was, wisely, vested more in the owners than the actual horses. The jockeys were all amateurs. "Are they local?" Jack chuckled, "Lord, lord, no! They come from all over." He pointed to a figure sitting in the corner. "That's Alan Bennet - he started racing with some training establishment at Murray Bridge but he got too heavy and so he registered for race meetings in the outback, and now it's the only actual racing that he does." The jockeys were picking up their whips and putting on their helmets for the Innamincka Gold Cup, an impressive bit of silver that had whiled away the day on the counter of the race secretary's shack, next to the cubby-hole that sold 'drink tickets.'

The Gold Cup was both the high-spot of the day, and a genuine chance to win big money. This didn't involve the bookies at all. The horses were walked around the paddock, and then one was led into the centre. The most glib-tongued auctioneer I have ever had the pleasure to listen to began taking bids on the horse.

"Start me at $50! Whose for $50? I hear fifty, fiftyfiftyfiftyandafiftyfive... sixtysixtyfivec'monnowc'mongentlemanontherailsixtyfive..." A rolling torrent of cajoling, threats, bids off the distant gum trees and sharp-eyed spotting of an imperceptibly nodded head jacked the horse's price higher and then higher still. Mystified and needing an explanation, I turned to two, laconic stockmen from the Snowy River Mountains standing beside me. "It's like a chook raffle," they told me, referring to the 'chicken' raffles popular in outback bars, where tickets were sold for chicken, with the bird going to the ticket drawn from a hat at the end of the evening.

So at Innamincka. Punters bid to 'buy' a horse for the Gold Cup race. A no-hoper might go for a hundred dollars or so, whilst the favourite, the Cormack horse perhaps, saw frenzied bidding that took its price up into the high hundreds. All the money bid on the horses was pooled, with half going to the Flying Doctor Service, and the other half of the pot, a fair few thousand dollars, going to the person who had 'bought' the horse that actually went on to win the race.

The jockeys were put up and the horses set off on the long trek into the outback to reach the start. There was time for a drink before the off. And then, suddenly, the scurrying cloud of dust above the horses began whirl-winding its elliptical route round the course and towards the winning post. There was cheering. Then cursing. And a dashing of hats to the ground. And one chap with a big grin on his face.

On the last race I put five dollars on Honest Lad at 6/1, who predictably sent it straight to the bookies' benevolent fund. The betting slip was a cheap souvenir for a day spent at the remotest of race meetings.

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