YOU CAN'T SELL ANYTHING IF YOU CAN'T TELL ANYTHING

WRITTEN BY JESSICA OWERS

Hotel quarantine has been one of the unique experiences of the COVIDaffected world and, with Magic Millions plying its trade through live sales most of the way, there were few better stories to emerge than the fortnight spent on the tenth floor of a Gold Coast hotel by our own Steve Davis.

They say that good stories happen to those who can tell them, so Steve Davis must be a good storyteller. He’s one of the longest-serving of the Magic Millions auctioneers, and you might argue it’s his job to tell stories. In the rostrum overlooking the sale ring, Davis has just minutes to spin the tale of each young racehorse that jogs in. There’s the pedigree and the page, plus the wit that draws the moss out of wallets around the auditorium. It’s not an easy gig, a quick-fire, high-pressure profession, but it’s storytelling in one form or another.

So in the winter of 2020, when COVID-19 had its first grip on local and international borders, Davis was to embark on one of his best stories yet, and it occurred as he made his way from Auckland to the Gold Coast for the 2020 Magic Millions National Sale. Worldwide, travel had come to a thudding halt and, in Australia, a fortnight’s hotel quarantine welcomed anyone flying in.

“I’ve got footage of Auckland airport from the day we left, and there was just no one there,” Davis says. “It was scary stuff, but it was new territory for everyone. We’d had to apply to the Australian consulate over here in New Zealand just to be able to get in.”

Davis has been calling auctions on the Gold Coast since 1997, so his presence at the National Sale was critical. He was one of the four-strong voices on the rostrum, a mainstay when it came to vendor and buyer trust. For weeks, the Magic Millions team had tapped away at getting him to Australia, which included the paperwork behind travel exemptions, quarantine bookings and flights. It was a mess, but it was a mess for everyone.

“Cassandra Simmonds was bringing it all together,” Davis says. “There was a lot of work done in the background just to get people out, and four of us were pulled together to fly over, which was a bit of a rigmarole even getting on the plane. But we had our passes and we had our masks, and we stood a metre apart, all that. It was like something out of a movie.”

Those were the early days of COVID. There was no vaccine, surface transmission was the great unknown, and headlines from the likes of Italy were appalling. Magic Millions had pushed the National Sale back from its original May berth to July, and it was a feat of mankind that the sale went off at all. On arrival into the Gold Coast, Davis and his cohorts, which included bloodstock agents Marcus Corban, Bevan Smith and Paul Willetts, were hustled onto a quarantine bus, unaware of where they were going and who they’d be with. They were given a nicotine patch and a number for Quitline, and sent on their way.

“It was like an episode of Squid Games,” Davis says. “We were given a bus and this bus was our area, and it would dictate where we would end up staying. I was given this thing that said ‘Voco’, and I know all the hotels on Surfers Paradise but I’d never heard of Voco. As it turned out, it was the old Watermark hotel and they’d changed the name of it.”

The Voco hotel is sat along Hamilton Avenue in Surfers Paradise, a busy strip along the tourist trail. Davis had stayed there once when it was the old Watermark hotel, about 12 months previous. He’d had no balcony or fresh air then, and he got no balcony or fresh air in July 2020 when he bunkered in for two weeks of quarantine.

Voco Hotel

“IT WAS VERY REGIMENTAL,” HE SAYS. “THE WHOLE THING FELT LIKE A MASSIVE OVERREACTION TO US, LIKE WE WERE HEADING INTO PRISON OR SOMETHING. WE’D HAD NO KNOWLEDGE IT WAS GOING TO BE LIKE THIS WHEN HE GOT ON THE PLANE IN AUCKLAND, SO WE WERE ALL A BIT SHOCKED, TO BE HONEST.”

Be it Squid Games or a tense episode of Wentworth, the New Zealanders were marched to isolation on the tenth floor of the Voco hotel. Davis was put in room 1020 overlooking the canals, Corban in 1017 with Willetts and Smith down the hall, and the theatrics began.

“On the bus, I’d met this guy called Richard who recognised me from doing racing TV in New Zealand,” Davis says. “He was a Kiwi coming home to the Gold Coast and we’d got talking, so when he was put into the room opposite me, we kind of knew each other already.”

Within a short time of their room doors closing, when no one was supposed to be interacting, Richard had crossed the hall to visit Davis with an armful of cheese, ham, salami and strawberries. He seemed to be the guy that could get stuff, the one you wanted to know. The Morgan Freeman of Shawshank.

“If it was a prison floor, he was the guy running it,” Davis says. “He knew everybody’s name down our end within a day, and of course we weren’t allowed to mingle, but at feed time you’d stand in the doorway and have a chat, and I spent most of my time talking to this guy.”

On day two, Richard got found out with cigarettes in a delivery. On day three, the cigarettes were stashed up the clacker of a rotisserie chicken and successfully delivered. To disguise the smoke, he used a COVID mask over the detectors and, when it didn’t suppress the smell, he sent a request to housekeeping for cleaning supplies.

“He was unbelievable,” Davis says. “After a few days, I asked him what he was going to do with all the bread and salami and cheese, and he said he was making toasted sandwiches. He was using the bloody iron, and I fair-dinkum reckon this bloke had been inside.”

Richard denied that he’d ever been in prison, but he did admit to Davis that he almost served time for DUI charges and, as such, he had worn a bracelet. He knew which people to keep onside and how to do it, and within days he had claims of a medical certificate to grant him access to outside walks on the second floor. A little more than nine days in, he was sharing them with Marcus Corban.

Between them, the ‘in-mates’ had a WhatsApp group that kept them going through 14 terrible days. They hung in the doorways, as much for company as air conditioning when the afternoon sun made their rooms hotter than the hinges of hell’s gates. Bevan Smith took to boiling broccoli in the belly of his electric kettle. Each of them got used to the swabs throughout the week and the confinement and claustrophobia, and they even looked forward to the swish and thud of food delivery bags in the hallway.

“If it wasn’t for Richard, we wouldn’t have got through it to the same extent,” Davis said. “He made it that bit more bearable, and I’ll never forget the last day or so before we were released. Richard began drinking and Marcus was texting me, ‘your mate’s going off’. I could hear Richard hollering out in the hallway. Steve! Steve! Where are ya, Steven!”

DAVIS HAS DONE THREE LOTS OF QUARANTINE SINCE COVID TOOK HOLD. IT BEGAN WITH THAT BAPTISM ON THE GOLD COAST, AND HE DID ANOTHER IN PERTH FOR THE FEBRUARY YEARLING SALE, PLUS A RETURN STINT ON FLYING HOME TO NEW ZEALAND. IT’S BEEN CHARACTER-BUILDING AT BEST, AND SOUL-TOPPLING AT ITS VERY WORST.

Steve Davis in action

In Perth, he shared an Airbnb with fellow auctioneer Grant Burns and Magic Millions’ former bloodstock consultant Chris Farrell, and, after home isolation, the trio celebrated its freedom with beers, prawns and laddish good times.

But that was short-lived when a COVID outbreak of just one threw Western Australia into lockdown, not to mention the bushfires that pushed livestock into the shelter of the Magic Millions complex in Middle Swan. For Davis, the whole thing has felt utopian.

“I always found days nine and 10 the worst,” he says. “By day nine, you’re realising that you’re past the halfway mark, but you’ve still got five days to go. It feels like you’ve been there forever, and so having Richard there that first time made all the difference. He was a character.”

In the time since, the pair of friends caught up on the Gold Coast again, and ‘Richard Quarantine’ hadn’t change an inch. His marriage had since collapsed, but he was the same ocker he had been in the Voco, the ineffable character that kicked the tenth floor through isolation. The whole episode will rank as one of Steve Davis’s greatest tales to tell, and he recounts it with all the kinks and comedy that it deserves. As they say, you can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything, and this auctioneer has no issues there.