The school of magic

HENRY PLUMPTRE

In the early 1990s, when Henry Plumptre came aboard Magic Millions in the department of yearling selection, they were tough ‘ol times.

“The whole world, economically, had just fallen off a cliff,” he says. “The end of the 1980s was a very messy affair for every sector of western economies, and the horse industry fell particularly hard because we were in a superfluous industry. We didn’t save lives or make food, and I think equine values might have dropped by more than 60 percent.”

For Plumptre, they were the best of times in the worst of times. From about 1991 until 1994, he worked as a yearling consultant for Magic Millions as the company rebooted from financial chaos.

“Survival,” he says. “All the sales companies had been hit terribly hard and they had huge amounts of debt, but they were incredible years. I can think back to some of the people I worked with, like Carl Waugh and Jan Peacock. David Chester I’ve known since I first came to Australia, and Val Hayward is still there. They were great times. I absolutely loved it.”

Plumptre spent three years at Magic Millions. During that time, he watched the catalogues blossom as horses like Mahogany sailed through them. Plumptre was there, was even instrumental, when the company expanded into Asia, sponsoring races in Singapore.

After his tenure, the Englishman moved on to some of the most prolific responsibilities in the industry. For 16 years, until mid-2017, Plumptre was the managing director of Godolphin Australia, after which he became the CEO of the rebranded Cambridge Stud, a position he holds to this day.

“Working with a man like Carl Waugh at Magic Millions, it gave me a very good perspective on survival,” he says. “Magic Millions went through some enormous highs and some enormous lows, and it taught me the values of being tough and seeing a way through a difficult time. They were very educational years for me. Very educational.”

Plumptre is highly educated. He speaks patiently, sees things objectively, and his wealth of living is written all over his memories. He remembers everything.

“Did those years at Magic Millions teach me to deal with people? Yes they did,” he says. “I met a lot of people, particularly in that early Singapore environment, and I had to make it work. We had to get those people to a sale and we had to prove we could run a race up there. Anyone that knows me will tell you I’m a good talker. I could talk the legs off a chair, but the rules of engagement when it comes to horses are different. I learned to listen to people in those formative years, and it really paid off in my later years.”

When Plumptre headed to Magic Millions in 1991, he’d worked at Arrowfield and Widden, and he had a bloodstock agency doing several things at once. He was even an expert witness on tax fraud. Among Plumptre’s best alliances was the one emerging with Lloyd Williams, the pair seeing an opportunity to buy well in a downwards market, and it was how Mahogany came into their lives in 1992.

After 16 years at Godolphin since, and another six at Cambridge Stud, Plumptre has chased bigger rainbows. But Magic Millions, even in those troubled, early years, was unforgettable.

“When the first million-dollar race was announced, I was working at a stud in Newmarket,” he says. “I remember reading all about it. Everyone wanted to know what these mad Australians had come up with. At Magic Millions, I was surrounded by people with great peripheral thinking powers, people that could actually do things and achieve things. Being around them probably prepared me for a bigger role in my life, definitely.”

VIN COX

Late in 2011, and not long after Gerry Harvey and Katie Page bought Magic Millions outright, the boy-faced Vin Cox became the company’s managing director, succeeding Dr Stephen Silk who, in turn, had succeeded David Chester.

Cox had worked as a bloodstock agent for Inglis for 16 years, and independently for a further six before his appointment to Magic Millions. He was sharply minded and thorough, a horseman with a good eye, and there was something about his pleasant ways and good manners. He seemed always the gentleman.

“I was approached by someone to go and see Gerry Harvey, which I did,” Cox says. “At the time I was running my own bloodstock agency, and I sat down with Gerry and had a chat for a couple of hours. He asked me to come back and see Katie, which I did about a week later, and a number of weeks went by before they rang me back to offer me the job. That was how it all came about, and it really was the beginning of something.”

At the time, Cox and his wife Nicole lived in Sydney. They had three young boys and they upped sticks for the city on the sand with its famous thoroughbred auction house.

“I was managing director of Magic Millions from March 2011 to January 2018,” Cox says. “I’d not had a role of that seniority before, and certainly not in terms of leading an industry company. I was reasonably well-known as a bloodstock agent, but I’d never led an organisation of that magnitude.”

In 2011, when Cox was appointed, Magic Millions was in its new Harvey era. The company was young and driven, as was its team.

“When we charged over the trenches, we were all together,” Cox says, recalling his best memory as a leader of a lively, loyal Magic Millions staff. “When I left seven years later, everyone went up a rung, and I thought that was a great thing, that they weren’t skirting far and wide for replacements.”

In 2018, after departing Magic Millions, Cox became the managing director of Godolphin Australia. Very recently, he took the position of general manager at Yulong, and these are top-shelf, high-achieving appointments that occurred seamlessly after Cox’s years on the Gold Coast.

“Magic Millions gave me quite a significant profile, through stakeholders and through sponsors,” he says. “Also through Katie’s and Gerry’s connections, and through big business and government, which I’d never been exposed to in any of my roles previously. It was quite enlightening, so looking back on it, you could say Magic Millions catapulted me to another level.”

Cox was at the helm when the company’s January raceday was first announced and then first occurred in 2016. It was Queensland’s first $10 million race meeting and a Cox-plied partnership between the auction house and Racing Queensland. He described it as a gamechanger, and he was right. In 2023, the sevenyear partnership was renewed to the tune of $14.75 million by 2025.

And still, to this day, Cox lives on the Gold Coast. He didn’t desert it for Sydney, Melbourne or the Hunter Valley. The Gold Coast can do that to people; its warm streets and endless sunshine take hold, until it seems absurd to live anywhere else.

“We moved up there for the Magic Millions gig all those years ago, and we love it now,” Cox says. “You won’t prise us out with a crowbar.”

TONY ‘TUBBA’ WILLIAMS

When Tony ‘Tubba’ Williams started at Magic Millions in 2003, he’d already been around the traps. A jockey, breeder, an agent at Dalgety Bloodstock... Williams had even run his own sale company for nine years in Victoria.

I’d worked in the thoroughbred industry for 28 years by the time I started at Magic Millions,” he says, which would have made him one of the most qualified of New South Wales managers.

“But make no mistake,” he says, “the role I held at Magic Millions put me to another level within the industry. Even though I’d had a lot of experience and I’d done quite a lot, and I would say I was pretty wellknown, going to Magic Millions really established me in this business, especially in respect to my contacts.”

From 2003 until 2012, Williams was New South Wales manager for Magic Millions. To the role, he brought a new benchmark to yearling inspections and private sales, preferring to first inspect horses at foot, and then reinspect them again as yearlings. It gave him a broader picture of individual progress or decline, and today that practice is universal.

Williams initially lived on the Gold Coast early in his role, but later relocated to the Hunter Valley where the majority of his responsibilities were. The roads were long and the journeys largely solo, but for Williams, the memories are good.

“It was fantastic to be involved for that long,” he says. “Those were the years when David Chester was managing director, and then Vin Cox towards the end, and the working environment was fantastic. Everyone did their job and they did it well, and I was given a lot of freedom. Magic Millions’ attitude to credit and looking after its clients was critical to the development of the company, and it has continued to evolve in that direction to this day.”

Williams is the stallion director at Newgate Farm now, bringing 48 years to one of the largest operators in the game. He’s still one of the good guys, that sort of relatable, high-achieving fellow that everyone likes. After wrapping up at Magic Millions, he was the managing director of Goffs UK before coming home to Newgate, opportunities he credits to his time on the Gold Coast.

“If it wasn’t for Magic Millions, I’m certainly not head-hunted by Newgate Farm,” he says. “And I certainly would not have got that position at Goffs if it weren’t for my tenure at Magic Millions and what I’d been able to achieve there. Magic Millions was a wonderful entrée internationally for me, make no mistake about that.”

Through much of 2023, Williams shed nearly 40 kilograms to weigh-in at the Bong Bong picnic meeting in November. It was a riding renaissance, and he rode trackwork and barrier trials to earn the ticks and checks for his riding licence. Pushing 63, he was a media hit all year.

It wasn’t exactly the second coming of Tubba Williams... more like the eighth or ninth for a man that continues to reinvent his wheel. But he never forgets where he came from, and one of those places is Magic Millions.

PAUL WEEKES

Paul Weekes can be found these days at the Shoalhaven City Turf Club, a long way from the clatter and clamour of the Magic Millions sale ring. But when he casts his mind back to his days as the company’s chief financial officer (CFO), he is wistful.

In a working sense, they were the best times of my life,” he says. “I loved it. I loved the horse industry and I loved the people I met through it. I was reluctant to leave, and I wouldn’t say I’ve regretted it ever since because I’m too old now to be doing what I was doing then, but it was that sort of job where the work seemed to blend into the social life. All my friends were either colleagues or people in the industry.”

Weekes was the financial controller at Magic Millions for about 12 years, variously from 1998 until 2010. Before he was ever associated with the company, he was a Sydney accountant working on its receivership, which was a colourful chapter in the earliest days of the auction house.

Weekes relocated to the Gold Coast with a plan to be there for a couple of years. Over 10 years later he was still there, seeing through the eras of Gerry Harvey, John Singleton and Rob Ferguson buying in, Don Hancock as managing director and David Chester ever present.

“I had a dual role of finance, and then pretty much everything else that David didn’t want to deal with,” Weekes says.

Weekes has a lively mind. He is animated, and those years at Magic Millions under Harvey, ‘Singo’ and Ferguson seemed to suit him. The energy of the workplace was brilliant and he thrived in it.

“There was never a dull moment,” he says.

After Magic Millions, Weekes moved on to Racing NSW, where he was an executive officer in the country division. He held that position for six years before a brief stint in a similar role at Aquis Farm, and now he is the general manager of the Shoalhaven City Turf Club.

It’s a quieter life than the Gold Coast, with richly varied days of racing to hopping on a mower like Forrest Gump.

“I couldn’t get the horse industry out of my blood when I left Magic Millions,” Weekes says. “I went back to Sydney and worked for Racing NSW, and I’ve since found myself here at Nowra for the last four years. I’m trying out every aspect of the industry apart from jockey, by the looks of things.”

Among the things he credits to his years at Magic Millions, his people skills rank first.

“I developed a lot as a person because of it,” he says.

“I got a lot more confidence dealing with people at all levels. One minute you were talking with billionaires and the next you were chatting with the guy unloading horses off a truck. I think I was pretty good at thinking on my feet, but it was a time in my life when I had to make a lot of decisions quickly. There were a lot of things happening all at once all the time.”

Weekes is pushing 60. If he misses the buzz of those years at Magic Millions, he also admits he couldn’t keep pace with “the long hours at sale time and the sleepless nights. I don’t think my mind or my body could keep up any more.”

At Nowra, he is a Magic Millions graduate with some of the best credentials going for a country race club, helped along somewhat by the boisterous, pioneering years he spent crunching numbers on the Gold Coast.