In the first of a new series, Jessica Owers chats to the recently retired Val Hayward about her 37 years with Magic Millions, her love of travel and the ever-changing nature of her own life and the thoroughbred industry which became her professional home.
Val Hayward was a twenty-something knockout in the late 1980s when Russ Hinze, the then Queensland racing minister, pinched her bum on the stairs of the Magic Millions office.
“They were certainly different times,” she tells The Straight, recently retired from 37 years with the auction house. She can’t believe it has been that long.
“I went into Magic Millions in 1988 on a three-week assignment as a temp, and I just never left. I thought I was in over my head because I wasn’t horsey. I’m still not horsey.”
Hayward was, until July 18, the perfectly blonde, slightly shy marketing manager of Magic Millions. She sat at a desk overlooking the Ascot Court cul-de-sac, except during sale times when she joined the concierge crew in the auditorium.
She was part of the Magic Millions furniture, a face so familiar for so long to breeders, buyers and vendors that they often overlooked she was there at all.
“I wouldn’t describe myself as conversational,” Hayward says. “I’m an introvert, I’m shy. Because I wasn’t horsey I probably always felt I was in over my head, that I couldn’t keep a conversation. I think I always felt like an imposter.”
Hayward’s humility is unfounded. Along with David Chester, she was the longest-serving of Magic Millions’ employees (the longest if going by the payroll) and her contribution to the auction house’s brand immeasurable.
Val Hayward has been an institution at Magic Millions. (Photos: Supplied)
It was Hayward’s careful eye that selected photographs for articles, advertising and signage, and her editorial aptitude that managed the carnival magazine, every year, from paper to press. She had a designer’s eye for colour and content, and her fingerprints were all over the colour palettes of the famous Magic Millions caps.
“The dark green one was my favourite, the one with the MM,” she says. “We would bring in about 13,000 caps every year in 25 different colour combinations.”
Hayward commenced at Ascot Court in late 1988 when John Needham was in charge. After that, she experienced an 18-month stint under the auction house’s original founder, Carl Waugh, before the Gerry Harvey era emerged in 1997.
The various managing directors over that time have included Needham, Waugh, New Zealander Don Hancock, David Chester, Dr Stephen Silk, Vin Cox and Barry Bowditch. From austere times to party central, she saw it all.
“I look back now at my time with Magic Millions and think it was very segmented,” Hayward says. “Under Carl it felt like a real country outfit, and then Don was much more corporate, more marketing-focused. I got to do brochures and learn about graphic design and colours and photography. I learned I was pretty good at it, too.”
Often, it’s the work you don’t see in the background that is among the most important, and often, it’s the quiet ones who are the most unsung. Though Hayward retired in the marketing department, she had also done secretarial and catalogue work over the years before there was internet, when everything had to be written down.
They are, these days, rare memories.
“I never dreamt in a million years I would have had a job where I’d meet so many varied and amazing people. Where else would you?” she asks, before rattling off a list that includes Bart Cummings and Denise Martin, Kenny McPeek, the Yoshida family, Mike Willessee, Evonne Goolagong, Zara Tindall, Bob Hawke and John Singleton. She also recalls the generational horse farmers she has admired from afar, like the Nolans of Raheen and Krugers of Lyndhurst Stud.
“I got to do some incredible things at Magic Millions,” she says. “I got to travel; I went to Japan 23 times. I got to learn amazing skills and meet incredible people, but I was ready to retire. You get to the point when you’ve been in the same place for so long that the managing directors are young enough to be your children.”
Behind her Magic Millions facade, Hayward has had a life that few people know about.
Born in New Zealand as Phillippa, she was adopted when just 18 months old and grew up as Valerie, an only child on a modest, suburban half-acre block north of Wellington. When just 14, her adopted father was killed on Christmas Day in a car accident.
Fast forward to the Gold Coast in 1994 and Hayward discovered that her birth mother, too, had been killed in a car crash. She also learned she had five half-siblings, and it took her until just a couple of years ago to discover the identity of her biological father.
Since then, she has learned childhood details that would rattle anyone. When just a baby, her mother fled and left her in the arms of her father, who had no rights to her because he had not married her mother. Hayward was taken from him and put into foster care in 1961 and, until two years ago, that was the last her father saw of her.
The details are the stuff of novels, but Hayward doesn’t advertise her story. Neither does she advertise her three-month combi-van trip through North America, or her months-long overland trip from London to New Zealand in 1983 via Greece, Turkey, Syria and the shores of the Red Sea in Jordan.
“We hit the Iranian border where we were greeted by a mural of the Statue of Liberty with a dead body draped over it, dripping blood,” she says. “We had an armed guard to accompany us on our journey to Pakistan, but when we tried to get to the Khyber Pass in Afghanistan, we were chased away by rebels with machine guns.
“We spent a month in the north of India, then up into Kashmir and finally Nepal, then flew over Burma into Thailand, by rail into Singapore via Koh Samui and Kuala Lumpur, then to New Caledonia, Australia, and finally home.”
Val Hayward has travelled extensively from India when she was 23 (left), with armed guards through Iran (middle), and in later times, an annual trips to Europe (right). (Photo: Supplied)
It’s hard to imagine all of this adventure crowded into the unassuming now mother of two grown children, but travel is the love of Hayward’s life. It was the part of her job she savoured most.
In her 23 visits to Japan, many were spent attending the Select Sale at Northern Farm in Hokkaido, which she describes as an incredible experience “unlike anything in the western world”. She went to the training centres at Ritto, near Kyoto, and Miho outside of Tokyo, along with Shadai Stallion Station. She saw Deep Impact and mingled in the mounting yard at the Japan Cup.
“I fell in love with Japan. The people must be the most polite and orderly on earth. But I think London will always be my favourite destination, Italy the most beautiful, and I love Edinburgh. Over the last ten years or so, I’ve gone to Europe if not every year, then every other year," she said.
Val Hayward's love of Japan has seen her develop some friendships with the Yoshida family, including Katsumi (centre) and Mitsu Nakauchida (right). (Photos: Supplied)
In a modern Australia where the average person spends 3.5 years in a job, Hayward’s 37 years at Magic Millions is exceptional. When she departed, a near seven-minute tribute video produced in-house revealed that loyalty was what her colleagues most valued in her.
“Val was there through all the trials and tribulations of Magic Millions,” David Chester, Magic Millions’s international sales director, tells The Straight. “She and I travelled all through Asia together, and when I got the job as managing director, I told Gerry (Harvey) I couldn’t do it without Val.
“She was so thorough in everything she did. She was a perfectionist, and you only need to look at the magazine. She handled that whole publication and she wasn’t a publishing professional. I think, if I’m honest, we’re only now starting to feel her loss in the company.”
Chester chuckles at some of the private memories he shares with Val, like her former chain-smoking days through the airports of Asia when she insisted he join her in the smoking rooms. The pair was like a set of bookends at Magic Millions; they knew the good times, the bad times and every other time inside out.
“Val was a quiet achiever,” Chester says. “She wasn’t an outgoing person, but the amount of acknowledgements she got, when word got out about her retiring, amazed me. So many people said lovely things about her.”
Hayward sailed quietly into retirement last month, as was her style, a 37-year tenure spent well. The staff gathered in the Magic Millions sale ring to cheer her off, and then she was gone. It was the end of an era at Ascot Court.
