“[The setting] helps the trainers to get owners and they all have a few grogs. They think, ‘I’m not going to buy a horse’. By the end of the day they’ve bought three.

“But others want to keep it very low-key. Some want to hide. They think, ‘If I’m bidding on it and am a really good judge, it must be a good horse and the opposition will keep bidding’. It’s great theatre.”

And it’s rich theatre, too, with the Magic Millions on track to trade $250 million worth of yearlings by the end of the week, highlighted by a $2.6m filly on day two, the most ever paid for a horse on the holiday strip. Long before The Everest became an Australian racing phenomenon, the Magic Millions was leading the way in outside-the-box thinking.

On a parcel of land adjacent to the Gold Coast racetrack, potential buyers walk around with their bibles: the sales catalogue. It’s more than 1000 pages long and as thick as an old-fashioned Yellow Pages. Each book has a name territorially scribbled on the side, lest someone accidentally picks it up and sees the private, handwritten notes alongside a buyer’s favoured horses. Each horse has a lot number and a page with a detailed pedigree. This is a complex business and each buyer has a slightly different way of reading the same set of data.

“We basically get a minute-and-a-half to two minutes to do a huge job on each yearling, which the breeders have been working on for almost two-and-a-half years, from the mating to the foaling down and then finally bringing it to the sale,” Magic Millions managing director Barry Bowditch says.

Pressure?

“Absolutely there is,” Bowditch replies.

Inside the sales complex, horses spin around in circles while parading as members of the audience suck back Coronas with lime and line up to pile prawns on their buffet plates. The atmosphere is relaxed, but the pace of buying and selling is relentless. Grown men wearing thongs spend more money on horses than first home-buyers would spend on a house in Sydney. There is the constant buzz of auctioneer noise and chatter, at least until a high-priced yearling enters when, suddenly, the room goes quiet, the audience engrossed.

“The first sale we were in was a circus tent,” Chester says. “They hadn’t built this shed.

“We were the people who invented the ringside dining, which is now costing us a lot of money and [Magic Millions owner] Gerry [Harvey] is getting pissed off it’s costing us too much money! Now other companies are copying what we do.”

Another key component of the Magic Millions is lucrative Saturday race day that follows. Only horses sold at a Magic Millions sales can enter.

Henry Field, from the Newgate Farm stud, will have three runners in the $2 million two-year-old race on Saturday. He is one of the biggest power players in the complex and he is selling, as well as buying, trying to find the next colt that will turn into a licence-to-print-money stallion.

Ego?

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“For us, buying and selling horses, we do it every day, every week, every month, every year,” he says. “You can’t afford to have ego. You’ve got to keep batting away and stay level, trying to delineate between the big, shiny colts, and the horses that are actually runners.

“In this business it’s easy for people to get carried away, but ego and hubris is the kiss of death.”

Which is why sometimes it pays not to be seen - no matter how obscure the hiding place might be.

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