The clearance rate was 98% (1293 out of 1321 of lots on offer sold), after some minor withdrawals, and only one heavy- weight lot not appearing as such in the published sales result.
With its status as a one-owner sale of incredibly eclectic proportions, the auction attracted the most intense concentration of bidding activity seen at an art and antique auction in Australia in recent times, if not, given new technology, in all history.
The sale was also well served by being driven principally by one of the three d's that auctioneers and the public like to drive a sale - divorce – or at least a bitter property separation - and remotely by others.. Death was also in the background conspiring to create a saleroom epic. There was also a link to the debt-laden Firepower company.
A second such sale is from the Owston collection, accumulated by early Coles developer Warren Anderson, is being scheduled for October.
While the enthusiasm expressed itself mainly in the material more accessible to the hoi polloi (lots offered at below $100,000) and 80 per cent of the lots consequently going locally, the sale embraced some big ticket highlights.
A set of 12 George III mahogany collector's cabinets (lot 591) which the British naturalist and one time Australian visitor Sir Joseph Banks used to store his natural history specimens went to an agent for TV tycoon Kerry Stokes, another, more visibly prosperous survivor from the 1980s, for $250,000 against a commissioned bid held by the auctioneer.
Stokes's bidding number 605, held mostly by a woman who declined to give her name, and then also at times held by Melbourne book dealer Andrew Isles, was called repeatedly throughout. Isles presumably was also bidding for other clients under this number, and secured a Japanese Buddhist altar (lot 605) for $33,600 against an estimate of $6000 - $10,000. Two big lots of Biedermeierfurniture also went later to the same paddle. But the antique wooden folio holders presumably were also for this devoted antiquarian book collector.
A British portrait of Colonel Thomas Thornton by Philip Reinagle and Sawrey Gilpin made $348,000 (Lot 1233 ) to the telephone against bidding from Tasmanian antique dealer John Hawkins. This was a natural for London dealer Richard Green although this dealer's interest could not be confirmed and is struggling with a weak pound. Clutching a gun, the subject was also an 18th century self-styled prince and therefore a type albeit from an earlier era well loved by Australians.
An oil painting The Sisters by Norman Lindsay (543) went to a telephone bidder curiously rumoured to have been a Continental buyer for $288,000. The normally hard-to-beat wealthy Sydney (health care) Moran family was left well behind in the bidding on this lot, as it was on several other major lots.
Bidder 177 Sydney dealer Martyn Cook, sitting between his long-term client David Roche and Rupert Murdoch's daughter Prudence paid $288,000 for a fine Irish Regency mahogany dining table. Roche should have had plenty of extra money to spend after his shop housing Cook's gallery was sold for $4.6 million a few days earlier.
As Bidder 144 (and occasionally 370), John Hawkins paid $192,000 for a difficult-to-house (3.5 metre high) George IV Gothic bookcase (lot 639) which he said he had sold to Anderson for $310,000.
A telephone bidder gave $122,400 for the J. A Turner painting Australian Pioneers (estimate $70,000 to $100,000) against bidding by Melbourne antiques dealer Phil Capocchi while an English silver equestrian group of an Indian spearing a buffalo sold for $144,000 to an unknown buyer after spirited bidding on it between Capocchi and Hawkins.
A run of rhinoceros trophy heads sold for up to $108,000 each mainly to Chinese buyers including Vernon Yip who in the late 1990s was the principal tenant of the Sydney Antique Centre but now is based in Shanghai and Paris. Yip said he was buying for a Continental with a private museum.
A total of 1400 bidders registered and the room appeared to house at least half this number for much of the time. Five or six bidders often were visible on the same lot and these were supported by a bevy of bidders on the phones and a new force, the Internet. Out of cyberspace came a tidal wave of last minute bids (or so the auctioneers repeatedly told room bidders).
Buyers in the room have to believe it, of course. They cannot see this bidding. However, there were many rare, but safely buy-able unseen from catalogue descriptions, available in the sale and saleroom notices were more accessible on the internet than in the room itself.
A late notice that the Banks cabinets were not Australian cedar but mahogany, for instance, was hard to find in the rooms and in and out of cyberspace needed elaboration..
A relay team of auctioneers, mostly sent out from Britain, but also including Adelaide's Ian Bruce who is the chairman of Bonhams Australia kept the first day's sale proceeding at a cracking pace despite the difficulty of fielding so many bids often from newcomers to the market. Brooks and Malcolm Barber despatched the second day's with only rare bruising moments. One of the rhino heads had to be re-offered and one of lively Sydney dealer Paul Attard's bids was treated awkwardly in the hum drum.
Dealers, and others acting as bidding agents hid behind statues and mirrors or suddenly zigzagged across the floor to throw less discreet and now more urgent bids into the air, bumping into other frenzied bidders and puzzled observers in the process. This further heightened the frenetic excitement of the occasion which left many auction goers visibly drained.
But the staying paid off in the occasional snare by the ever vigilant trade quite happy to discuss them afterwards.
The sale provided a brilliantly timed opportunity for Bonhams to enter the Australian auction industry as part of its global strategy and the opportunity was seized and pursued with relish. The collection was consigned by Adelaide receivers KordaMentha on behalf of the creditors of the Owston Nominees Number 2 the Warren Anderson Family Trust company pursuant to the dispute between Anderson and his wife Cheryl. The apparent inability to use the Anderson name for legal reasons must have been a drag on marketing and Bonhams was stuck with a nominee company's name to embrace the collection. However, the sale could still be marketed as a one-owner affair and Bonhams drenched the general, financial and trade press here and overseas with coloured advertising.
The venue proved perfect, barring the lack of provision of food and helped centre overseas buyers attention.
The catalogue cover showed a shot of the venue and the Opera House. Sotheby's had held auctions there in the 1980s. Even earlier (in 1974) it had sold the William Dobell estate in the concert hall of the Sydney Opera House a few hundred meters away and the Bennelong Restaurant there, the venue for a speech-free party two nights before the auction.
Robert Brooks, the owner of the auction house, was clearly determined that the sale would go with a bang, after his plans to expand in Australia through Bonhams and Goodman had been frustrated. The major shareholder in B and G (Tim Goodman) and associates in which Bonhams had, and is still locked into a 9 per cent interest acquired the Sotheby's franchise in Australia.
As Sotheby's International and Bonhams are in fierce competition world-wide, this did not particularly please Brooks (to put it mildly) and he then outbid Goodman to snare the collection, which Goodman had expected to be his own. A deal involving no vendors fee and rebate of half the 20 per cent buyers premium is said to have been negotiated.
Snaring the sale was a feat of blokey daring-do that also pervaded the collection, full of its treasures fit predominantly for men's dens.
Along with Anderson's divorce and some interesting debts in the trust accounts such as $2 million to the newsy Firepower featured in the wind up, death was also in the background in the biggest concentration of rhino horns and antlers and other animal parts together with stuffed animals seen in the Australian saleroom in recent memory.
The morbid, which brings big large crowds to shows devoted to entombed warriors or child pharaohs and has entranced top artists and decorators in the new millennium's continued thrust into “disturbed minimalism”, was available en bulk to be bought not just gawked at. A rhino-charge of collectors otherwise poorly served by taxidermy attacked it with the passion of the hunters depicted in some of the artworks.
The interest was also stoked by the extraordinary transformation of the offering to a presentable form when removed from its warehouse and set up by staff in the venue. Marketing was also possibly helped by the delayed announcement that a second sale would be held from the Owston collection in October.
To many who viewed this offering, it was all too much, ringing of the horror of the Bates Motel in the movie Psycho and Pretty Polly antics on the shoulders of John Cleese in Monty Python, both of which this year are enjoying their 50th anniversaries. Inevitably many local taxidermy enthusiasts and interior decorators were out-bid by buyers on the phones even though these needed licences to ship their buys, not easily transported, out of the country and some were banned for export.
In what was the most blokey offering ever to go under the hammer locally outside a classic car sale, the offering also brought out those viewers who never missed the TV program Top Gear, had cash to spend, were not afraid of using strong words and put their feet up on other people's desks when they visited them.
The offering was top gear of its kind but, that said, the prices did not always reach the excesses of the art and antique markets of the 1970s and 1980s when the accumulator of the 1400 lot offerings began his sweeps-through. Anderson had not been afraid to agree to top prices when he wanted something that fitted the bill.
The Pioneers an oil painting showing an Australian covered wagon heading into the sunset, was one such purchase. Australian art market legend has it that the sale of this picture for $350,000, a record then for any Australian picture, bankrolled Denis Savill's art business in 1984.
But it apparently was only one of many such pictures sold into the corporate culture of the times by this Sydney dealer who insisted from a yacht in the Mediterranean this week that he only made 10 per cent on the brokerage deal. He had been asked for a large work by Impressionist Tom Roberts but had been told a large Australian painting might do in its absence. Savill flew to Adelaide and drove out to the Bugle Ranges near Adelaide to retrieve The Pioneers by outback narrative painter J A Turner from South Australian dealer Hugh Bonython's underground shelter gallery. Bonython claimed this was nuclear bomb-proof and therefore the only place to store major traditional school painting such as Norman Lindsay oil and watercolours and Turners.
The Owston sale began to take off early on when a batch of watercolours by Neville Cayley were offered individually to make prices of up to $18,000 for a watercolour estimated to make between $2000 to $3000. Paddle 605 began to stir around lots 200-220 when some exceptionally character laden watercolours of Aborigines by colonial artist Richard Browne were offered with the finest of these going to this bidder for $52,500.
Hawkins, a major seller to Anderson, seriously began his $800,000 worth of purchases at lot 351 with a 20th century part dinner service of Royal Copenhagen Flora Danica for $66,000, three times the estimate but justified by the current retail price, he felt, of new porcelain in this pattern.
William Longstaff's large oil painting The Rear Guard, The Spirit of Anzac which particularly excited the auctioneer and featured in the presale publicity made nearly double its top estimate to go for $72,000 to a telephone bidder. This was despite being seemingly a big challenge to even the most skilled restorer, and possibly therefore of only interest to heavily focussed Gallipoli collector like the NZ film director Peter Jackson.
Given the less likely locally excitable nature of its subject matter, a second Longstaff, Wilkins at the Arctic surprised just as much by making $48,000, more than double its top estimate, to 605.
Back in the "war zone" Sydney antique dealer Veronica Bunda wanted the model cannon with projectiles and moving canons but was blown away long before it had reached $45,600
Sydney businessman John Schaeffer, who was later to let the one Pre Raphaelite work in the sale go by because of awkwardly painted hands splashed out with a successful $13,200 bid on Alfred Cook's masterful watercolour portrait of Albert Namatjira and was not to triumph again until towards the end of the sale when he bought a stuffed (wise?) old owl.
The less blokey stuff occasionally went cheaply, especially as the first day crowd began to tire, as when lot 662, a George III giltwood mirror went for $48,000 to NSW decorator Barry Byrne who had helped furnish Anderson's property of Fern Hill near Mulgoa. The estimate? $100,000 to $150,000.
English paintings and clocks were also a little lightly bid upon despite the presence of great names in the sale, three by Vullamy alone. Possible tragic losses to Australia include The Barbers Shop (Lot 1037 ) a cased Edwardian display showing stuffed cats being shaved by macauqes which went to a telephone bidder for $24,000 against estimates of $10,000 to $15,000.
After the record price paid for a huia bird feather in Auckland recently the display of a pair of extinct huia birds at $36,000 (Lot 978) against estimates of $8000 to $12,000 may have been cheap.
As in much of the sale, professional bidders in the room, such as Byron Bay Aboriginal art consultant Tim Klingender bidding for himself, walked away with one in five of their five proposed purchases if they were lucky.
While four fifths of the sale may have gone to Australian buyers, this, of course, included lots bought by local agents for overseas dealers buyers or to re-offer overseas. Hawkins, for example, sold a half share in his bookcase immediately sold to an overseas dealer and together they will offer it for sale overseas.
The major lot which appears to have failed to sell was an 18th century French natural history book with an estimate of $150,000 to $160,000 which the trade had remarked upon well before the sale as a little rich.
At least two collections accumulated by Anderson were offered at auction overseas in the early 1990s. A gun collection included one lot which fetched $US1 million. A copy of Audubon's Birds of America was sold in the 1990s some of the lots in the latest sale were returned to re-appear in the latest offering.