Drongo, fancied at the time, finished back in the field. (In response to many questions, Archer won the race in its first two years – 1861 and 1862). Drongo had 37 attempts and didn’t win a race.

He had five second placings and seven thirds, but was always back in the field. The owner, Dorothy Wood, couldn’t let Drongo go and neither could the press and public. He was a popular horse.

The word quickly developed a meaning of a champion that never was. But the term drongo, with a lower case D, developed as a hapless soul who couldn’t do anything right. But Drongo was not really hopeless. He was only entered in city races and raced against the best of his era. But soon punters claimed a mug was a drongo.

The Australian Dictionary of Insults and Vulgarities says drongo means a stupid person or an idiot. ”To be a dill is unavoidable, to be a drongo is inexcusable,” the book said. 

My big dictionary firstly says it was the name of a bird but then said the version we are interested in was Australian slang. We aren’t interested in the bird, only in the version that says a drongo is a foolish person or anybody slow-witted or clumsy.

I can think of many people who fit that description, and I’m sure you can too. But don’t call them a drongo to their face, unless you know them really well; maybe not even then.

Drongo often came very close to winning major races, coming second in a VRC Derby and St Leger, third in the AJC St Leger, and fifth in the Sydney Cup, but in 37 starts he never won a race. Soon after Drongo’s retirement, racegoers began applying his name to other unlucky horses, and then by extension to humans who were slow, clumsy or hopeless cases.

The horse wasn’t unusually hopeless. Many horses never win a race. There was a 15-year gap between the end of Drongo’s racing career and the first proven use of drongo in the transferred pejorative sense. This was in the early 1940s when RAAF personnel began applying the term to slow-learning World War 2 recruits.

The book What’s Their Storey said Drongo was not an absolute no-hoper and the Melbourne Argus once said Drongo was improving with every run.

Bill Hornage’s The Australian Slanguage says that on February 15, 1977, a Drongo Handicap was included in the Epson program at Flemington, for apprentice jockeys and horses who didn’t have a win to their name in the previous 12 months. 

Obviously, the winner was no longer a drongo.