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Andreas Collection Item Detail



Gustav Boehm - Melbourne Cup Perfume


Melbourne Cup Perfume

This is a very strange name for a perfume.   The Melbourne Cup is Australia's premier horse racing event, a gruelling 2 miles or 3200metres.   It has been run since 1861 and we have a public holiday (in Victoria) so that we all have the opportunity to go to the races.    The "cup" as it affectionately known is part of Melbourne's Spring Racing Carnival when the best horses in the world come to win the gold cup and the $5 million dollar first prize that goes with it.  The cup itself is valued at around $175,000.

However it's not just the horses that people come to look at as it's the fashions and the celebrities who also draw a crowd.    The "Fashions on the Field" competitions are hotly contested and the champagne flows in the corporate marquees.   In Melbourne it's a day like no other.   It's not known as the race that stops a nation for nothing.

So although the perfume was made by Gustav Boehm of Offenbach, Germany it is decidedly Australian.  About 4.5 inches or 11cm tall.  The first mention that I can find of this scent is an advertisement in "The Argus" a Melbourne daily newspaper, November 1903 where it was advertised for sale at 1/- (10cents) per bottle.

 


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