AUCTIONEERS try to overpower the bleats of sheep and the bellows of cattle railed to the weekly sale, as agents shake hands, confirming a deal, men draft pens, and the rain stings the faces of all.
Beside the auctioneer stands a young Jim Matthews, hurriedly recording the respective vendors and buyers for each pen at the weekly Newmarket saleyard.
Jim Matthews may be well known around the ridges in the Northern Territory and Queensland, but it was Melbourne and the Newmarket Saleyards which gave Jim his start.
Jim was born in East Malvern in 1936, and the Victorian suburb was where he spent his days attending school until the holidays, when he would act as offsider to his mother's brothers who were drovers and regular buyers at the Newmarket Saleyards.
Today, a prolific stock agent, Jim's career was to start at the age of 13, persuading his mother to let him begin work after her initial insistence Jim complete high school.
The Newmarket Saleyards beckoned and celebrations of his 14th birthday in January 1950 coincided with celebrations of Jim's position at private company Fisken Read and Co, owned by Bob Read.
"I was a young boy who did all the gopher jobs working as a booking clerk and drafting animals," Jim said.
Hundreds of thousands of sheep passed through the yards all week and up to 20,000 cattle were sold from Wednesday to Friday, with stock railed from various places across Australia Victoria, NSW and even South East Queensland.
"There were hardly any private sales in those days; there was no such thing as a contract you just shook hands and that was the deal," he said.
The saleyards were incredibly busy, Jim recalled, with some 14 agencies the majority of which were privately owned required to stay on top of their payments on a weekly basis.
"In the saleyards, all the companies made their bills within seven days or they were put on an outstanding payments list and weren't allowed to buy the next week."
Jim had a "pretty quick rise" as Fisken Read and Co was short an auctioneer he took on the position at the age of 17.
"There was no training you just learned from watching other people sell.
"It is a bit like watching a good football or tennis player you try and build off how they play."
In 1958, Jim inherited Fisken Read and Co after the owner, Bob Read, died and left the company to Jim and another chap, who sold his share because the business had no money and he had a wife to look after.
Jack Coghlan became Jim's new partner and the pair built the business into the biggest private stock and station agency in the southern hemisphere, with a massive 208,000 cattle sold by Fisken Read and Co in the Newmarket Saleyards in 1975.
That same year, Jim was invited to holiday at Brunette Downs in the Northern Territory "and I started to think you could do a lot of business up there".
Consignments of cattle started to arrive from the Northern Territory in the early 1980s, with cattle from Brunette Downs and Anthony's Lagoon making the journey to the Newmarket Saleyards by road train.
"No other agents were taking any cattle to Victoria from the Northern Territory some maybe into South Australia, but not that many.
"As it went on, we no longer took them to Victoria.
"We used to make sales at Roma, Longreach and Coonamble, cutting travel and expense."
In 1980, Jim walked 1000 bullocks from Brunette Downs to Longreach, where he made his first large-scale deal.
The manager of Brunette Downs at the time, Ken Warriner, became a good friend of Jim's, and business between the pair continued when Ken became the managing director of Consolidated Pastoral Company.
"He helped me a lot when I started in the Northern Territory he made it easy for me to operate up there as I had a lot of cattle to handle."
While business was beginning to thrive in the Northern Territory, Newmarket was dwindling, with regional centres building their own saleyards.
Jim sold out of Fisken Read and Co in 1984 to the company Challenge Mercantile, and he continued work with them for a while.
The last sale at Newmarket was in 1986. Jim sold the last mob to his cousin, a fitting tribute for Jim's family after his great grandfather Isaac Hill bought the very first mob at Newmarket many years beforehand.
Jim then made an attempt to resign from the agency game to work on his properties, including Newman Park, Diggers Rest, where he lived for 35 years.
It wasn't long before Landmark (then Dalgety and Co) approached him to take up a position as their key account manager for the Northern Territory and North Queensland.
The position wasn't the retiring kind with Jim continuing his business acumen in charge of the first auction sale in the Kimberleys region in 1988.
Two auctions were held one on Ivanhoe and the other Carlton Hills and many people flew in from Queensland for the sale of 1800 head on Ivanhoe and 1500 head on Carlton Hills.
While Jim paved the way with large sales in the Northern Territory, he recalled his largest single sale to be 6400 head from Milo Station, Augathella, to John Dunnicliffe.
"We walked mobs of 1500 and dropped the mobs at various points, with the biggest mob of Herefords sold at a sale in Goondiwindi."
Even today, at 76, Jim continues to make large sales, running a recent cattle sale in Katherine of some 4500 head before travelling to Alice Springs a fortnight later.
Newmarket may no longer exist, but Jim commented on the numbers of cattle this year in Victoria, with a lot of his work keeping him close to his home at Emu Park, Lancefield, with his wife Dulcie.
A first acquaintance at the trots, where Dulcie was secretary of the trotting control board, sparked a marriage of 53 years that produced two children Raymond and Leanne and four grandchildren.
Horse racing trotting and otherwise has been a constant throughout Jim's career racing his home-grown Thoroughbreds and travelling around the countryside with his son Raymond, a keen and successful campdrafter.
He has had some success over his time, winning the Victoria Derby and the Sydney Derby in 1968 with Adios Bear, a horse he owned and bred.
"I'm having a bit of luck at the moment with Thoroughbreds (with Rebel Truce winning at Flemington recently and Rich Faith winning at Mildura), but it doesn't always go that way."
Success has not been isolated to his Thoroughbreds, with his son winning the biggest campdraft, the Warwick Gold Cup in 1982, and the Chinchilla Grandfather Clock in 1989 on horses the family owned.
The achievements of Jim's career and personal life are his own, but he made special mention of influences on his work ethic Sir James Balderstone and Kerry Packer.
"James had more business acumen regarding cattle sales than anyone else and taught me what you could and couldn't do.
"Kerry said that to be in business, you have got to do as much as you can, as fast as you can."
Their words clearly impacted on Jim, who is a believer that "you make your own luck". Such a philosophy was no doubt solidified 14 years ago when Jim underwent surgery and came out requiring the use of an electrolarynx (a small hand-held device) to speak.
"It hasn't altered much. I just can't auctioneer, but it never worried me much."
The tenacity of a young Jim Matthews, eager to leave school to work, still exists, and with no signs of easing up, his name will no doubt continue to reverberate around the ridges.