Won In A Million

by Jessica Owers

It’s been a long time between drinks for racing author Jessica Owers, her last book released in 2013. But a chat with David Chester, our international sales director, started a chain of events that will lead to the 2025 release of her new book… the complete and untold story of Magic Millions.

Four years ago, on the edge of Covid, I sat with David Chester in his office at Magic Millions. The brief was simple; write a story on Chester, for 40 years a Magic Millions servant, and don’t forget the running and the budgie smugglers. The result was the 2019 magazine feature I Am David, but the real result was a book.

“You should write one on Magic Millions. Honestly,” Chester said, “people wouldn’t believe the stories. They wouldn’t believe how close we were to failing, how it all might have fallen apart if it hadn’t been for Snippets.”

Chester said the stories were disappearing with the old guys. The passing of time, he said, had not been kind to the history of Magic Millions.

“Hardly any of it is recorded. You should write a book on it,” he said, but how many times had I heard that?

Shortly after I Am David was published, Covid-19 dropped its anchors in Australia. Three years passed, and in the spring of 2023 I was frustrated. I was publishing work around the clock, but it had been a decade since I had released a book, and when you’re an author first, journalist second, nothing will do but a manuscript and a promise to publish. I thought back to the afternoon in Chester’s office. The sun had been low, the sliding doors open to the Gold Coast heat. “This used to be a bedroom,” Chester had said as I ran a finger over the 1986 Magic Millions trophy and squinted at the old catalogues on the shelf.

A book about an auction house… how would I write it, and who would read it? Where in god’s good name would I even start?

A month later, I telephoned Chester to tell him that his book would be written. I had a publisher and I had the faith. Chester, sitting in that sunsoaked, one-time bedroom downstairs, was stunned. “Now begins the hard part,” he said.

I had written big books before, but the calibre of the Magic Millions story kept me up at night. There were dozens of people to interview, from the obvious ones like Gerry Harvey to the less obvious ones like John Grieg, head of Deloitte Australia. There were families to track down with crumbs of history, and land records, deeds of mortgage and newspaper archives to shovel. Used as I was to writing about the dead (my previous books were on 1930s Peter Pan and 1940s Shannon), writing about the living was a new experience.

I hit the road in my old white Land Rover, pointed north from Sydney for Toowoomba, Brisbane and the Gold Coast. I was keeping a list of interviewees and it was growing daily. It grew so quickly that I wondered how I would ever find time to start writing. The only way to tackle it, with just a year to finish it, was chronologically, and so I started in 1978, the year the land was bought at Ascot Court.

I became friends with Roger Waugh, son of Magic Millions founder Carl Waugh, and I telephoned David Chester weekly, sometimes daily. I harassed him in Hong Kong, Penang and Singapore, wherever he was, with questions about prices and the car he drove in 1992. On one occasion he was seated around a table for 20 at the Yulong homestead in Shanxi. Back in the Magic Millions office at Bundall, I was a similar pest for Val Hayward, the company’s marketing manager who has been on the payroll since 1988.

Carl Waugh, responsible for the original sales complex in 1980 and co-creator of the Magic Millions concept in 1986.

The stories began to pour; it was like twisting the tap of a flow hive. People found themselves dredging 40-year-old memories and talking about things they had never discussed, or hadn’t discussed for decades, or never wanted to discuss again. Did they remember the weather that day? Could they recall who led that yearling? What were the use-by dates on the pies at Sanctuary Cove?

I had stories from studmasters, the likes of Neville Stewart, Basil Nolan and John Messara, and people like Andy Augustine and Sally Rogers, who had been involved with Snippets. I spoke to Peter Cameron, Tony Fleiter, Paul Weekes, Terry Catip and Anthony Gow-Gates, men who never expected anyone to telephone them, out of the blue, about their jobs 30 years ago. Some of the best material emerged from people out of the racing industry, like the once billionaire property developer Malcolm Edwards, who I met in downtown Sydney on a cold morning in July.

At the time of writing, I have 56 recorded interviews and dozens more in casual telephone calls. The manuscript, still unfinished, has emerged as plump and fanciful as fiction because Chester was right. People won’t believe the stories.

A crowd of 10,000 people packed the complex for the inaugural Magic Million Yearling Sale in 1986.

Magic Millions rose out of swampland in 1978. Not even the canal at the far end of the complex existed. At the time, there was no dedicated selling facility in Queensland, yearling auctions occurring in the bull ring of the Brisbane Exhibition Grounds.

But into town rolled Carl Waugh, a sweary, brilliant old bushie with an idea and a few quid, and with five founding partners he built the complex that was first the Gold Coast Convention & Sales Centre, and today is Magic Millions.

Not much has changed onsite. New barns have gone up and the place beautified, but it is lined with palm trees as it was for the first sale in 1980. The big tickets, aside from horses, are still the golden beaches, Queensland sun and a holiday spot in January. “We never wanted to look like hicks,” Waugh said, and by 1988 the Magic Millions Yearling Sale was second only to Inglis Easter on the Australian auction calendar. Inglis, remember, had a century-old head start.

In the late 1980s, Magic Millions was the fastestgrowing auction house in the country and introduced the world’s first incentive sale-race concept. With its million-dollar kitty (the ‘Magic Million’), only the Golden Slipper and Melbourne Cup were worth more. Criticism of the concept was relentless, and from corners of the industry you would least expect, but the Gold Coast incentive sale, ‘Won in a Million’ so the slogan went, is still blooming 39 years later.

I discovered that Magic Millions, the company, had distinct eras. The first was Waugh, the second under Malcolm Edwards and John Needham, the third when it tumbled into financial chaos, and the fourth when Gerry Harvey emerged with deep pockets and scuffed tennis shoes. Harvey, for a time alongside Singo and the late Rob Ferguson, sailed Magic Millions into what it is today, Katie Page adding the wax and polish. In between, some of the great episodes in modern bloodstock have occurred; the Bart Cummings fire sale, publicly listed farms and stables, Brian Maher and the ‘Bottom of the Harbour’ scandal, and equine influenza and Covid-19.

Gerry Harvey and John Singleton, whose Magic Millions era began in 1997.

Sale graduates have been just as interesting; Snippets, Stylish Century, Tristanagh and Shadea in the early days. The very first Magic Millions catalogue, just 200 yearlings, produced seven stakes winners from Brisbane to Sydney to Melbourne. Later on came Subzero, Mahogany, Pierro, Sunlight and Atlantic Jewel until Winx, knocked down for $230,000, put a pen to the history books.

Today, we write about Magic Millions like it has always been there on the landscape. It is one half of the two leviathan auction houses in Australia, but while today it flourishes, and in the last four decades it has flourished, at times it has limped along like a wounded stag. The receivers and liquidators stood over it in the 1990s, and I have written about moments when the future of the company came down to one man’s decision on the 23rd floor of the Peninsula Hotel, Surfers Paradise.

So, in the words of novelist David Morrell, “why is this book worth a year of my life”? I found myself asking this question last year. There are countless stories to tell in horse racing; I’ve told two of the greatest already, so why Magic Millions?

But quickly I learned that this sun-soaked auction house has lived, breathed, failed and succeeded like any human character, and all in an industry as hard and storied and vivid as racing. The story of Magic Millions is not mine to own, but it has been mine to tell, and David Chester is still right. You won’t believe it. n

*The as-yet untitled story of Magic Millions will be released by Penguin Random House in late 2025.

‘…this sun-soaked auction house has lived, breathed, failed and succeeded like any human character, and all in an industry as hard and storied and vivid as racing.’