Randwick’s racing DNA is not only the course — it is also the yards and sale rings that once made Young Street smell of straw and money. The Newmarket Precinct grew from the Newmarket Hotel of 1861 (John Dillon’s house tradition) into a thoroughbred complex when trainer Michael Fennelly and grazier–AJC figure James White took the place in hand from the late 1870s. The great timber Big Stable behind the hotel went up about 1880 — clerestory light, galleries over the boxes, a building type rare enough to land on the State Heritage Register.
William Inglis & Son began selling here in 1906, bought the site in 1917, and for a century made Newmarket the auction capital of Australian bloodstock. In between, the Big Stable did stranger duty — WWII detention barracks, then a laminex factory — before a mid-1980s restoration put horses back under the iron roof (and put the building on screen in Phar Lap). Thomas Payten, Jim Pike, W.J. Smith and others leased or worked the yards; the Sale Ring was the theatre.
Inglis has since shifted its flagship sales toward Warwick Farm, and the Randwick acres have been reimagined as housing with the heritage fabric retained as the precinct’s memory. Stand in Young Street and you are still in Struggle Town’s racing suburb — only the yearlings have moved west.