As Judith Durham Once Said, The Carnival Is Over

The sales, the carnival - they're over. The Sydney ones at any rate. So much to reflect on, so little time to do it.

Stallion owners have gone berserk with some of the most unjustified, avaricious service fee increases ever foisted on their customers. Part of the rationale must be that they want the lion's share of future yearling markets just for themselves (the Easter Sale is getting more like the defunct Keeneland July as each year goes by). Or the belief that what is going up will never come down. Or that they can devise no other way of coping with the laws of supply and demand. Or that greed is good. Australia is now the dearest place on the planet to breed a horse if you ask me. Even though it might take 10 weeks to ship your mare to New Zealand, just do it! You'll get NZ$1.20 for your buck. Dozens of breeders, many of whom had 'made' the self-same stallions in their now forgotten lean years, were running around Newmarket panicking about how on earth they were going to breed their mares this year. At one stage I thought we might have a Jonestown on our hands.

I thought Grant Pritchard-Hyphen-Gordon spoke a lot of sense in his post-sale comments reported in ANZ Bloodstock News.

Upstart cheap and unfashionably-bred horses won a truckload of feature races throughout the autumn carnival. What a bloody cheek they had. Who gave them permission? Makes you wonder why people are so keen to pay so much for yearlings, broodmares and service fees.

The Melbourne Cup is now $5.5 million. What a joke. The race no owner of a colt ever wants to win. The race no commercial breeder in Australia ever wants to breed the winner of, nor, I might add, is ever likely to again. Is, say, $4 million not enough? It's a bit like being in the men's loo ... "mine is as big as yours".

Sebring wins the Slipper for 10 Aussie battlers (several of whom just happen to be multi-millionaires anyway). How do you get 10 people to agree to sell The Next Big Thing, for how much and when? (by the way, I have not been asked nor volunteered to facilitate). As each day slips by he probably assumes a different value. It's a mystery how this cheapie eluded Gai's surgeon's knife. When syndicator Denise Martin succumbed to a virus due to the pressure of it all in the days immediately after Sebring's triumph, I diagnosed her malady as a bad case of Sebring Non-Castration Syndrome. Denise well and truly earned and deserved her moment of glory and her handling of the occasion with the media was a model for all her imitators.

Patinack Farm continued on its merry way through the yearling and broodmare sales. Anthony Cummings had a checklist in his catalogue just like you and I take to the supermarket, only longer. Why doesn't Patinack want its name on the sales results sheets any more, preferring to shelter behind its agents' and surrogates'? It wasn't like that earlier in the year. Its buying is an open secret to any informed observer but perhaps Patinack feels it doesn't want to appear omnipresent and frighten the natives too much when it's just about to formally announce its clutch of stallions and their fees.

(Omnipresent reminds me of uberstallion, the term I coined in an earlier post. A lot of people commented to me on that. Seems they like it. It may be my one lasting legacy to the industry.)

We are yet to hear if the FIRB has approved the Darley buy-out of Woodlands. The decision is due 14 May. Are they having the jitters? Has there been some fierce behind-the-scenes opposition and a stack of anti-submissions which closed on 5 May? Surely not. Anyone who saw the memorable Bob Ingham interview on TVN would think it's a done deal. The two people assigned as project staff by the ACCC on Review 31710 as it's known, are a Ms Bull - appropriate given the number of stallions Darley will have under control - and a Ms Wood !

Don't be surprised if I climb on a few more hobby horses in the next couple of weeks. I'll probably reminisce over many irrelevant and now dated tidbits from the carnival. You guys haven't sent in any comments during my hiatus so I'll write whatever takes my fancy, it's therapy. I should have time - the upcoming Karaka and Melbourne catalogues are woeful, breeders bailing out in all directions, so they're not going to be distractions for me.

Meantime, I have a couple of months' bills to sort out. They're about to shut down my phone, gas and electric and evict me from my digs. I've even got some accounts of my own to send out, mercifully, and some food to buy in, some domestics to do and a car to clean - I've been on the road since January and don't have a maidservant - so the blog will have to wait.