Newmarket Oral History: Jonathan D'Arcy

Jonathan D'Arcy (b. 1965) speaks to interviewer Virginia Macleod. Jonathan grew up beside Brisbane’s Eagle Farm racecourse, where early-morning stable work shaped a lifelong connection to horses. Both his parents were involved in the industry, and after school he pursued hands-on experience that led him to Glenormiston Agricultural College in Victoria. There he deepened his knowledge of thoroughbred breeding and training, and discovered a fascination with the craft of auctioneering. A short placement with Inglis at Newmarket in 1986—spent manually researching pedigrees for sale catalogues—led to a job offer from John Inglis and the beginning of a long career. Within five years Jonathan was auctioneering at Camden, supported by mentors such as Peter Heagney. He formalised his skills with real-estate and stock-agent licences, and developed an understanding of the annual cycle of thoroughbred sales: inspecting breeders’ horses, preparing catalogues, setting price ranges and, during major sales, helping a team of auctioneers move hundreds of lots a day while supporting both vendors and buyers. Jonathan’s work now spans Australia and overseas as he builds relationships and promotes the strength of Australian racing and bloodlines. After 30 years living at Newmarket, he reflects warmly on its unique outdoor ring, the surrounding horse-centred community, and the excitement of remarkable sales.

Today is the Friday 11th of August 2017 and I'm speaking with Jonathan D’Arcy, chief auctioneer for Inglis Company.  We’re speaking at the Newmarket Stables for the Newmarket Stables Oral History Project and my name is Virginia Macleod.

                 Jonathan, what year you were born?

                 I was born in 1965 up in Brisbane.

                 Right. And you grew up in Brisbane?

                 I did.  I did my schooling in Brisbane and I was quite fortunate - I think it was a great time to be in Brisbane.  Obviously, growing up in the Sunshine State at that stage, you know, it was the year of Joh Bjelke-Petersen and things were happening at a rapid rate in Queensland.  It was going from a big country town to, what is now one of the major capital cities of Australia.

                 And what did your parents do?

                 My father was involved with the newspaper industry.  So, he was the finance director of Queensland Press and, went on to become the chief executive of the Herald or Weekly Times, which was the head group and one of the big media groups in Australia at that time, so he led a very interesting life.  On the horse side of things, he was treasurer of Mooney Valley Racing Club, and, we raced the odd horse as a family together with some friends, partners.  My mother was actually a journalist.  She obviously raised myself and two other siblings, but mum wrote a couple of cookbooks, and was also, I suppose to tie in with the racing theme, she was the tipster on the radio 4BC at that stage, and also wrote a tipping column every Friday night, and gave the tips on the radio on Saturday morning.

                 Great.

                 Known as ‘The lady with the last word’.

                 Terrific, yeah.  So you had a strong background with horses then?

                 Certainly.  And in breeding parlance, I was by one and out of one.

                 And did you live right in the city or on the edge of the city?

                 We grew up in a suburb, a small suburb, called Bowen Hills, which is between the city and Breakfast Creek, if people listening would understand, fairly inner-city.  In the mornings as I got older, I used to run down to Eagle Farm Racecourse and work for trainers in the morning, just to – you know, I liked being around horses.  This is round probably fourteen, fifteen, sixteen years of age, so it was a passion of mine from an early age.

                 And when you say you worked with the trainers, what were you doing?  Were you riding the horses?

                 No.  Well, obviously listeners can't see but I'm actually about six foot one, so, I was quickly probably deemed too tall, and probably a little too heavy to be riding them but we’d strap them, we’d do the boxes in the morning, and then we’d take horses over to the racetrack.  This is sort of starting around five, five thirty in the morning and I'd do two hours’ work and then I'd run back home, which would be about twenty, twenty five minutes just running along Coronation Drive there, so it was a good time.  I wouldn’t do that every morning, of course, but once or twice a week, just to have an interest.

                 And at weekends were you down there too?

                 Weekends were mainly taken up with school sport.  If we weren't playing school sport and, mum and or dad, were going to the races, I'd tag along and while they'd be upstairs, probably, you know, mixing in the committee room or talking with their friends at the bar or something, I'd be downstairs, I'd be at the scraping sheds, watching horses parade.  I remember the first camera I ever owned, I used to take a lot of photos of the bigger horses, or the better horses that were visiting for the Queensland Carnival in June and July each year.  So, as I said, it was just a passion of mine and, every month I'd buy the Racetrack magazine, which was a national publication at that time and pull out the centrefold, with the leading horse of the day.  So they became some of the pinups in my room, you know, the leading horses of the day.  Seems a bit sad now when you look back, but it was something that I enjoyed following.

                 And so when you left school, what did you do next?

                 I went to a school called St Joseph’s College Gregory Terrace in Brisbane, and on finishing Year 12 my plan was to go and do something along the lines of business, or commerce, or something like that. But, in some of the school holidays in previous years I'd been working for a stud farm called Coolbadah which was run by the Hedley family out of Beaudesert, about an hour out of Brisbane.  So I'd spent some school holidays there; they stood two stallions.  They had about thirty or forty mares on the property, so they raised foals and sold them as yearlings; they raced a few horses.  So they were family friends and they were very kind to me, and so on leaving school, mum and dad and I thought it was a nice idea just to go and have a year’s work, and get some money behind me before, you know, maybe taking on some sort of tertiary education.  And while I was there, I read about an agricultural college course in Victoria, at a campus called Glenormiston College, which was a state-run organisation down at Noorat near Terang in Victoria. And so to attend that college you had to do two years’ practical experience in the thoroughbred industry.  They also ran farming courses as well, and agricultural secretary courses, but the horse course required two years’ practical experience.

                 So it was something that appealed to me.  It was sort of, I suppose, trying to prepare people to go and manage a stud farm, or become a racehorse trainer, and things like that.  So it was something that, as I said, harboured some interest for me, going forward, and so I did the one year’s work with the Hedley family, Ian and Mimosa Hedley at Beaudesert, and then I was fortunate enough to arrange one year’s work experience, at a property called Woodburn at Cootamundra in New South Wales run by a fellow called Joe Manning, who was very well-known in racing circles.  They used to spell horses for Tommy Smith and Neville Begg and, it was a great property to work at, because they had not only spelling horses – they would spell forty or fifty racehorses there at any given time – they also ran a stable of twenty five to thirty horses in the local area.  So they used to race at Canberra and Young and Wagga Wagga and that Riverina district; they also broke horses in for some of the leading stables in Sydney, so it was a great all-round experience and, I look back to those days very fondly – it was a great time.

                 It sounds wonderful, yes.  So you had two years really – you got your two years of practical there, in between the two?

                 Two years’ work experience, and, yeah, so I pursued the course down at Glenormiston.  That was a two year course and so on leaving Cootamundra I went back, obviously, at the end of the year, did the Christmas holidays with family in Queensland, and then, packed the car and drove all the way to Glenormiston Victoria, and arrived probably in late January or early February, to meet about thirty five like-minded people, sort of, half girls, half boys, and the next best part of two years was spent being taught by agronomists and vets.  And one of the things we had to do at the course was we had to break our own horse in, and then train that for an equine pursuit.  So some of the girls on the course obviously were taking their horses through for dressage and for show jumping, and half a dozen of the racing-minded people, like myself, we broke our horses in and used to take them into the track, and gallop them and, you know, program their races.  So once again it was a very interesting learning period, and some very good friendships were forged that still remain today.

                 Sounds a really interesting course.  So it’s very hands-on and very practical?

                 Very much so.  Yeah, we had vets coming in, you know, we were dissecting horses that needed to be put down or, were brought up from the universities and so we learned a lot about the anatomy of horses.  We did lectures on pasture improvement, on grasses.  So a lot of the courses we did, obviously we did with some of the agricultural or farming side of the course.  And, yeah, we did a lot of fieldtrips out to stud farms, training stables; any agricultural pursuit we pretty much learnt about.  So, as I said, I think everyone who did the course, it gave us a good foundation for our future careers, in some form of agriculture.

                 So by the end of that you were set on a career with thoroughbred racing?

                 I think, yeah, certainly thoroughbred racing.  During my time at Cootamundra, I was doing a bit of riding and unfortunately had an accident where I was galloped on by a horse and had my cheekbone, and the side of my face damaged.  So that was the end of my career as a male model, but I sort of thought after that, well, perhaps being on top of the horse wasn’t for me, and so whether it was going to be a trainer, or a stud manager.  The breeding side of things did interest me.  We did quite a lot of work with genetics, and the theory behind breeding a good racehorse, while we were at college, and so that was certainly something of interest to me.  And one of the fieldtrips we had done while being at the college was down to Dalgety saleyards at Oaklands Junction in Melbourne and, that was the first real experience I'd had of first-hand listening to auctioneers and watching the likes of Peter Heagney and his fellow auctioneers work at a sale.  I'd been to a couple of sales at the Gold Coast in Queensland, but this was the first time that I'd really sort of taken note of the role of an auctioneer.  And so the last part of the college course in Glen Ormiston was to actually go and do six to eight weeks’ work experience in a thoroughbred enterprise.  Now, that could have been going and working in a racing stable or on a stud farm but I actually wrote away to the four or five auctioneering companies in Australia, so Goodwood Bloodstock over in Perth and Abcos in Adelaide and Dalgety’s, and Inglis, and Elders Estates, or Primus as they were, in Queensland and I was very fortunate that through perseverance, and a little bit of assistance along the way I was very fortunate to land some work experience with Inglis in Sydney.  Once again, I'd been to Inglis once before – we sold some yearlings when I was working for Joe Manning at Woodburn, we’d sold some yearlings in 1984, at the Inglis sales.

                 In Sydney?

                 In Sydney at Newmarket.  And so I can remember travelling up on the float and unloading the horses down in stable 3, and then walking up to the Gemini Motel, up on Belmore Road, so I had a little bit of knowledge of the sales but, obviously have never worked in an auction house or anything.  So for my six or seven weeks’ work experience, back in those days in 1986, September 1986, it was all about writing out the pedigrees for the sales to be held in January and April, the following year.  And so I was working with a group of like-minded people, some industry names that have gone onto great success as bloodstock agents and stud farm owners.  But it’s quite different now, of course, with the computer age but back then it was all done by hand, and the research, I think, gave everyone who worked at that time, in that sort of industry, a really good grounding.

                 So this was to create the catalogue which lists all the pedigrees and background?

                 Correct.  Pretty much just writing up the family tree of the horse.  So each year you would check if the siblings of a certain yearling to be sold had won races, if there was any improvement in some of the pedigrees down the page.  So it was a lot of research.  We used to keep cards on every horse that raced in Australia, and each Monday morning you'd update those cards.  So if a horse had run fourth, or third, or second or first, or last, you had to actually write down that the horse had performed in that way.  So a lot of research, and obviously in this day and age all that research is gone – the computer does it for us – but, as I said, it was a really good way to learn about pedigrees.

                 Well, presumably you sort of talked about it with your other colleagues and learned that way?

                 Yes.  Well, I was the baby of the office.  I think I was twenty one and, most of the team were a little bit older and so, yes, they certainly taught me from the word go.  But from time to time there would be international pedigrees, so a mare might have arrived from England or America, and if you happened to be given the job of doing the international pedigree, that probably took you five times as long as a local pedigree to do.  So I think I was a bit naïve: from time to time I'd walk up to the pile, and grab the next pedigree, or the next horse to have their pedigree done and I couldn’t understand why I kept getting the international ones, but I twigged after a while that perhaps they were being placed in a prominent position for me to take, by a few of my fellow colleagues.  But, no, it was all a bit of fun back then.

                 And where did you look up say the international ones?  Did you have a library at Inglis?

                 We had a very large and extensive library.  We had what we call the American Stud Book records, which were produced every year.  And so you would pretty much research the mare’s name, what her produce record was, look up the foals’ names and, we would then try and source a catalogue that had been produced by …….(?) or by the Jockey Club in America for their sales.  So their sales were conducted in July and September, their big yearling sales, and they would sell three to four thousand yearlings over there at that time, and so most of the pedigrees or most of the families could be found in those catalogues.  So once again you got very used to researching catalogues, finding pedigrees and then writing out, by hand, what the race records were of each of the progeny of the family.

                 And who were you working along with at that time?  Were you working with John Inglis?

                 Yes, so ‘the boss’, as he was referred to by pretty much all and sundry - the boss was still in charge here at Newmarket.  Yeah, we’re talking about 1986, 1987; he was still selling at the sales, so the boss was here.  Reg Inglis would come in from time to time – he was based out at Camden, with his father, Dick Inglis.  So Reg was spending more and more time in the Sydney office, and a couple of years later would take over, as managing director of the firm.  Some of the pedigree people I worked with, Glenn Burrows, who was just a couple of years older than I was, he was a great help to me in those early days, and we had a lot of good times.  So Glenn now runs a successful farm up at Scone called Willow Park.

                 I also worked with Karen Olive who’s another young lady who went on and ran her own farm up at Tamworth.  In charge of the pedigree section at that stage, was John Hutchinson, who is now the owner of Scone Bloodstock, a very successful bloodstock agent.  And it was probably John who was the biggest influence on my life at that stage, looking at horses and teaching you about confirmation, and about reading a pedigree, and what was required or, you know, certainly what his thoughts were, on what was required to look into the confirmation of a yearling, and see a horse that could be successful on the racetrack.  But everyone played a role, I suppose, in the development of the younger people coming through Inglis.  I'd go out with the boss, John Inglis, and we'd go racing on a Wednesday at Canterbury and get to meet a lot of the trainers and owners.  It was such an interesting job for someone who had a passion for thoroughbreds, that I thought I'd died and gone to heaven.

                 Sounds good.  So after you'd done your six weeks here, you went back and graduated from the college?

                 Went back and graduated, but at the end of the six weeks John Inglis called me into his office and said, ‘Look, Jonathan, we’ve enjoyed having you here and just wondering what your plans are?’ and I said, ‘Well, boss, to be quite honest, I have no plans.  I want to stay involved in the industry, and everything else.’ and I was very fortunate that the boss offered me a full-time role doing what I was doing, pedigree research and going out and looking at the yearlings for sales.  And at that stage I think we’d only had one sale – I'd worked at the September or the spring sale, as it’s known – and so I was very fortunate that Inglis became my second home, really.

                 Right.  So you learned at the job – that was good.

                 Well, thirty one years later I'm still here, so it’s been a tremendous ride, and I've been very fortunate, the company’s been very good to me and, as I said, it’s been a second home to me, really.

                 So you then stayed here to work and how did you move over to be an auctioneer?  Was it a gradual process?

                 I think it was.  At that stage, John Inglis was the main auctioneer here at the firm, and on some days he’d sell everything that was being offered, but he did have assistance from his son or his brother, Dick, on occasions, and then both Reg and Jamie, his two nephews, Dick Inglis’ two sons, Reg and Jamie, had just started selling, had been selling for a year or two, when I joined the firm.  And as the boss was starting to decide to give up the auctioneering side of things, Reg had probably been selling for ten or twelve years, and Jamie for seven or eight years.  And Reg said to me one day, ‘Look’ – he called myself and Vin Cox who had also joined the firm around the same time as I had, and Vin’s gone on to be managing direction of Magic Millions – but he said to both Vin and I, ‘Would you like to have a go at auctioneering?’  And, of course, having worked in the company for four or five years at that stage, I think most of the young pedigree people, had an interest in auctioneering. So we took him up and we’d start by going out to the Camden saleyards, which the company also owned, where we sold cattle, pigs, goats, pretty much any livestock.  And we’d go out there on a Wednesday and they'd have sales, where we would listen to the auctioneers, but also at the end of the sale they'd be selling poddy calves or they'd sell some gear, buckets, horse rugs, pretty much like a clearing sale, so that was the first experience I'd had of auctioneering, and practice.  And from time to time we’d get to sell a couple of animals in the sale ring, whether there’d be a few sheep or a few rough cattle that, you know, you'd stand up there and sell those, and at the same time Reg encouraged us to go and do a real estate course, or an auctioneering course, to get our licence.  So one thing led to another: I did a two year course at TAFE, at Randwick TAFE, down near the racecourse, and got my real estate licence, I suppose in the early ‘90s, and that encompassed at that time an auctioneering licence; and I did a bridging course for stock and station agents’ licence and so that licence I still sell under today.

                 That’s interesting.  So there was no separate training for auctioning livestock and animals then, that you just did a real estate auctioneer’s training?

                 Well, at TAFE that was the case.  You could have gone and done an intensive, I think two or three week course, at Hawkesbury Ag College but, at that stage we were all pretty busy here in the bloodstock team, in the Sydney office.  So I chose to do it via the real estate licensing course that Randwick TAFE offered, you know, two nights a week for about two years.  And that was quite good because we do run a real estate arm here at Inglis and, so from time to time, it has been quite handy just to have that real estate licence as well.

                 Yes, because sometimes you're auctioning properties as well as contents and animals, yeah.

                 Jamie Inglis has made that his strong point over the last fifteen years or so, and so it’s been good, you know, from time to time be able to give him a hand.

                 And tell me how did they train you to be an auctioneer in this course - I mean what does it involve?  I mean is it like actors learn voice projection ..?

                 A little bit of that.  Obviously, the real estate course was basically around about the act.  It was teaching you what sort of rules and regulations about, quoting on housing, about, receipts of trust account, about contracts – a lot of contract law: what you're allowed to say, what you need to put in, when you can exchange and accept.  And there’s obviously a close role between real estate, and the act of selling a house, and the act of selling anything else - there’s offer and exchange on private sales, and things like that.  And they did obviously then move onto auction sales, and once again you’ve got your conditions of sale, and the importance of registering bids and, what the rules and regulations are about the actual auction of a house.  And then from time to time, I could just go and speak to Reg or Jamie and learn a little bit more about how that then applied to the horse industry.

                 A little bit different for the horse industry?

                 It is, yeah.

                 Less complex?

                 Yeah, look, the Stock & Station Act, is a little bit different.  As we currently stand, most people would be aware you have to register prior to bidding, and then use a bidder number or paddle showing your bidder number.  At a horse auction, the way Inglis run them at the present time, we encourage everyone to bid, and we give you a buyer’s number, but you don't actually have to hold up a paddle and do that, and show that the paddle is there to be seen.  At a thoroughbred auction as well, we have the right to bid for and on behalf of the vendor more than once, and we don't have to declare that bid.  We have the right to bid up until the reserve price, so that’s a little bit different to real estate auctions where the vendor bid has to be disclosed, and there can be only one vendor bid, and that’s the same in all livestock auctioning and I'd hate to see that change because I think, everyone’s well aware of the role of the vendor, and the auctioneer in that process.  So, yeah, that’s a bit of the art of auctioneering, knowing the horses’ value, or the animals’ value that you're selling.

                 So the family auctioneers were good mentors for you?

                 Outstanding, yeah.  I think the boss was seen as one of the doyens of the auctioneering world, really, not just in Australia.  You still go overseas and, particularly the older generation, will still talk to you about John Inglis, and the memories of coming down here to Australia.  And, yes, Reg and Jamie were both very, very kind to me, Reg particularly.  Obviously, he was my managing director for, probably fifteen to twenty years, and we developed a very good rapport; he was very kind to me.  He sent me overseas to America, to Europe, to attend thoroughbred auctions over there, and build relationships that obviously, have been the backbone of my existence in the thoroughbred game.  So, no, I mean I can't thank the family, and, as I said, Reg and Jamie and the boss, enough for the opportunities I've been given to build this career.

                 And did you find that you modelled – because John Inglis, I mean I've heard that he was a very fine auctioneer – did you find that you modelled your style on him?  Does each auctioneer have a different style, or is it very similar?

                 No, I think each auctioneer, you can hear certain traits in auctioneers, and you can tell that that person probably has modelled themselves on someone, but I wouldn’t say that I sold like John Inglis.  The first thing John Inglis ever told me was you just have to be clear and concise, and that the bidder should know at all times, where the bid was, and if it was his or her bid that, you know, they were in no doubt about that.  So I think that’s something that I always try and ensure that people know where the bid is, and if they're out, you know, they’ve got the opportunity to come back in.

                 I think if anyone, I probably model my selling more on Peter Heagney because I enjoyed his style, and Peter once again was a very popular auctioneer, and remains popular to this day.  So I was fortunate enough, at that stage, to go around the world and listen to auctioneers.  I mean auctioneers in America are very, very different there.  Professional auctioneers, they don't work for the sales companies on a day to day basis.  They’re mainly car, and tobacco auctioneers, so they come in and they sell very quickly and they almost pride themselves on trying to confuse the bidders, so people are more inclined to keep bidding to make sure it’s their bid.  So, yeah, no, I think while I enjoyed the auctioneering styles of the boss and others, I think probably Peter Heagney was someone I styled myself more on.

                 So how do you prepare for an auction?  I mean is it a year-long process?  What’s involved in bringing it all together?

                 Well, we have different types of auctions here at Inglis but the main auctions are, of course, the yearling sales.  This is where, I suppose, anyone listening to the tape would understand that, from year to year the breeders of Australia and New Zealand prepare their horses and then enter them in sales, all over Australia. But the number one sale has always been the Easter sale; been held here in Sydney for over a hundred years.  In 2017, the sale averaged $355,000 per horse, and the top price of $2.5 million, so it’s a high profile sale.  But, yes, the preparations for a sale like that, begin twelve months - or pretty much the day we finish 2017 yearling sale, we start working on next year’s edition and that is going out and looking at the foals on the ground.  So we sell horses as yearlings.  Obviously, the season when they're born is somewhere between August and December, of one year, and then they're sold from fourteen months through to about eighteen months, depending on if they're an early foal or a later foal.  So those horses will be seen on the farms as foals, then we’ll go back again, in around July/August, just before they turn one, and have another look at them, see their development, and probably give some feedback to the breeders, to the owners, about where we see them best placed in our sales system.  So you’ve got the Easter sales, we’ve got the Classic sale, that’s held in February every year, we’ve got the Melbourne sale, that is held in March every year, and so horses suit certain sales depending on their pedigree, their physical confirmation, their maturity levels and things like that.  The entries are called for in August, and then in September we’ll go out and do a final selection of the horses, and then we’ll offer the breeders a place for each and every horse they’ve got in one of our sales.  So some horses might go to the Easter sale, some horses might go to Melbourne, some horses might go to the Classic sale, some horses might be kept over for Scone, or we might suggest that some horses are best placed just to be sold online with our online Bloodstock.com service.  So that’s the leadup. 

                 If we’re talking about auctioneering-wise, the catalogue is produced about four weeks prior to a sale, and in that four week period, myself and my fellow auctioneers - at Easter we’ve got, you know, three, four, five auctioneers operating – and we would go up to the Hunter Valley and look at, probably three hundred yearlings, in the weeks leading up to the sale.  We might pop down to Victoria to have a look at the thirty or forty coming from Victoria, and then the others that we haven't seen, those coming from western New South Wales or Queensland or South Australia or New Zealand, we’d see when they got here.  So the horses would arrive normally about a week before the sale, and so not only the auctioneers but, of course, all the agents, trainers, owners who are interested in purchasing at the sale, they would come to the auction and inspect the horses and by ‘inspect the horses’, they would ask the strapper or the owner of the horse to leave the horse out for them, and they would look at the horse for maybe two, three minutes, write some notes normally.  As an auctioneer when I'm going through that process, I'm trying to determine what a reasonable value for the horse would be, and more often than not, I would then sit down with the breeder or the owner, and we’d try and work out a reserve where we thought the horse could be sold for.

                 Now, being a public auction, you really don't know, it’s very hard to predict the sale price of a horse.  Most stallions have progeny sold at all the sales, and so you do get a bit of an idea of what stallions’ progeny are popular, and over the years, I think as auctioneers, you develop a bit of a feel for the strength of the pedigree, how the siblings to the yearling have been racing, and so you do get a bit of an idea.  You know, I'm not saying I'm an expert by any stretch of the imagination but, hopefully I've got an informed opinion, that we can develop and assist the breeder or the owner in setting a reserve price.  Now, some owners might decide just to put the horse on the market – they have to sell it or they want to sell it – and so that’s hopefully where the skill of an auctioneer can come into play, by driving the bidding in such a way, that the horse realises its potential in the sale ring.  For example, if I'm selling a horse that I think is worth 100,000, I would hopefully get an opening bid of 20 to 30,000, and then maybe take five or ten thousand dollar increments up to 100,000.  Differently, if the horse is worth 20,000, you know, I might look to start the bidding at 5,000 and take $1,000 increments, or maybe $2,000 increments.  So that’s the skill of the auctioneer, to try and get the horse sold within 90 seconds to two minutes.  It’s not like real estate auctions that might take 20 minutes or a half an hour.  We’ve got, some days 200 or 250 horses to sell in a day, and while we give every horse its opportunity in the sale ring, you do have to keep the auction moving because we do have, obviously, a lot of horses to get through each day.

                 And so you’ve set those increments according to the target you have in mind?

                 To the value, correct, yeah.  And, Virginia, what we as auctioneers, obviously all the people attending the sale have got a catalogue, a lot of them are very much informed about what the stallion’s done recently, what the mare’s produce have done. So if you are going to say anything to add to the description of the horse, you try and obviously look for a positive.  You know, the horse might be a particularly good moving horse, be quite athletic, or the horse might be very well muscled, or have a good length of hip, or something that is a positive to be able to mention during the selling process.  If, for example, you're selling a horse by a sire, that a certain trainer, or a certain bidder has had success with, you might mention the fact that, you know, ‘Don't forget this horse is the sire of the recent Cox Plate winner.’ or “You know how well the sire does with his two year olds”, so you're trying to influence the psyche or the emotion that a certain bidder is feeling.  If a certain bidder has been beaten on a previous lot you might say, you know, ‘Make sure you don't run second this time.’ or ‘This is not the one to miss.’ or just little catchphrases that hopefully keep the bidder interested in having another bid on the horse.

                 So you have about six hundred horses here at a sale, don't you?

                 At a yearling sale, Easter or Classic you have six hundred, at broodmare sales and weaning sales you might have eight hundred to a thousand.

                 Right.  So you have all these prices in mind and an understanding of each horse or are you dividing it up amongst several auctioneers?

                 We divide it up between auctioneers.  As I said, some sales you might have two or three auctioneers, other sales you might have four or five auctioneers and so, yeah, we pretty much divide it up evenly.  If there’s two hundred horses to be sold today and there’s five auctioneers, we’ll do forty each or, it really depends on what the structure of the sale is.  As I said, certainly with young horses, weanlings or yearlings, you do have to go and look at the horse, to work out what their value might be.  With racehorses or broodmares, it’s more on the pedigree page, and on their race performance.  If you're selling a racehorse, it depends how their recent form has been, if you're selling a broodmare, it’s pretty much what her pedigree, and what her commercial appeal is going to be to fellow breeders if they want to buy her.

                 So it’s quite a bit to pull together in that week when they're all here, have a good look at them all and work out, yeah?

                 It is.  It’s a busy week, but also it’s Grand Final Day, I often describe it as, for the breeders.  I mean they’ve put two years’ hard work, having planned the mating, the mare gets in foal, the mare foals, then the foal is looked after, and prepared, and grown.  And there’s so many things that can go wrong, so for a breeder to get a yearling to a yearling sale is, you know, a minor feat in itself.  And then obviously the pressure of auction, and most people listening to us would know that – you know, they might have sold a house at auction or gone to an auction to try and buy a unit – it’s very much a pressure situation for both, buyer and seller.  And so we need to remain calm, obviously, and help people through that process, and that’s helping the breeder through the process by giving them sound advice about setting a reserve, but also helping the buyers, you know, giving them time to bid but also encouraging them to bid in a manner, which is going to see the horse knocked down for its optimum price.

                 Quite an art, isn't it?

                 It is, but anyway I think most auctioneers enjoy standing up there and listening to their own voice, so it’s a bit of fun.

                 Yeah.  And so once you're in the auction arena and the horses are led up, there must be a skill in that.  You’ve talked about how you're trying to sell them in a very short space of time.  How do you manage that?

                 I suppose it becomes second nature.  Look, a horse might walk in that might be there is an anticipation the horse is going to sell very well, and personally, as an auctioneer I don't want to scare people off.  If the expectation is ‘This horse might top the sale’ or ‘This horse is going to make a million dollars or more”, you don't want to scare people out.  So I would much prefer to get people actually bidding on the horse; instead of using that vendor’s bid that I spoke of, it’s an opportunity for people to have a bid.  Now, a horse might be going to make a million dollars, but you want to actually have people bidding at 200 and 250 and 300, because that builds the atmosphere.  It gets people involved and it gets the theatre starting to really crack up and so, yeah, it’s important to have people bidding.  There’s nothing worse than having a deathly silence as an auctioneer; you're talking but there’s no bids coming.  And the way we run our auctions is, if you can picture a sale ring with maybe two, three, four hundred people around it, but we have four or five bid spotters, so men and women who look for bidders having a bid.  So not like a real estate auction where the auctioneer has to see every bid, we are allowed to take the bids, as spotted by our bid spotters.  So in a strong market, when horses are selling well and a popular horse comes in, you'll have cries of ‘Yes’: and ‘Yes’, you know, all round the sale ring and as an auctioneer it’s ‘A hundred, one twenty, one fifty, one eighty’ and so that’s great because people do get quite emotional about bidding, winning the bid, much different to, as I said, silence and you're trying to eke out another bid, knowing in your opinion if the horse is worth a bit more money.

                 Quite an art.  And you’ve talked about yearlings and I think you’ve described what they are and tried horses are those that have already raced.  And is there a difference between when you say a mare or a broodmare – it’s the same thing?

                 Yes.  Well, female horses, they're born fillies, so you're either born a colt or a filly.  So if we take the fillies, they're fillies until they turn four, and a filly will become a mare when she turns four.  So as many of the listeners would probably be aware, all thoroughbred horses born in the southern hemisphere, have their birthday on 1st of August.  So on 1st of August every horse advances by one year, so the three year old fillies in July become mares on the 1st of August but a mare can still race on but when they retire from being a race mare, they then become a broodmare.  So they're a breeding prospect, but once they're in foal they're then a broodmare.

                 Right.

                 So mares - the expectancy of thoroughbred horses is anywhere from eighteen through to, you know, thirty years old; some horses have been known to live to thirty five, thirty six – but probably broodmares they're effective life as producing foals, would probably cease, around twenty or early twenties.  So a broodmare who retires at five or six, could be expected to have anywhere between ten and twelve foals, if she remains commercial.

                 And what about the racing period?  I mean would you only expect a mare to race up to five or six years or there’s no prediction?

                 Look, it really depends on their form, and how they are performing on the racetrack.  There have been successful, certainly geldings.  We had a horse a couple of years ago called Mustard, who won a city race here in Sydney at the age of thirteen; which, that’s as old as I've seen them race, but obviously he was enjoying his racing, he was sound and obviously performing at the highest level by winning in the Sydney metropolitan area. But the majority of horses, if they're sound, and they're enjoying their racing, and they're performing and obviously returning their owners prizemoney, you might see them race up until sort of six and seven. 

                 With broodmares, they can certainly race to that age, but because they have a residual value - if they’ve got a good race record behind them and a good pedigree – they can go and earn money for their owners by producing foals and, that sometimes dictates when they might be retired, if the owner feels that, ‘Oh, look, she might win one more race but if we retire her now we can get a foal out of her and sell it in the future.’, so that normally dictates when the mare might be retired.

                 And you mentioned a gelding.  Now, I read somewhere that – does that change the horse’s nature, make it a better racer?  Why are some horses gelded?

                 It’s probably an age-old issue where, the majority of – obviously. As I said, all male horses are born as colts, and a gelding is a colt that has had his testicles removed; and so, yes, I think temperament-wise it certainly helps in handling geldings, or colts, after they’ve been gelded.  But that’s not to say that an entire, a horse that has not been gelded, can't be the most docile, placid horse at ten, twelve, fourteen years old. But in the majority of cases horses, colts that perhaps are exhibiting signs of getting a little bit too hard to handle, gelding will assist in being able to look after them.  There have been some famous cases, some of the listeners might remember: a champion racehorse of the late ‘80s called Kingston Town, who famously had his first start for Tommy Smith and ran twenty-five lengths last at Canterbury.  He was then gelded after that run, and came back and won three Cox Plates, ran second in a Melbourne Cup and probably was the champion of his era, and probably in some people’s mind one of the best racehorses of all time, in Australia.  So the gelding certainly helped that particular horse. But in a stable environment, if you’ve got forty, fifty, sixty horses in a stable yard, it does help that you haven't got too many colts in there, because if fillies or mares come into season, colts do get aroused and obviously that becomes an issue if they're confined to stables nearby.

                 Right, thank you.  You’ve mentioned already going to America and you’ve mentioned horses coming from New Zealand.  So how much do you travel to go and look at horses that are going to be auctioned here?

                 Well, my wife tells me I'm away about fifty per cent of the year.  It’s not quite fifty per cent but, I think I'd spend on average about a hundred and twenty five days away from home a year, but that would be a combination, of obviously the centre of breeding here in Australia is the Hunter Valley, and so I would be in the Hunter Valley at least two times a month, maybe three times a month.  The company keeps a house up there, so on any of those trips you might stay up for one night, or up to four nights on some occasions.  We have sales interstate that we run down in Victoria, and so when those big sales are on you're away for a week, ten days at a time.  And if we look at the year in a whole, half the year is spent sourcing horses, or inspecting horses and selecting horses for the auctions to be held in the first half of the year, and then the second half of the year there’s a lot of marketing that goes on.  So myself and other members of the Inglis team would travel, pretty much all over the world, in talking to buyers and encouraging them to attend our sales.  So pretty much I'd spend a week or ten days in New Zealand, at least once a year, normally twice a year.  I'd be going to America, to Europe, China, Hong Kong, Singapore, and sometimes other members of the team undertake those trips as well.  Look, it’s a very interesting lifestyle, but it can be a little bit draining from time to time, and certainly it’s something that while I've enjoyed over the years, it’s something that it’s good to encourage the younger people to take up some of that role.  Because once again it’s building relationships, and when I'm gone it’s important for the company to have strong relations, with those buying countries, and encouraging the younger staff to attend some of those sales and trips that we do; it’s building up that relationship for the future generations.

                 And over the time that you’ve been here, are more and more people coming from overseas to buy horses here, Australian horses?

                 It’s quite amazing, the growth of the Australian industry around the world.  I think obviously the tyranny of distance in the ‘60s, ‘70s, it was very different to what we find today, I think; most children in Australia are on a plane before they turn one year old.  I remember the first time I got on a plane – I think I was twenty one, so I've made up for it in latter years.  But, yes, I think the world’s become a much smaller place but, one of the keys to the growth of the Australian bloodstock industry, on a worldwide stage, has been our prizemoney levels that are seen as some of the best in the world.  Here in Sydney and in Melbourne for example, every Saturday we race for $100,000 as a minimum prize. And so what that means is if you're lucky enough to own a horse that wins a race in Sydney or Melbourne on a Saturday, that pretty much pays for all the training fees for the entire year.  Obviously, if you can win two or three, you're making a profit - it’s easier said than done, of course.  But I think our horses have also been exported - going back to the ‘60s and ‘70s, our horses were being exported through Southeast Asia, to Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Macau, and the Australian horse has performed very, very well in those areas, particularly Hong Kong, which is one of the biggest jurisdictions in the world for racing.  They have horses racing there from Europe, from America, and from New Zealand and Australia, and the Australian horse performs very well.  So we’ve been able to develop that market in that Hong Kong buyers, and buyers from other areas of Southeast Asia, come down to our sales here in Australia and, take the horses back up there to race. And also what we find now is that buyers from that region, from mainland China, from Hong Kong and Singapore, they're actually leaving horses here in Australia because it is so profitable if you get a good horse racing in Australia, they're leaving horses here to race for the outstanding prizemoney that’s on offer.

                 And do people invite you to come to them or you go to the races and meet the people there?  Overseas, I'm talking about.

                 There’s a little bit of both.  Obviously, if buyers are known to us, we will go and introduce ourselves and then invite them to come down.  And, you know, the horse industry is really a people industry; you’ve got to develop those relationships, and I think sell the product on behalf of the breeders.  The breeders, obviously, are busy throughout the year producing the horses, and so it’s our job as an auction house to ensure that we get the best buying bench we can for our sales.  And so part of the role, as I said, part of the role is going and working with the breeders and sourcing the right yearlings for our sales, but the second part is marketing those yearlings to the world.  And while we spend a lot of time getting around to race meetings here in Sydney, and all over Australia, sponsoring races and talking to trainers and owners and telling them what horses we’ve got coming up in the sales; we also go to all the major racing jurisdictions, be it in America or Europe or throughout Asia, and encourage them to come down to our sales.  And Inglis had a policy of paying some travel rebates and, getting people down, because the more people we can get to our sales, the more money we can get for the yearlings, on behalf of our breeders.

                 And you said the Australian horses do really well in Hong Kong and places like that.  Is that to do with the climate, or the type of horse?  What is it about the Australian horse, that it does so well?

                 That’s a very good question.  I think my answer would be that we’re very fortunate we’ve got some great bloodlines here in Australia and over the past twenty five, thirty years, our breeders, instead of just breeding from the Australian gene pool, we’ve actually been able to first of all attract stallions from overseas.  So the way the breeding industry works around the world is, there’s a northern hemisphere and a southern hemisphere breeding season.  So in the northern hemisphere, the horses are conceived from February through to May.  In the southern hemisphere, horses are conceived from September through to December. And so what that allows for is the stallions, who are the propagators of the herd, they can be sent down from the northern hemisphere to stand in the southern hemisphere.  Because the Australian racing industry probably has the greatest returns, we’re able to attract the leading stallions from North America, from Europe; so, Ireland, France, England.  And so all those top-class stallions, or the majority of those top-class stallions in the northern hemisphere come to Australia and that has developed one of the best gene pools in the world.  We’ve also got some of the Australian stallions going up to the northern hemisphere, but to add to that, the breeders of Australia have actually gone to North America, and gone to England and France and Ireland and purchased fillies and mares, and brought them back down to Australia.  So the bloodlines have changed so much here in Australia since – say, the ‘60s, it was very rare to get an English mare down - you might get five or six mares a year come down from the northern hemisphere. 

                 In this day and age, you might get, you know, a hundred and fifty broodmares and some years there’s forty or fifty stallions coming from the northern hemisphere to stand here in Australia, and obviously that just leads to a better product.  And I think the foundation of the breeding industry here is; we’ve got excellent horse people, so men and women who are trained in horse husbandry, I think the way we feed our horses, the way we raise them in big paddocks, we haven't got, I suppose, the great excesses of snow, and things like that that they find in Kentucky, and in England.  So our horses do develop, I think, a little bit quicker, they develop a bit more bone and substance, and racing in say a place like Hong Kong or Singapore, the horses pretty much when they go up there, they don't get much of a rest - they're in a stable environment for maybe three, four, five years, and so you’ve got to have done your growing by the time you get up there.  And so the Australian horse has been able to adapt very well to those conditions, of being stabled pretty much three hundred and sixty five days a year, going out for their exercise – they might go to the pool in the afternoon and have a swim – but basically they're in training most of the year round and the Australian horses, seem to perform at the best level up there, in comparison to horses bred in other areas of the world.

                 So somewhere like Hong Kong, when you talked earlier on about having a spell or spelling horses, there isn't anywhere really to do that?

                 Not really.  Hong Kong, they don't race for a period of six to seven weeks each year, so the horses, that are there would only be walked; they wouldn’t get a lot of galloping or anything else.  So that is a bit of a break for them but unfortunately, as any listener would know, who’s travelled to Hong Kong or even Singapore, there’s not a lot of green space for horses to go and stand in a paddock.  So we’re very fortunate here in Australia to have, an abundance of space, where horses can be sent and put out to pasture, or put out on grass to relax.  Most of the horses that go into training in a lot of these Asian communities, don't get to be turned out, as we would describe it, into a field or into a paddock for any length of time.  As I said, they’ll stop their training – and even throughout the year if the trainer of a horse in Hong Kong or Singapore feels the horse is not racing at its best, they’ll be given a spell, but the spell would be in a box.

                 Not in a paddock?

                 No, no.  Look, they're very well looked after, but it’s different to the way we train our horses here in Australia.

                 And you’ve mentioned Melbourne briefly.  So you go down there and also do the auctions for the Inglis property at Oaklands?

                 Correct.  I think it was in the early 1990s that we purchased Dalgety Bloodstock from Dalgety’s obviously - they were looking to get out of the thoroughbred industry – so we were very fortunate to, not only buy the bloodstock business, which was selling the majority of the Victorian yearlings and broodmares, but also we were able to buy the company on a walk-in, walk-out basis.  So we got the complex, which is located near Melbourne airport at Tullamarine, and we also go the existing staff, which included Peter Heagney who I've described earlier as one of the most well-known and respected thoroughbred judges and auctioneers in Australia.  We got fellow staff such as Mark Dodemaide and Ian Baird and Michael Kelleher, so it was fairly easy to join the two companies up, and those staff helped us with our inspections down there, and we’ve been able to formulate, I think, a much stronger company because of that.

                 Yeah, because they had all the Victorian contacts already - - -

                 They did, yeah.

                 - - - and the goodwill and relationships?

                 Correct, yeah.  So we spent a lot of money, building up the complex down there, and I think the Victorian industry is a very strong and vibrant industry.  Obviously, racing down there is well-known through the Melbourne Cup Carnival and the Spring Carnival in Melbourne.  So it’s great to have a company that encompasses both New South Wales and Victoria, the two strongest racing states in Australia.

                 And you have an auction at Scone, don't you?

                 We do.  Scone is probably the breeding capital of Australia.  Most of the leading stallions stand around the Hunter Valley, and Scone is at its heartland, and for over sixty years now we’ve conducted an annual yearling sale at Scone, at White Park, which is a council-owned premises.  We sell about two hundred yearlings there, sometimes three hundred yearlings there, every May, in conjunction with their racing carnival, the Scone Cup Carnival, which is a two day carnival, held in May, and the Saturday meeting up there being a stand-alone for the metropolitan area. So it’s a great association.  Obviously, a lot of the breeders are involved with the race club up there and, yeah, it’s a great weekend because while it’s a yearling sale, it’s certainly a lower-key yearling sale, to the pressure of selling horses for 350,000.  It’s a sale that averages around about nineteen to 20,000 and so everyone’s pretty relaxed.  It’s the last sale of the year, the last yearling sale of the year, so everyone can pretty much start thinking about the following year, once the Scone yearling sale’s finished.

                 Right.  And what about Camden?  Those auctions have stopped, have they?

                 The saleyards at Camden, while Inglis still owns the land, we have actually sold the business to another livestock agent out there.  Just with the encroachment of residential owners around the Camden area, as some listeners would know, Oren Park and Camden, Narellan, there’s not a lot of cattle to be seen as you drive through that area anymore, and so the business is currently being run by Jim Hindmarsh and his company from Moss Vale, and I think, in time, that property will be on-sold for development, be it in a commercial sense or light industrial.

                 And anywhere else that you do auctions?

                 The company runs a sale in Alice Springs on behalf of the Alice Springs Turf Club.  This was something that a friend of mine, John Fitzgerald, invited us to be part of, some twenty years ago now.  He rang and said, ‘Jonathan, you know we run a little auction sale out here in conjunction with the Alice Springs Cup meeting.’ and Alice Spring being obviously in the centre of Australia, a long, long way from where horses are being bred, he wanted to encourage young horses to come out to the Territory, and actually have their racing careers from the start.  Historically, only older horses had gone out there; so horses at four and five and six, that couldn’t make it in Sydney or Melbourne or Adelaide, would make their way up to Darwin and Alice Springs to continue their racing careers.  So the club gave us a budget – I think back in those days it was around 40 to 50,000 and we would buy horses from our second sale in Victoria, the autumn yearling sale, which is now the VOBIS Gold Sale, we’d buy twelve, fifteen, sixteen yearlings, take them up there a week later and sell them on the Friday night before the Alice Springs Cup Carnival, and it’s something that, yeah, it’s quite unique selling out at Alice Springs – it’s a lot of fun.  And we’ve been fortunate enough to sell several Horse of the Year for the Northern Territory – I think there’s six or seven Stakes winners.  I remember we sold a horse called Periduki, for four and a half thousand - it went on and won seven hundred and fifty thousand in prizemoney, and went down and won in Adelaide.  We’ve sold horses that have won at Randwick, sold horses that won at Moonee Valley and Flemington, all out at Alice Springs.  So, yeah, it’s been just nice to be associated with what is a smaller racing community, but I think that’s something Inglis has done very well over the years, is look after a lot of the race clubs, from the smaller country clubs, all the way through to Flemington and Randwick in the major capitals.

                 And did you do the auction very differently up there, or is it much the same?

                 It works very well in that we make sure – we have a cocktail party; the chief minister of the Northern Territory puts on a cocktail party, and that follows on from a sportsman’s lunch.  So if you can imagine a group of ladies and gentlemen who have had a very enjoyable afternoon having a few quiet beverages, and we get up and sell the horses in the convention centre, which is attached to the casino in Alice Springs; we sell them about half past eight, nine o'clock at night, so we’ve never had any trouble getting a few bids going there.  And I can still remember a fellow standing there with his gold Amex card, just holding it in the air, making sure he bought the horse.  No, it’s always a bit of fun that night, and as I said, it adds younger horses into a racing population, where there weren't younger horses racing there for a long time, and the opportunity to buy a horse, that can go all the way through to stakes class, I think that didn’t exist in the Territory, before we became involved, so it’s been a very good marriage.

                 It sounds good.  And do you go over to New Zealand to do auctions as well?

                 No, there’s a company in New Zealand, New Zealand Bloodstock, who run the auctions over there, so we don't conduct auctions over there.  We do go over and source yearlings, and source buyers.  So twice a year, myself or one of my colleagues would go to New Zealand, look at the young horses, and select horses that we feel would suit, one of our yearling sales.  But also we go over there around December each year, and talk to buyers, and encourage them to attend our sales.  So New Zealand’s a very strong trading partner in the thoroughbred industry, and it’s an industry, while they're not blessed with the prizemoney levels we’ve got, in New Zealand, they're certainly a very strong part of our industry.

                 Jonathan, I'd like to ask you what you particularly like about the Newmarket site in terms of the sales ring and selling.

                 I think it’s unique – and I stand to be corrected, but I think it’s the only outdoor thoroughbred auction house, in the world.  I've been to the majority of them, and the majority of them are enclosed in buildings; horses walk in and walk out.  Here at Newmarket we’ve been very fortunate.  The sale ring that was built, obviously they used to sell the horses near the old house but, in 1981 they built a purpose-built facility, with seating for about six hundred people, but it’s actually open to the elements.  There’s a roof, but at the front of the sale ring it is open and, of course, the famous Moreton Bay fig tree sits at the front of the sale ring.  So as an auctioneer, standing up in the Newmarket box and looking out, on both sides you’ve got the tiered seating, but out front you’ve got the big Moreton Bay fig, and the majority of buyers, and the majority of bidders would stand under that Morton Bay fig tree.  Behind the fig tree there is a pre-parade ring, and the horses would walk down a chute on the left hand side, and then walk out after they were sold.  So you're standing up there – I can still picture certain people; I can still picture it when I was bid spotting where Tommy Smith would stand, and he’d always have a little entourage around him, always beautifully dressed, very dapper - he’d have a tie and a hat, and a sports coat on.  Gai Waterhouse, his daughter, now stands in not a dissimilar spot: as the auctioneer stands, she always sits, or stands on the left-hand side of the tree and once again with an entourage.  She’d often bring her dog along, so you could always know where Gai was, because you could spot the dog, there before you spot Gai and the entourage.  Bart Cummings, the late Bart Cummings, known to one and all as a trainer of over twelve or thirteen Melbourne Cup winners, Bart would bid by raising his eyebrows, and he had very distinctive, bushy eyebrows and I think early on, it was quite intimidating to be taking the bid from Bart, but at the end of the day, you do get to know the bidders’ idiosyncrasies and how they like to bid.  Of course, at any auction sale, a lot of people don’t like to be noticed when they're bidding, so the bid spotter, it’s a very important role.  It was a role that I did for maybe fifteen years; before becoming a full-time auctioneer, I was bid spotting for some fifteen years.  And so certain people would like to bid to certain bid spotters, a lot of people would like to bid from the same place, because they thought it was lucky.  At the Newmarket complex, there are two side entrances so people can walk up, between the seating, and take their spot in the stand, but that’s also a very popular place to bid, because the auctioneer can’t see you, and so the bid spotter has to relay the bid to the auctioneer.  And you do get a sense, as an auctioneer standing up you do get a sense if you're selling a particular type of yearling, that might suit a type of buyer.  You might suit a Hong Kong buyer; it might be a buyer who’s successful up in Hong Kong, you know where certain buyers will sit and when bidding starts to come from that area, even though you can’t see the bidder, you’ve got a fair idea of who’s standing there and so it’s always interesting.  We ask our bid spotters to call out the name of the successful buyer and, it’s a little game we play with ourselves, just trying to guess who that person who has just bought the horse will be announced as.  But it’s a remarkable place.  I can remember selling the first foal of a great race mare called Makybe Diva, who won three Melbourne Cups.  And her first foal was a Galileo Colt who was one of the leading sires of the day, and he was a very good-looking colt, a dark brown horse with a lot of white on him, very flashy horse, and he was the sort of horse, you know, he’s on the front page of the paper the day he was being sold, and all the commercial news channels were out here, covering the sale of this horse.  While I've been selling at Easter for probably five or six years, one of the big horses obviously was expected to go very close to topping the sale, so it was a little bit nerve-wracking.  The horse went and made one and a half million dollars, but the crowd that was around that day, I don’t think I've seen a much bigger crowd here.  We sold obviously half-brothers and sisters to Black Caviar – they drew huge crowds, and every year you get good size crowds, at the sale, but I can remember that day, selling that particular colt, just people crowding in, and not a spare seat in the house, and all the cameras.  So it’s very exciting; it’s exciting for everyone to be involved in.  And these days we broadcast the sales live on free-to-air TV.  We’ve had a good association with [Channel] 7 too, and obviously our own website pumps out the footage, as well as Sky Channel who have been a partner for many years.  So it does allow for people, even sitting at home, to feel a little bit of the excitement, when horses are being auctioned for one and two and two and a half million dollars under the fig tree.

                 Yeah, definitely.  And are there other things you like about the Newmarket setting for sales?

                 Look, Newmarket, has been my home for thirty one years.  I lived in Young Street for sixteen or seventeen years, so my children were born here, and I walked the dog around here, for years and years and years.  I think it is unique because it is right in the centre of Sydney.  Certainly, I don't know of any other thoroughbred complex, that is so close to a major city.  We’re only fifteen minutes out of Sydney, and so close to Coogee, and I think while that gave it its charm, it also presented a unique set of problems.  You know, we’ve got schools on two sides of us, we’ve got one of the largest hospitals in Australia fronting us on the top side; and we’ve got the University of New South Wales, which is a huge campus and complex, and so, that has led to issues such as parking, such as safety for people who are attending the sales.  For those people who’ve never attended Newmarket, we have a public road that splits our property; so we’ve got two stables on one side of Young Street and two stables on the other side of Young Street, so horses have to cross when they come to be sold.  So that’s one of the reasons that led to the company deciding to move our operations out to Warwick Farm.  But it was unique to have this complex so close to Sydney, and so, when we were conducting major auctions like the Classic sale or the Easter sale, it was not uncommon for a lot of people in suits to be coming out, from their offices in Sydney in the afternoon, and attending the sales and it remains to be seen what sort of clientele we get to attend Warwick Farm.  It might be a more casually dressed clientele but, yeah, it’s something that will always be remembered by those who attended sales here.

                 You mentioned that you lived in Young Street for sixteen years and I just wondered if you could tell me a bit about the community there.  Was it all horse people?

                 Look, majority horse people, as the years went on less and less.  In those days, Gai Waterhouse had horses stabled down at the Chiltern Stables, which is part of our complex, and in the morning you'd hear the clip-clop of horses going up Young Street, and the horses were actually walked up Young Street, down Barker Street, down High Street, and onto the course.  So, you know, we’re going back to the early ‘90s. But, yeah, Inglis owned five houses in this general area.  So we owned three houses in Young Street, so one of the houses was occupied by myself, originally by a couple of other staff members, and then Reg Inglis was kind enough to grant me the house, and I was married out of the house, and had my children there.  Beside me was another house that was company owned, and we had different staff members in that and then the complex manager, Jeff Matthews, lived in the other house for probably the last fifteen or sixteen years and before him Ryan Faulkner.  It was the house where the complex manager lived, and that backed onto Chiltern Stables. So obviously Young Street was home; and there was one other house that was owned a Hungarian couple who raised their family there and they were quite friendly and understood the comings and goings of the horse staff that lived in the street.  But the area, yeah, early on certainly was part of the equine community of Randwick.  Stewart Bathurst and his family were down Jane Street and they broke horses in for many, many years there.  They had a group of stables – probably about twelve, fourteen stables – out the back of their house, and that is now a small unit block with about twelve units - a lot of the houses in Jane Street have now been converted to townhouses.  And also along Botany Street, there were several people who were either jockeys or racing staff down at Randwick, and a lot of those houses have been sold, renovated and obviously the whole of Randwick and this community – colloquial name was Struggletown – it’s changed a lot over the last twenty, twenty five years since I've known it, and there’s probably not too many thoroughbred or horse people involved in the industry still living in the area.  But Bruce and Suni Carnes, who were involved both at the ATC, and regular racehorse owners, they had a house in Jane Street, so it was a great area growing up because it was fairly quiet.  Young Street’s a dead end, and so while we had the school down one end, certainly on any given weekend you'd rarely see a car coming down that way, and it was a great place to grow up and share those early days.

                 So your children knew a lot of children in the area, did they?

                 Absolutely, yes.

                 And did they ride on the old bullring area?

                 Not really.  No, we didn’t keep a horse here at that age.  They’ve gone on to some form of riding after that, but certainly, as no doubt you’ve heard from Arthur Inglis, given his childhood here, there was always a pony or two kept on the premises for the Inglis family.

                 You mentioned going out to look at horses at stud farms and I wondered how many farms does that involve?  Are there a lot in the Hunter Valley and elsewhere?

                 There are a lot of thoroughbred breeders although, it has become more centralised, in the last ten years or so.  Certainly in the days of John Inglis, and going out with Reg and Jamie Inglis, we would spend, you know, two or three days at places like Dubbo and Mudgee and Cootamundra and Wagga, and places like that - pretty much every second farmer would have a broodmare or two, and would breed a yearling.  These days you'd spend a day in most of those centres.  The farmers don’t own the broodmares anymore, and if they do own broodmares most of them are domiciled up on the major stud farms, or broodmare farms of the Hunter Valley.  I think one of the reasons for that is the accessibility to stallions, and to top-class veterinary care, and farriers.  It has become a much more professional industry.  Back in certainly the time where I became involved, the late ‘80s, the farmers, and the people off the land, would just prepare their own yearlings.  They might spend a month or five weeks, giving them a bit of a brush, and to getting their feet done, and doing a bit of education with them but the preparation or the presentation of horses, from those sort of days to now, has changed completely.  Horses now are groomed in the leadup.  Most of the horses would be prepared for a major yearling sale for ten to twelve weeks. And so it’s an education process; they're taught to lead, to stand, they have x-rays taken.  Pretty much they're groomed to be shown to their absolute peak potential, whereas back in the days where the farmers or even the horse breeders, there wasn’t that level of professionalism, to get the horse to that level.  Everyone presented their horses in good condition, but they weren’t taught to lead like they are today, and it’s become a real art.  And it’s something, I suppose that started in America; became very professional in America, and then Europe, and we followed suit.  Not to say it’s a bad thing, it’s just the way the industry has progressed over the years.  But, yeah, look, there’s a lot of farms in the Hunter Valley.  What’s become quite popular now are broodmare farms; so they don’t stand a stallion but they specialise in housing their own mares or clients’ mares.  So a person might live in Sydney and might own two or three broodmares but they stay up at the Hunter Valley.  They're foaled down there, they're sent to stallions in the Hunter Valley, they walk on, they're serviced, they come back, they have their foal, and pretty much live their lives out on those broodmare farms.  So the Inglis employees, like myself and my other auctioneers and bloodstock consultants, we would go round looking at roughly, four to five thousand yearlings a year for our sales, and we’d look to sell, somewhere in the vicinity of two thousand yearlings, in Victoria and New South Wales during the space of any one sale season.  So it’s a lot of time spent looking at horses and deciding which ones suit which sales.  It’s also a great time, because the cyclical nature of the thoroughbred industry is, that there’s always new stallions with new progeny, broodmares that have been retired having their first foal, so it’s a real circle of life to see a horse, that might have been winning the Golden Slipper or the Randwick Guineas one year, suddenly he’s got progeny on the ground and you're trying to ascertain what they're worth.

                 Interesting.  It sounds very cyclical too, your whole work year.

                 It is, it is very much so.  We talk about getting back on the merry-go-round once the gavel falls after Easter.  It is a little bit that way.

                 Is there a down season, a sort of time when you're not having to – especially given that you're now interacting with the northern hemisphere?

                 Look, there’s not much of a down season.  We do try and take - all the staff here at Inglis in the bloodstock division, certainly try and take their holidays around July/August, because that is the quieter time, but even during those two months we are out in the paddocks, looking at young horses for next year’s sales but, yeah, that’s where we’ll have a few staff on leave, during those two months, but pretty much after that it’s full steam ahead.  September, October, November are very busy, making final assessments, and putting catalogues together for sales and also getting out and marketing, doing marketing trips to our markets around the world, to Europe and America and throughout Southeast Asia and China.  As I said, it’s two halves of the year, but it’s good to be involved because, it’s an amazing industry, the thoroughbred industry, because you can travel around the world, but if you're talking horses it doesn’t matter if you're talking to an Arab sheik, or you're talking to a strapper in Japan, we both share a common love of the thoroughbred.

                 And your next sale will be at Warwick Farm.  That’s the January yearling sale, is it?

                 The Classic yearling sale will launch, the Riverside complex at Warwick Farm.  So it’s been, some four or five years in the planning and in the building.  Over $140 million invested out at Riverside. We’re very excited about it.  Obviously, Inglis has been based at Newmarket for over a hundred years - they were at Castlereagh Street before that – but to build a complex, on a completely green site.  So we’ve been able to hopefully develop a complex that will be state-of-the-art, that will offer both buyers and sellers an outstanding experience in marketing their thoroughbreds, and purchasing their thoroughbreds.  So it'll be a very different complex to what we’ve got here at Newmarket.  Certainly a lot more room, to parade the horses.  One of the downfalls of this site at Newmarket it’s been there’s not a lot of space to parade horses and unbroken thoroughbreds can be quite flighty, so we’ve had to be very careful about our safety fencing, and keeping the public and all participants safe here at Newmarket.  But by having a lot more space to parade horses at Warwick Farm, I think it'll be an easier place to inspect horses, a safer environment for everyone, and for the horses themselves.  But we’re part of an equine community out there; obviously, we’re based on the racetrack, we’ve got good farriers and vets in attendance out there, but it will be very different.  It'll be sad to walk out of Newmarket, later this year, but we can always hold fond the memories that were forged here, and I think Riverside is going to be very exciting.  I think we’ve got, as I said, a world-class complex, we’ve got eight hundred stables, compared to six hundred stables here at Newmarket, so we can sell more horses, and I think the demand for our larger sales is such, that we’ll be able to catalogue more horses of sufficient quality, to make it worthwhile.

                 And what will the sales ring be like then?  Will it be under cover like everywhere else?

                 It will be.  Given that we have three or four major sales a year, it would be sad to build a complex and spend $140 million and not use it for anything else.  So the development of the sales ring out at Warwick Farm has encompassed a multiuse facility, and so, we’ll be able to host banquets, conferences, field days, anything that needs anything from two hundred through to a thousand people.  Because we’re building a four and a half star hotel, we’ve got conference rooms, we’ve got boardrooms, we’ve got a huge dining area where, large functions can be held, and because we’ve got a stage there, you could have a concert, you could have a play, so it is a multipurpose facility.  And, once again, that’s something that is exciting to be part of the development of that, and I think it just adds another string to our bow as a company to be able to offer a facility that, perhaps instead of being just a facility that can be used fifteen to twenty days a year, it’s something that could be used three hundred and sixty five days a year.

                 Also I realised the big stables here gets used from time to time for functions too, doesn’t it?

                 It does; it’s become very popular.  In the early days, certainly for the first twenty years I was here, while the company might hold a dinner, or a cocktail party, in the old stable or the Newmarket Room; it’s only been the last five years that, we’ve really outsourced that, and offered that to people having weddings or Christmas parties, and it seems sad that we only sort of cottoned onto it in the last five years, because it really has become a good revenue earner for the company, and great to be able to showcase, what is quite a unique part of Sydney – a bit of country in the city - and obviously I think I've attended three or four weddings here.

                 In the stables?

                 In the stables, and it’s unique.  For any listener who has not had the chance to come down to the old Newmarket barn here at Randwick, it’s open to the public, and it’s very exciting to remember, not only that horses were sold out of there but people got married, cocktail parties were held, the film Phar Lap, has some scenes that were filmed there.  I remember John Inglis used to have his horses trained out of there.  So an old character called Bernie Burns was his private trainer, and he always had two or three horses in the old Newmarket barn, so if you listen very intently when you're in there, I'm sure you could hear the clip-clop of horses walking around that old Newmarket barn.

                 Yes, and its wonderful timber structure too.

                 Oh, it’s magnificent.  In the war, they actually used it in the war for keeping prisoners of war in there.  So it’s got an amazing history, and certainly worth more research, if anyone’s interested to learn about the old Newmarket barn here, on the Newmarket complex.

                 Do you have any horses still?

                 Yes.  My daughter who’s currently thirteen, she’s got a pony that we keep out at Cobbitty, on the outskirts of Sydney.  We’ve got two ex-racehorses out there as well.  So my wife and daughter are both keen riders, so that’s more the equestrian side.  My son and I aren’t overly avid riders these days, but the family likes to go to the races, once or twice a year, and once I think their schooling’s done we’ll get back into racehorse ownership.  As I said earlier, we’ve been fortunate enough to race horses with family and friends over many years, and it’s a great sport.  It’s something that I think once you’ve seen your colours dash along the straight and finish first, it’s a feeling that is hard to replicate. So, yeah, I think it’s something that will always be in our blood and, yeah, there’ll always be a horse or two around the D’Arcy family.

                 So looking back, because you’ve been working here and been an auctioneer for a long time, what satisfies you most in your work in the horse thoroughbred industry?

                 I suppose you do develop very strong relationships with the breeders and, while it’s fun to stand up there and sell, on behalf of some of the bigger studs, yearlings that make a million and two million dollars, that’s great fun. But from time to time you'll sell a horse that might only be for a 100,000, but if the client expects 20,000 and they're people that 100,000 is a lot of money to, to achieve a sale of a 100,000 for a 20,000 expectation, does give you a real thrill.  I remember a few years ago, some good friends of mine, who run Fairview Park Stud, Ian and Linda Duckworth, they were fortunate enough to breed a yearling that they sold at the Easter sale.  The yearling made 85,000; it went on and won the Golden Slipper.  So the price was okay, it was at the lower end of the Easter scale that year, but of course, they had a great thrill.  While they didn’t get the prizemoney for breeding the Golden Slipper winner, they still owned the broodmare and the following year, just a couple of weeks after the Golden Slipper, we were auctioning a colt in the Easter two section of the sale. And obviously the expectation, given that the sibling had won the Golden Slipper recently, the expectation was this colt could sell quite well.  He was by a horse called Magic Albert, who stood for about 15,000, so the cost of production would have been – while they owned the mare - the cost of production would have been about 30,000 for this horse.  So the horse arrives on the grounds and, you know, we’re all quite pleased.  He was a lovely colt, and I remember talking to Linda four or five days out from the sale and I said, ‘What are your expectations?’  She said, ‘Well, we want to sell him.  We don’t want to race a colt, we want to sell him.  He’s a nice colt but given that Mossfun had recently won the Slipper, we thought we might make maybe 150,000.  It’d be lovely.  Magic Alberts don’t make much more than that’.  I said, ‘Yes, I think you're right.  I think he can make that and he might make a little more.’  Anyway, another day or two goes by and, of course, everyone’s coming to look at the horse and the expectation’s growing, and they could tell he was very popular: you know, some of the big buyers were coming back, some of the sheiks and some of the big Hong Kong buyers were looking at him.  Anyway, the morning of the sale I said, ‘Well, what do you think?’  She said, ‘Do you think we could put a reserve of 250,000?’  I said, ‘Look, Linda, given the interest in the horse, I think we can.  I think 250,000’s achievable.’  Anyway, the horse came in and I had the pleasure of selling him, and, yeah, to cut a long story short, the horse was knocked down after a protracted bidding duel, for 750,000.  And so while they're very successful breeders and, 750,000 may not change their lives, but it certainly had a very positive impact on their lives, that was as much fun as I've had selling a horse.  Linda had a tear in her eye – I think I did – so it was good fun.  And so I think, that’s auctioneering.  I mean a lot of it is business, and you knock horses down, as I said, thirty horses an hour we sell, but sometimes you have those good experiences and they stay with you.

                 Wonderful, yes.  Well thank you very much - - -

                 Okay, no trouble.

                 - - - for all you’ve told me.  It’s been really interesting, thank you.

                 No trouble.  If there’s anything else you think of that you want to come back to me on, just either email or give me a call.

                 Sure, thank you.

                 That’s good.