Newmarket Oral History: Arthur Inglis - Part 1

Arthur Inglis, (b. 1956) speaks to interviewer Virginia Macleod. He grew up at Newmarket House with his parents and two siblings. Educated in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, he began work in the Inglis accounts department after school, booking weekly pig auctions at Homebush while studying part-time for a Bachelor of Commerce at UNSW. When the office moved to Newmarket in 1983, he became closely involved in the expanding operations of the company. He outlines Inglis’ broad scope today, from insurance, finance, advertising and sales transactions to its online auction platforms. The firm also invests in an accounting practice for the horse industry and a stock and station agency in Scone, reflecting the importance of close relationships and informed credit decisions. While thoroughbred sales remain central, they also serve as major networking events where unbiased advice is offered to vendors. Arthur discusses industry changes, including international growth, improved horse transport, and Inglis’ development of a computerised pedigree system. He reflects on past sales culture and the incorporation of Newmarket and Warwick Farm heritage into the company’s new complex. He also recalls childhood life at Newmarket House—ponies, pigeons, open space, and the seasonal rhythms of breeding and sales that shaped his family and community life.

     Today is the Wednesday, the 2nd of August 2017 and I'm speaking with Arthur Inglis, Deputy Chair and Director of William Inglis & Son Limited.  We’re speaking together for the Newmarket Stables Oral History Project.  My name is Virginia Macleod.

                 Arthur, can I just ask you first of all what year you were born.

                 1956.

                 And were you born in Sydney?

                 I was, yeah.

                 And did you grow up here at Newmarket Stables?

                 I did all my early years, yes; I lived here with my parents and my siblings.

                 And what were your parents’ names?

                 My father was John and my mother Margaret – her maiden name was Whitford, her name was Whitford.

                 And your siblings, what were their names?

                 My brother, five years older than me, Bill, or William, or William Thomas, and my sister, three years older than me, Jeanette Marilyn.

                 And where did you go to school?

                 I went to school, first of all primary school at Coogee Preparatory School, which is locally, in Randwick – although it’s called Coogee, it’s up in Alison Road, Randwick, behind the Presbyterian Church – only a small school, about a hundred students and then my high school, I went to Scots College in Bellevue Hill.

                 And your brother went to the same school as you?

                 My brother went to primary school at Scots Primary in Bellevue Hill, and then he went to Canberra Grammar as a boarder.

                 And so you grew up in this area.  Did your parents have other properties in the country at the time?

                 No.  This is their home.  Later on, when we were all basically, grown up, my father bought half a property in the Bylong Valley with my cousin, Jamie, but we never resided there.

                 So you were always in the city - - -

                 Correct.

                 - - - but an unusual place in that you had stables all around you.

                 That’s right.

                 And when you left school, did you go straight away into the company?  Were you expected to?

                 I did virtually.  I think I finished school on Friday, and started in 122 Castlereagh Street in the city on the Monday.

                 And what did you start off doing?

                 The round eternal of the ledger and the journal and 5th floor of 122 Castlereagh Street I was, if you like, put on accounts.  I had a little dingy room, and all accounts in those days, of course, were done manually, no computers, so it was, I think, very simple journal processing, adding up pages, transferring balances to ledgers and all that sort of stuff.

                 And did you enjoy the maths side of it?

                 Yes.  I guess, maths has been one of my strengths, and I did go on, the following year – that was the end of 1974, in 1975 I went to the University of New South Wales, and studied for the Bachelor of Commerce degree, part-time for six years.

                 And did that fit well with what you were doing in the company?

                 Yeah, I guess that’s why I mentioned it, because I was doing accounts.  I suppose what you'd call what I was doing bookkeeping, more correctly than accounting, but it certainly had applications towards, the aspects of the commerce degree, which was centred around, for my degree was accounting, commerce accounting.

                 So that was a real asset and probably extra interesting because you already had a job and were working in that area?

                 Correct, yeah.

                 And your brother was also working for the company?

                 Yes, my brother was an auctioneer, and he worked on horses also, and livestock; cattle, but mostly pigs.  We used to sell pigs at Homebush.  We were one of the agents at Homebush saleyards and, every Tuesday involved auctioning pigs, on behalf of our clients.  He used to manage that part of the business, as well as a horse auctioneer.

                 And did you go and see these events as well?

                 Yes.  For quite a few years I actually booked the sale, the pig sale, which means you basically go out there, count the numbers, and book up which vendor it is in which pen, and then as the auction progresses, you write down the prices.  Then you do the invoicing and, later on back at the office you balance up, and send the proceeds through to the vendors.

                 So that was every week for the pigs.

                 Every Tuesday, yes.

                 And what about the horse sales – how often were they then?

                 It’s pretty much the same routine as we have now.  We have major sales in Sydney, in January, and in April.

                 That’s the one known as the Easter sale?

                 Yeah, that’s right, our flag-bearing sale has always been the Easter sale, which has been at Newmarket since 1905/06.  ’05 was when we did it in conjunction, ’06 is the first sale we did by ourselves, yeah, here.

                 And how long did you stay at Castlereagh Street?

                 At Castlereagh Street, yes, I was at Castlereagh Street for eight years.  We moved office.  We built the office we’re sitting in here at Newmarket in 1980 – well, we concluded building it in ’83, and we moved out here around about that time – in 1983.  So I was there from ’74 to ’83, about eight years, yeah.

                 And the move to bring the office out here, was there a particular reason for that?

                 It might have been prompted by our building being sold off.  We had the opportunity to buy the two floors that we were on, and at the time it was thought that it was better to construct ourselves, and be onsite, both for investment and for convenience of conducting operations.  I suppose, if you go back far enough, our business was previously in O’Connell Street in the city and, then moved to Castlereagh Street for quite a few years.  If you go back into those years, to conduct a business you have to really be at the CBD, and that was for a number of reasons but, you know, if you had to do your banking and see lawyers, and accountants and so forth, -  a lot of personal visits.  And so we sort of had to get our head around not being in the city, and transport of staff and so forth, but we decided at the time it was all quite manageable. I think if you'd taken it back say ten years before, it would have still been in the era, where it would have been deemed inappropriate not to have a city office, city address.

                 Yeah, a lot of business then was face-to-face in that small CBD area, wasn’t it?

                 Yeah, and I suppose it’s got something to do with the status of the company, you know, that it has a city office is considered, ‘Well, that’s a reputable and viable sort of business’.

                 Yes.  And did you spend a lot of time coming out here?  Well, obviously you were still living here, were you, or did you live…?

                 Yeah, after leaving school I stayed living in that Newmarket House, and used to just commute to the city to that office.

                 And did your work bring you out to the stables?

                 Yes, of course, around sale time, absolutely, All our staff would have to be onsite here and actually pretty much closed down the city office – there might be one person in there.  We had what we call a ‘sale day office’ and that’s where we conducted the operations, or the centre of the operations for things like invoicing and writing passouts, and receiving money from payment and conducting all the communications, the phone calls and so forth.  So we built and had a sale day office here, which is quite a substantial building, and that’s where I was residing and working from for probably a week, around the sales.

                 So that was there before this office complex that was opened in ’83?

                 Correct.  Correct, yes, that’s right.  That was sort of, if you like, the temporary site office.

                 And I guess too with changes in communications and so on being much easier, being out here was even easier after 1983, I mean as computers came in and faxes.

                 Yes, that’s right, that’s right.  Yes, it’s all predated fax machines and so forth, the office in the city, you're quite right.  And not only that, more, I suppose, more staff having their own cars, and so forth. So it wasn’t so inconvenient, I suppose you could say.

                 And did you like transferring out here?

                 Yeah.

                 Did you prefer it to the city?

                 Well, it’s ideal for me because I live close by, and my studies were at the University.  The only thing you do miss, you know, might be the city visits and shopping, and that, the convenience of that but, no, no, it was far outweighed by the convenience of close proximity to work, I suppose you could say.  Some might say you were living at work but it didn’t feel like that.

                 You liked that?  That was good.

                 Yeah.

                 Can I ask you to describe the scope of your business now?  Is it just thoroughbred sales?  I mean you talk about pigs in the past but what are you focusing on?

                 Yeah, more and more throughout my life, I suppose, the thoroughbred side of the business has taken over and dominated, in terms of our revenues and our turnovers.  So, the scope of the business now, the large share of our revenue is around horse auctions, and their support services to that, or businesses that leverage off that.  So, we also insure horses as one example and, of course, when people transact a horse and they purchase a horse, it’s a good opportunity to offer them insurance and we do so, as do our competitors.  We’re a licensed broker - we have a financial services licence.

                 When did you introduce that aspect?

                 Well, we started off as just agents for insurance companies, and when the sort of legislation changed we became a broker.  I can't tell you what year it was but I can tell you from the early photos, as early as 1914, we were agents for what was then the Yorkshire Insurance Company, and when I was just a kid, I know we were still agents for the Yorkshire Insurance Company.  I think we got a certificate from there for being an agent for seventy five years, so we had long been in insurance, yeah.  I started off talking about the scope of the business.  So to finish that off, the scope includes financing; we do leasing and loans around horses.  We also have a digital business, which, it has websites, which service the industry for advertising and for transactions.  We conduct online auctions regularly of thoroughbreds, and we also have another website for the pleasure horse or the recreational horse industries, Horsezone, and it’s the largest online horse site in Australia, for all kinds of horses and horse-related products.  And we have an investment in an accounting firm, that services the horse industry - we own that with partners - and we also own a stock and station agency at Scone, which is the heart of the breeding industry in Australia.  And a lot of our clients have their farms at Scone so, that’s sort of a strategic hold for us, although you might say it’s left of centre in terms of the thoroughbred world – it’s not fully thoroughbred focused, but it’s more like a regional presence.

                 It’s a good place to be by the sound of it.

                 Yeah, it’s a good place to have a presence, that’s right.  It is by far and away the largest part of the thoroughbred breeding industry in Australia.  Our clients, the core of our clients, are located there.  We earn our revenues from commission on sales and the commission is charged to the vendor.  So you might say our primary customer is the vendor of the horse, and that’s quite often the breeder – not always - but quite often the breeder of the horse – and the breeder of the horse has their farms, and most of the farms, a lot of the farms are around Scone or Scone and the Hunter Valley broadly.  I suppose you'd say our secondary client is the purchaser, we don't earn commission from the purchaser.  They're important clients to us too, and we spent a lot of time marketing to them, but very often the breeders are also purchasers, so they're even more important - - -

                 It’s a circular world, yes.

                 - - - in that sense, that’s right.  Yeah, that’s quite right.

                 So you're relating both with breeders and purchasers and the breeders are buying?

                 Yeah, they are sellers and buyers and quite often at the same sale.

                 Can I just come back to the online sales and ask you when you started that?

                 I'm afraid I can't tell you precisely what year - - -

                 Roughly.

                 - - - but I would say, it’d be about eight years ago.  Yeah, there’s two aspects to it.  We purchased an existing called Bloodstock.com – we brought that in-house.  It was only existing probably two years at that time.  We did consider whether we should start up ourselves a separate business, or acquire that, but the opportunity presented itself and around about the same time we started at Horsezone.  So I suppose we’ve been in that space, I guess it’s around about eight years now.

                 So is that the same as Inglis Digital.com?

                 Yeah, Inglis Digital is, if you like, presenting that for the family of businesses, but if you look at it like in a legal sense or an entity sense, it’s all part of the one company.  It’s very uncomplicated: it’s William Inglis & Son Limited owns all those businesses – there’s no subsidiaries.

                 And you have online auctions once a month, so is that done like people put in silent bids or is it whoever bids at a deadline, gets it – how does it work?

                 It’s a bit of I might say a hybrid between it, so an eBay style and our live auctions.

                 You were telling me about the live auctions.

                 So it’s a hybrid – as I said, it’s a hybrid.  We have a recording from an auctioneer – it’s very much like the preamble you have to an auction, to a live auction, but we also invite bids, up to a closing time, which is probably more the online auction style of eBays and so forth, unlike those we also offer some post-sale service.  In other words, we undertake to collect the money, which is basically what we do in the live auction, as well. That definitely distinguishes from other players in the online auction market because from all our years of experience in our big database, we know our clients very well, and we know the purchasers and we can provide credit accordingly.  That’s a core part of what we have to do here, is know our customers and take risk on some, or most of them if we know them very well.

                 Right, so you extend them credit for maybe a week or maybe longer, depending on their circumstance?

                 Correct, that’s right.

                 And that makes the sales flow more efficiently?

                 Yes, yes, it does.  They're more familiar with that type of operation, yeah, as purchasers certainly. Yes, it much closer parallels the live auctions that we conduct at our premises in Sydney and Melbourne.

                 Tell me about the live auctions.  So I gather it’s quite an event and what’s involved in the build up to it and then the actual auction day?

                 Yeah, it is an event.  A horse sale, whether it’s one of our sales or any other sale, and whether it’s a thoroughbred or not, it’s very much a meeting place - I think traditionally it has been.  A lot of people come to sales to see people, and meet with people, and see what the market’s like, whether they're buying or selling.  It’s a good place to gather information and sort of you might use the word we use now, ‘network’ amongst people. There’s a lot of other transactions go on apart from just the sale of the horse.  I mentioned insurance before but, of course, there’s transport and the vets and all the other support services.  There’s also people come along to market their wares; you know, whether they're selling horse feed, and horse products generally, veterinary products and so forth, they’ll come along to talk, because they know they're going to be in front of a bunch of people.  So it become like a trade show, and a conference almost.

                 Do they stand up and say, you know, ‘I'm a saddle maker’ and this, that and the other?

                 No, they have to get around and do the best they can.

                 They just do it, yeah.

                 They wear a cap or a shirt and hand out cards or they already know their customers.  Maybe they're just networking with existing customers to see if they can support them in any way.  So that all goes on at a sale, as I say, whether it’s a thoroughbred sale or any other sale.  My father used to go regularly to auctions we conducted of utility horses – you know, horses that pull wagons and carts and sulkies and so forth – It’s the same sort of thing: there’s a bunch of people selling all kinds of things and trading or booking transport or whatever.  So that all goes on at a sale, and we put a date out, that’s very much the same – typically, it’s the same sort of calendar as we had last year and the same sort of people turn up.

                 But you asked about marketing - that’s something that’s changed over my life too.  There’s a lot of work and time and effort and expense, and there’s a big team goes into marketing of sales now.  That’s both within Australia, all over Australia, and internationally – internationally is a very big aspect of it - and part of our role is to make sure that the right buyer group, interested buyer group, and any new buyers we can find get along to a sale to create competition, and support the trade for our vendors.  That’s our responsibility so we spend a lot of time and effort on that.  So I guess, what I'm trying to say is there’s a certain trade element to it, like what you might call a wholesale professional element, and then there’s also the buyers that we have to get along or we want to get along, to encourage them to support the industry generally, grow the industry.

                 So are you in touch with buyers?  I mean does a buyer come to you and say, ‘I'm looking for this kind of a horse?’  Do you ever do an individual deal?  They say, ‘Well, I'd like a horse like this.’ or do they always come to the big sales, or online?  I guess they could use the online.

                 I suppose there’s two answers to that.  We do do some private sales and it might be occasionally some people overseas, want us to assemble a bunch of horses for them, say a planeload of horses to take away, or individual people want a horse for a particular reason or at a particular time when there’s no sale on or there’s no horse to suit from a sale, but that is a rare and very small part of our business.  Mostly, it’s around people, we’ve got an auction sale on and they say, ‘I want to buy a horse.  Can you suggest one to me?’  And, yes, in answer to your question, we do quite a bit of that - we have a team that will support that.  We quite commonly get people coming along to our sale and say, ‘I want to buy…’  We’ll ask them what type of category they want, whether they want a colt of filly, what sort of price category it is, were they looking for a sprinter or a versatile horse or whatever, what size they like or dislike, and we try and distil down their specification, if you like.  And then within those specifications we’ll suggest maybe a shortlist to them - we usually don't suggest one horse – and then that’ll be down to them to make their selection from that and, of course, outside that too.  I mean I fully recognise that they may be just picking our brains for free, and they may add to that from whatever other sources of information they have, which is fine too and we’re quite happy with that. We try to point out that what distinguishes us in this industry, is we’re quite independent.  We don't get fees from the buyers and we get the same fee from every seller, so when we do give them advice and a shortlist, it’s from a selection that we’ve made without, if you like, any area of conflict, in that selection.

                 No axe to grind, yeah.

                 No axe to grind.  You know, you might say people in our team might have their own personal views, and I think everyone recognises that’s what happens when it comes down to horses, eye of the beholder and so forth.  I think it’s worth mentioning that a horse sale is always a place, where you make every endeavour to search everything, every bit of information you can - we look the horse up and down and examine it - but once you bid and buy it, it’s yours, you own it. So we encourage people to make all examinations they can, and be completely satisfied when they're bidding.

                 Yes.  In a way that seems from people I've talked to, part of the interest is that you can't be sure.  You can't look at a horse and be absolutely sure what he or she is going to turn into.

                 That’s right, that’s definitely part of the appeal.  And likewise, of course, the same applies, especially in the yearling sales, the same applies to the vendors: the vendors don't really know what they’ve got.  They’ve seen it grow up in their paddock, they’ve seen it for hours, lots more time than the purchasers have but that doesn’t mean they’ve been able to asses it either.  And so, basically each one of them’s a surprise package, from a yearling sale, anyway, I'm talking about, because they haven't been broken in, it’s so early in their life.

                 And the actual sale process on the ground, the horses start coming in here a week or more beforehand and are stabled.  And how many horses do you have?  I mean they're very big, some of your sales?

                 Yeah.  I suppose what we are offering as a service is convenience to purchasers.  So you’ve got a lot of horses assembled in one place for comparison purposes and convenience.  So, yes, you're right, the horses come in up to a week before the sale, and there’s good reason for that too.  If you want to look at a lot of the horses in the sale, it takes quite a lot of time. So a lot of our serious buyers do just that.  Yes, we’ll have a stable full, basically.  We fill up our Randwick stables here with six hundred horses, and if you do your arithmetic on how long it takes to look at a horse, that takes a few days, really, to get through them and that’s only to see everything and then, you know, quite often the typical buyer would want to see their selections two or three times.  So that’s why it takes at least several days, and for the convenience of buyers we try to make sure the horses are here, well and truly in front of the sale.  I suppose you could say that’s doing the vendors justice too, because they’ve spent a lot of money and a lot of time getting that horse at that stage, and to sell it to best advantage they’ve got to have adequate time for the purchasers to make their decisions.  So, look, the convenience of having a lot of horses in one place, it comes at a cost.  We’ve got to have quite a major facility available to us, which is specifically for horse sales. It doesn’t really have a lot of other purposes in life and for most of the year is underutilised - you would say something like over ninety per cent of the year is underutilised.  I didn’t say ‘unutilised’ but underutilised anyway.  And so a business like us has a very large capital outlay in setting up its premises.  I guess that dictates why there aren't many businesses like us.  It’s not easy for a competitor to set up without quite a large commitment.

                 Yeah, and you’ve built that up over many years, as a family.

                 Yeah, I suppose as the industry’s grown, so too have we and, yeah, it has evolved and it’s been added to. It’s got to a certain size but part of the relocation process is because we want to increase that size.  As an example, in Melbourne where we have plenty of space, we have added to the stable capacity down there, over the last decade, let’s say, so we’re up to just over eight hundred stables down there.

                 What’s the name of the stable in Melbourne?

                 Well, we name it after its location in Melbourne.  The area it’s in is Oaklands, which is out just past Tullamarine Airport.  It’s Oaklands Junction and that’s what we call our premises down there, so Oaklands.

                 And you acquired that about 1994, so you’ve expanded that up to eight hundred, have you?

                 We have, yes, that’s right.

                 Generally, the whole thoroughbred sales industry seems to have expanded, and expanded and expanded. So it’s expanded, really, in your lifetime working at the company.  The horse sale or the thoroughbred industry has expanded immensely.  Is that your experience, or does it go up and down, up and down?

                 Yes.  Well, like a lot of things, like the economy generally, there’s cycles in terms of the price, of horses, but you could say it’s expanded, dollars have got higher and it has expanded internationally.  Certainly, there’s much more investor interest in this industry, people owning horses without owning farms, or without owning land – this is to breed from as investments.  However, the number of horses, the population of horses, the foal crop each year, has continued to decline over quite a large number of years, and it may have sort of plateaued off now; it may not be declining as much, but it’s certainly declined a lot in my lifetime and the attendances at races has declined a lot too.  So they're two metrics, I suppose you'd say go against the indications of growth.  What would indicate growth is, the, I suppose, dollars turnover, and I think even though there’s a lower horse population, there continues to be a large number of commercially bred horses – that’s horses bred for sale – and those horses get transacted more times in their life.

                 So just to illustrate that. Typically way back say fifty years ago, a farm would have a few mares.  They would own those mares – they may have bred them themselves – they own those mares.  They may have a stallion, a resident stallion, or several, and they would breed horses and they'd bring them to the sale.  They'd be purchased by someone for racing, and that person would take that horse for racing and then if it’s a filly maybe sell it, but if it’s a colt, gets gelded.  What I'm saying is that horse only gets transacted once in its life.  Now, people own mares for investments, and even farms that own mares for investment, they will typically transact them quite regularly.  They might only keep a mare for three years and sell her on.  Some other farm buys it and likewise they’ll sell her on.  They breed and they have a foal - they could sometimes sell the horse as a foal.  Someone else buys a horse as a foal and sells it at a yearling, perhaps even then sells it at a ready-to-race sale.  So that part of it has grown the industry: more horses being transacted more times throughout their life and that’s what creates a turnover increase. Plus we have so many more visitors from overseas.  We have investments from Asia and from North America and Europe, owning operations in Australia, which has all changed in my lifetime, and so that has grown the number of dollars – if you like, the turnover – in our Australian industry.  Some of those people what they call creates jobs, which is all positive and some of those people buy farms here too and go on to breed horses and race horses, the same as an Australia resident would, yeah.

                 But they're taking quite a few overseas for breeding and racing?

                 Yes, horses being exported, that’s been an increasing trend too. And we’ll see how that continues, but there’s potential for that to expand quite significantly, if racing in China grows.

                 And it’s already quite established in Hong Kong.

                 Hong Kong for many years now, yeah.

                 And other Asian countries?

                 But there’re only two racecourses in Hong Kong, so there’s a limit to how many horses they can take there and, of course, they buy from the northern hemisphere, equally as well. But if Chinese racing expands, it’s sort of unlimited how many horses they can take there, and I think you would see a lot of them being sourced in Australia.  Likewise, you’ve got racing in Korea now - it’s grown and still growing - and racing is starting up, we think, in Vietnam – well, not ‘we think’, it is definitely starting up in Vietnam.  So, yeah, there is new venues, new countries expanding into it, so potentially we could see – it’s not hard to imagine we could see the foal crop eventually turning around, and growing to supply into that demand.  I think Australia has a few natural advantages, competitive advantages, over other countries in things that we produce; probably agricultural products are one of them and you're calling horses ‘agricultural product’ or livestock, it’s something we can do as well or better, than anywhere else in the world, so if those markets do expand, you could see the possibility of us growing to supply into it.

                 And does the Australian horse have particular qualities that distinguish it, say, from a North American horse, or a European, that would attract buyers?

                 We’re all thoroughbreds.  This is all thoroughbreds we’re talking about.

                 Yes, yes.

                 And a thoroughbred, you know, there’s genealogy, genetics, which is shared throughout the world.  Horses travel throughout the world, so there is no particular Australian thoroughbred as you might say, in other breeds that distinguish it.  However, our racing focuses on short races, sprints, certainly less than a mile, less than 1600 metres, and consequently our breeding focused on that too.  So there’s two aspects to horses in Australia, that would maybe distinguish them.  If you were scanning the world to buy horses, you would see horses that mature earlier – I'm speaking generally on terms but not all our horses are this way - but there’s a focus on breeding horses that mature earlier, and race over shorter distances.  That’s what our breeding industry might say what sells best in Australia in our markets.  That may change, but interestingly it’s not necessarily the way our racing prizemoney is distributed, but that’s certainly what the focus of the breeding industry and what’s rewarded in the sales ring.

                 I was just intrigued when you talked about a planeload of horses going somewhere.  How many horses would you fit in a plane and what are the logistics and risks of flying horses around?

                 Yeah.  The largest of the planes if you were, say, taking a load to China would be eighty seven horses – that goes on a 747, the jumbo, on an air freighter.  Horses fit into pallets, air freight pallets, just like any other freight.  They're specially designed pallets for horses but the same size air freight pallet as normally goes in plans like that there’s space for three horses.  So whatever eighty seven is … what is that?  Twenty nine pallets fits on a jumbo.  That’s twenty nine times three and smaller planes or planes that might share cargo - they’ll have normal cargo and part horse cargo – it’d be a lesser number.  Say for example like I take horses to the Philippines, there might be a freighter that does a courier type and it'll have its normal freight - - -

                 In place?

                 - - - and three pallets of horses, or five pallets of horses.  So that, and you ask about how it’s done.  It’s pretty much very simply – well, I shouldn’t say ‘simply’ – it’s a fairly low-risk operation now; horses travel fairly well.  It’s not too dissimilar, I think, from the space and the experience they have on a truck, and horses travel in trucks regularly and without incident, all over Australia.  They are well-treated and well-managed.  The air freight agents, the people that conduct this, are quite experienced.  They have very experienced grooms, in many cases vets that travel with the horses, so they're well looked after and, as I say, usually without incident.  I suppose the risks associated with it, are like all animal movements, with disease and so forth.  And we have had a celebrated case of equine influenza that was imported into Australia, and caused a lot of havoc, so the risks, I think, are mainly around that in conducting adequate quarantine and pre-travel veterinary examination, which is stringently adhered to and conducted, but regularly done.  So the industry is pretty well conducted that way. As is domestic transport. I mean people don't really appreciate it because it’s so widespread. But, you know, to think that we have a place here in Randwick where we get six hundred horses into and the sale might finish and any day there'll be maybe three hundred horses depart from here on trucks, is pretty efficient.  I like to compare it to sending parcels by courier and you can get a horse to Melbourne quicker than you get a parcel to Melbourne, and I don't think the price is that bad either. And very, very few incidents.  Horses travel safely and are delivered safe at the other end, so it’s a very efficient operation, domestic horse travel.

                 Yes, because you see them on the roads but I've never seen any at airports.

                 Yeah.  And they likewise travel to the races.  You know, a horse will go from Randwick to Newcastle races, and the punters are very astute at how they assess the likelihood of a horse winning, and it’s very rare that you'll see anyone talk about, ‘Oh, that horse had to travel to the races.  Therefore’ - - -

                 It won't be so good.

                 - - - its price should be adjusted accordingly’.  They travel so well, it’s almost negligible, the impact.  Of course, if we’re talking long distances, ten hours, yes, they need a day off but for any of those shorter distances, it’s almost without incident, yeah.

                 And when they went by ship, did they get seasick - do they get that adjusted?

                 Well, you're talking before my time and I would say - - -

                 You haven't had a ship then?

                 - - - very likely.  I don’t know a horse experience on a boat, but – well, yeah, no, I'm not the right person to comment on that.  It’s maybe something that’s being explored again now, but I don't have any experience with that.

                 And coming back to the preparations for the sales and getting all the information together, you produced – I've looked at them – very detailed catalogues for each sale.  And do you have someone whose job it is just to put together the catalogue, and how do you amass all that detail and check it?

                 Well, this is also related to digital and information age, I suppose.  Way back when I started, there wasn’t such a thing so we had to keep detailed records and it was down to a lot of people’s memory, and use of library, and reference books to compile a catalogue - - -

                 To get the genealogy of it, yeah.

                 - - - and acquire a team of specially skilled people to do so.  We were one of the forerunners in the world in a partnership to create a catalogue, pedigrees by computer, computer pedigrees. And the operation that we started, we’ve since moved out of, but we access a service now which provides computer pedigrees, as anyone anywhere in the world can now.  They're available online, usually for a fee, but pedigrees are compiled – it’s not as complicated a process as it was before, even though it involves a cost.  Usually breeder enters a horse for the sale, we assess it, we download a pedigree, and we assess it based on that pedigree.

                 How far back does a pedigree go – just the parents of the horse?

                 It goes back as far as you want it to go back.  It goes back literally to the first – well, the first thoroughbred stallions were actually Arabian stallions; you can go back as many generations as you want.  However, I guess what we could ask each other, is how much is relevant. For the market, market assessment, it’s usually the first two dams looking at horses.  Because a large number of horses are by the same stallion, it becomes sort of common knowledge; an assessment of the stallion is understood, or you can research that stallion.  So the pedigree on the catalogue page is dominated by the dam, the mother’s pedigree, and her mother’s pedigree. and so on.  So it goes down the dam line.  Although it mentions the stallion, it doesn’t go into great depth about the stallion and the stallion’s stallion, and so forth.  So what you might say, going back to your question, what you might say is, yes, you could have as many generations as you like, but we would say probably the most important, and what influences the value of the horse mostly is the first two dams - your mum and your grandmum.

                 Right.

                 And that is what we would – sorry, I mentioned we download pedigrees.  Obviously you can edit pedigrees accordingly, and we have to decide how much we put on a page.  It can go on and on and on for pages, so part of the process we do is editing them.  They can come edited, but we have one person here who goes through and ensures the editing is, if you like, satisfactory, and ensures that if there’s an enhancements can be done to the pedigree with minor wording changes, that’s all done in-house here too, yeah.

                 So a big production. 

                 It is.  It’s publishing a book literally.

                 It must take a few months to get that all assembled and printed.

                 Yeah.  Well, there’s ancillary aspects too.  We’ve got to decide where the horse is going to go, located within our stables - we’ve got to publish that in the book - and then lists of all the vendors, and the horses sold by that vendor and where they are going to be located in the stables, and so forth.  So there’s all the supporting indexes, if you like, that go in the catalogue and we’ve got to produce in-house.  Does it take months?  No, it doesn’t take months.  For the major sales it would take a couple of months, yeah.

                 And fine-tuning before printing, yeah.

                 Well, what takes time is selecting out those six hundred horses, because we’d have a large number more entries, so we have to choose the horses that we feel best suited to that sale, whether it’s a top sale, or a second sale.  So it involves inspecting the horses at their farms, which could be anywhere in Australia and New Zealand – we have horses come from New Zealand for these sales.  So that’s what’s the time-consuming part, that’s what takes the months.  They're already started with the inspection for next April, now, and they won't conclude that until probably November.

                 And then so it’s a negotiation with the breeder?  You may say, ‘Well, look, we’ll take these five but the other three, we don't think they're ready for this sale’?

                 Exactly right, exactly right, yes, that’s right.  There’s two things we could say: ‘It’s better suited to another sale.’ or we might say, ‘We’re not sure yet.  We want to see how it grows for the next few weeks or months or whatever and we’ll come back and look at it again.’

                 So you do more than one inspection?

                 Typically, yeah, it can be three.

                 So you're on the road a lot. 

                 A lot of miles.

                 And do you personally do a lot of those?

                 Sometimes but not generally; it’s not my role.  Normally, yeah, they jump in the car and cover a lot of kilometres; usually two people on a team.