About this special 2-part series
Every year, Australians gather to watch the Melbourne Cup — once hailed as “the race that stops a nation.” But these days, fewer people are tuning in, and more are asking uncomfortable questions: what does this tradition really celebrate? Who benefits, and who pays the price? The conversation isn’t just about horse racing, gambling, or fashion. It’s about the stories we inherit, the systems we participate in, and what happens when those old stories no longer resonate.
Standing at the Threshold is a special two-part series of Sacred Stories of the Spirit about what happens when a cultural story begins to loosen — and we can suddenly see the gap between the ritual we inherited and the values we now hold.
Thresholds are the places where old stories are still operating, but can no longer fully claim us. They are uncomfortable, formative, disorienting — and also deeply creative — because they ask us to decide what we will continue carrying, and what we are now ready to live differently.
Using the Melbourne Cup as a case study, this series looks at the “architecture” of a cultural ritual: the narratives, incentives, histories and norms that hold it in place. But more importantly, it asks what happensinside us when a familiar cultural script asks us to leave part of ourselves at the door in order to belong.
Because once we become conscious of a story, we also become responsible for how we carry it — whether we participate in it, reshape it, outgrow it, or choose a new expression entirely.
This is a series for anyone who can feel the cultural shift inside their own inner landscape — for people who sense that personal integrity is becoming the new ground of belonging, and that cultural change ultimately begins with the courage to remain whole.
About Part 1
When a cultural ritual stops reflecting who we are becoming, it reaches a threshold — a moment when its story begins to loosen. In Part One of this special two-part series, we explore the Melbourne Cup as a case study, with cultural scholars Professors Catharine Lumby and David Rowe unpacking how rituals accumulate social power, and Clancy Moore and Elio Celotto revealing what happens when protection meets accountability.
Guests in this episode:
Professor Catharine Lumby
Discipline of Media & Communications, University of Sydney
Expert in how media, culture and gender shape public narratives and collective identity.
Professor David Rowe FAHA, FASSA
Emeritus Professor of Cultural Research, Western Sydney University. A leading voice in cultural sociology, examining sport as a carrier of national identity and social power.
Clancy Moore
CEO, Transparency International Australia
Brings the structural lens: how political and economic ecosystems safeguard social permission around contested industries.
Elio Celotto
Campaign Director, Coalition for the Protection of Racehorses - Central to the 2019 exposé that revealed widespread cruelty in the racing industry, rupturing the myth of “harmless tradition.”
#cultural story #cultural rituals #collective identity #Narrative power #Public accountability #Transparency #Institutional power #Political influence #Social licence to operate #Melbourne Cup #Horse racing reform #Animal welfare #Investigative exposé #Governance ethics #Cultural shift