It has just gone midday and the warm and genial commentator orders a large cappuccino.
When pressed again about his ability, or inability, to retain quiz-winning volumes of general knowledge, he has a logical explanation: race callers, he says, train their brains to forget.
“We are learning and sieving, learning and sieving, learning and sieving,” he says.
Hill says that he can memorise a field of 15 horses in under five minutes, call them in a race and then forget them three minutes later.
“I don’t retain stuff, I don’t recall stuff,” Hill says. “I listen to the news a lot. I like listening to the news, and I will forget two days later what was in the news.”
Hill chose this cafe because it is central to his story.
Hill was eight when his father, Trevor, left the family. His brother, Timothy, was six. For the rest of their schooling life they were raised by their single mum, Susan, in her Altona Meadows house, which is just around the corner from Little Rosebery.
Hill now lives in his mother’s home, having agreed to buy his brother out when Susan died in August last year.
Matt Hill in his favourite local haunt.Credit: PENNY STEPHENS
“She worked so hard to own that home, you know,” Hill says of his emotional attachment to the family house.
“This area has been my whole life. I played basketball as a kid up the road, and we are literally 20 metres from where I caught the school bus for six years [to St Paul’s College in North Altona].”
Hill’s career is intrinsically linked to his mother. As a 15-year-old, she would drive him across the state to pursue his passion – calling races at Sale, Shepparton, Stawell and even as far afield as Mildura on Melbourne Cup Day.
Matt Hill has called eight Melbourne Cups.Credit: Michael Rayner
“Her little yellow Toyota probably did about 400,000 clicks,” he says. “I’d get on the phone and ring race clubs, and I’d say, ‘Would you like a race caller for your non-TAB meeting?’ They’d say, ‘Yeah, can you get here?’, and Mum would drive me.
“Then what would happen is my grandfather, who loved racing, and so did my grandmother, they would come along, too. So it ended up being a family expedition.”
Despite his tender age and experience, Hill was always welcomed on course, especially at picnic race meetings where they had often relied on untrained members of the public to call their races.
During one meeting at Pooncarie in NSW, the publican had a go and was so bad he was booed off the stand. The next year they agreed to give 16-year-old Hill a chance.
When he wasn’t crisscrossing the state, teenage Hill and his family would head to Flemington or Moonee Valley. There, he would find a spare seat or hunt out an empty broadcasting box in the grandstand, and call the races on his own.
“I should have been out chasing girls or with my mates, but I was honing what I was doing, you know, calling into a tape recorder,” he says.
“That was my life, and I loved it. I would never have changed it, you know. I couldn’t wait to get to Flemington and practise calling.”
Hill says his mother never passed judgment on his work unless he mentioned it first.
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“There’d be times when I’d come home, it might have been the Cox Plate or a big name, and I’d say, ‘Mum, I stumbled over a name there’, or something, and she’d go, ‘Oh yeah, I noticed that.’
“She would listen to everything. Even in her days in the nursing home, she was listening to me call the football on the radio. Half the time, it was a good way of knowing where I was.”
Hill still speaks to his father, who lives in Queensland, but says they are not close.
“Mum worked at the National Bank, she was a PA, and then Dad was an engineer,” he says.
“So there’s really no radio broadcasting, not even a racing background. I am self-made in a way.”
Hill, 44, says he comes to Little Rosebery three days a week. He spreads the newspaper across its wooden tables, studies the formguide and usually opts for something simple, like Vegemite on toast or a BLT, which the cafe has added to its menu especially for its regular guest.
But today he is going to venture into uncharted waters.
“I’m gonna hedge my bets,” he says in his signature mellifluous tone. “Gonna have a smashed avo, and get some bacon on the side.”
I opt for one of their bestsellers – Thai chilli eggs. Hill is still working through his coffee, but I order a large glass of pear and apple juice to accompany my meal.
Hill lives on his own, with his dog, and describes his profession as “the love of my life”.
“It’s very cliche to say I am married to the job, but I am because it is my hobby as well. It really is,” he says. “I sort of live to work. I just love it.”
The multi-talented sport commentator is lucky to be alive. After he finished year 12, he started running errands at a Melbourne radio station, won a racing industry scholarship at 19 and became Sydney’s main race caller. But it was on assignment in Beijing, calling at the 2008 Olympics for the Macquarie Radio Network, that he fell seriously ill.
He was flattened by double pneumonia and his body started shutting down. There were fears he wouldn’t survive.
Hill was flown to Hong Kong, where a medical professor, who had worked through the 2002-2004 SARS outbreak, “slammed” him with a concoction of antibiotics.
It was later discovered he had melioidosis, a bacterial disease spread through soil, air and water that had a 90 per cent death rate.
“It is actually very similar to COVID,” Hill says. “I just happened to be unlucky – lucky and unlucky at the same time because to be brutally honest, if I were a smoker, if I had an unhealthy lifestyle, I wouldn’t be here. I was young enough to fight it.”
Rather than slow him down, the near-death experience pushed Hill to work harder.
“All I ever wanted to do was call at the Olympics,” he says. “So it just made me so determined after that. It just made me want it more. It made me want to almost kind of prove myself, actually. Like, I felt like I just needed to prove myself again.
“I don’t know why … I saw the illness almost as a weakness, which was a silly thing to do because anyone can get sick, but I wanted to achieve even more then.
“So, in a way you do realise, and I realise it now with the death of my mum some 16 years later, that we are not here for a long time.”
Hill called the Olympic rowing for Nine in Paris, as well as the athletics for Nine radio. But he is about to make a bigger splash in AFL.
Fox Footy’s Thursday night AFL callers Matt Hill (left) and Mark Howard.
This year he is locked in to call 45 games for Fox Footy, alongside Mark Howard on Thursday nights and Dwayne Russell on Sundays, as well as 25 games for SEN radio on Friday nights.
He will also cover Melbourne’s major race meetings every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon.
“This year is going to be the hardest year I’ve ever worked,” he says. “My biggest challenge, I’ve found, is I naturally have a quick, quick flow because of calling horse races. So I don’t want to sound like it’s a race caller at the football – that’s my challenge.
“But it is a fast game. You know, you can be saying something, and the ball might go through four pairs of hands. I try and say as many players’ names as I can, and I try to be as accurate as I can.”
Hill, who grew up watching and supporting the Western Bulldogs, says it is difficult to pick up footballers’ numbers during a game, so he concentrates on their faces. Or their unique markings.
“I’ve got a pretty old-fashioned approach in that I get Google Images up, and I just look at their faces as if I’m meeting them for the first time,” he says of his AFL preparation.
“You just put a name to the face. Then I’ll watch their game from the week before, so I’ll study both of the teams from the week before.
“And then for me, the most important, this is where the race caller comes out in me. I don’t know how many people do this, I have to be there an hour before the game because I want to see them physically in the flesh when they’re warming up.
The receipt for our lunch at Little Rosebery cafe.
“Then what I tend to do is look for their coloured boots, anything that’s different – coloured boots, tattoos, strapping is important.
“If there are a couple of players that look the same, and it might be something really simple, like, you know, a little tatt on the left knee or left shin, or just something that – if the ball’s being given to a player quickly – I can pick up on who it is quickly.”
Our discussion returns to Hill’s mother and his first Melbourne Cup call without her.
“Two days after Mum died, my brother and I were driving to Tobin Brothers, to the funeral home, and Tim said to me, ‘What do you reckon Mum would like played at her funeral?’” Hill says.
“He said, ‘She loved Life Is a Rollercoaster, by Ronan Keating’. Within seconds, it came on the radio. So that was a bit sort of, ‘Wow, she’s still here.’
“Then on the day of her funeral, the week later, it was announced in the paper that Ronan Keating would sing on Melbourne Cup Day. He sang 30 minutes before the Melbourne Cup.
“So I took that as a little bit of a ‘she’s still with me’. And, thank Christ, he didn’t sing Life Is a Rollercoaster before the Cup because that would have made me a wreck.”
