The offering came from a variety of vendors all of whom were serious about selling.
Many of the 106 lots also came from a profession that has produced many of Australia's greatest collectors - medicine - and which has underpinned the art market in periods of both excess and withdrawal.
Doctors have even been known to be paid with paintings by sick clients and in recent years they have been among the keenest to pursue the benefits of donating to public institutions under the Cultural Gifts Program.
The first sale to be conducted in Australia under franchise from Sotheby's in the US the auction grossed $7.37 million which was well in excess of the estimates of $4.75 million to $5.54 million.
This represented a robust 84 per cent by lot and 96.1 per cent by value, a remarkable achievement for a multi vendor sale in what are still supposedly hard times.
Eighty nine of the lots found buyers, 70 per cent of them higher than the top estimates.
The offering, however, was light on the contemporary art that has produced some of the stellar performances of the early 2000 boom times but lately has fallen on its backside. The identity of most of the buyers was concealed by the usual high volume of successful telephone bidders to a room which has been much fuller.
Expectations of a bigger crowd participating in what was a nostalgic swansong for the "old Sotheby's."
Sotheby's International has followed Christie's example and reduced its exposure to the limited Australian market by selling a franchise to Sydney auctioneer Tim Goodman and associates. In his farewell address after the sale, Justin Miller, who is leaving after 22 years, named them as "Tim Goodman, Geoffrey Smith and Gary Singer."
Goodman and Smith, the new head of art and vice chairman of Sotheby's Australia sat together in the balcony at back of the room and Goodman was quick to alert Sotheby's staff of any difficult-to-spot bid.
The strongest private bidder in the room was Peter Moran of Sydney-based health care group. Moran secured Sir Arthur Streeton's Melba's Country, (Lot 14) a Yarra landscape of 1936 named after his great opera diva patron for $312,000 including premium compared with estimates of $90,000 to $120,000.
Moran also gave $300,000 against estimates of $150,000 to $250,000 for Norman Lindsay's The Woman I Am - The Woman I Was - The Woman I Will Be, (Lot 52) a genre type portrait placed towards the end of the sale because it needed just the right buyers to compete for it.
With a grand Darling Point mansion, The Swifts, to put it into, the Morans were such buyers especially as mother Gretel has a study for the work.
Both lots however were bought in the same vigorous extended bidding which marked much of the sale. The Lindsay price represented a strong gain on the $135,000 it had fetched at the Rivkin sale held by Sotheby's in 2001.
The Streeton was one of 27 Australian Impressionist paintings from the collection put together by the late Dr and Mrs D.R. Sheumack of Sydney's Burwood over years of friendship with many of the artists.
Apparently this and previous dispersals still leave a substantial body of work to be disseminated in auctions to come. The Sheumacks' son, David, described the results as "mind boggling" and praised Miller for his performance as auctioneer and long association with the collection including production of a book on it.
The gem of the sale was Charles Conder's Centennial Choir at Sorrento, (Lot 28) a small oil on panel depicting a choral event on a Melbourne beach during the Centennial of Australian settlement in 1888. The panel had been acquired by one of Australia's greatest doctor collectors, John William Springthorp one year after it was painted and sold well in the auction of his collection by Leonard Joel (now also part of the Goodman group) in May, 1934.
Although Streeton's Grey Day on the Hawkesbury had to be referred at that long-ago sale, the Sorrento picture made a then solid small panel price of 13 guineas.
Strong prices in the Springthorp sale were the first signs of an art market recovery from the Depression.
Roger McIlroy, now with the London-Australian dealership Nevill Keating McIlroy was a solid underbidder on the work which went to the telephone.
McIlroy's present business partner Angela Nevill had been a more successful bidder at Sotheby's first sale in Australia at the Regent in Melbourne in March 1983 when she purchased John Webber's Portrait of Captain Cook for Alan Bond.
McIlroy admitted to be fascinated by the decision of Sotheby's to reduce its Australian commitment when it had one of the best sales in several years on its hands - just as that other major multinational Christie's had done to him three years earlier, in a similar circumstance.
Former Christie's Australia staffer, Jon Dwyer paid $690,000, the top price in the sale for Russell Drysdale's Evening (Lot 31), a study of a solitary woman on a veranda in a bleak dark Australian landscape. The work was of the quality that could ender itself to Mark Besen for whom Dwyer has been known to act.
Estimated at a much lower $250,000 to $350,000 the Drysdale came from the estate of the Kate Jacqueline Crookston of Sydney, who had inherited it and other pictures in the sale from her father Dr R.M. Crookston. The often times purchaser from Sydney's Macquarie Galleries, he had bought well.
Basil Sellers was another "doctor vendor" at the sale. Sellers is a corporate doctor, a financial whiz who has been fixing up ailing companies for many years, donating some of the proceeds to art through an art prize and other agencies.
Sellers' Jeffrey Smart painting, The Terrace, Madrid Airport II (Lot 41) sold for $408,000 to a telephone bidder comfortably within the estimates of $300,000 to $400,000 (the estimates exclude the 20 per cent buyers premium.)
The work had last appeared in a Philip Bacon Galleries catalogue at $75,000 in Brisbane in 1996 before a football player, Sydney dealer Denis Savill and auctioneer Rodney Menzies began taking a public interest in the artist's market.
Savill who sold a lot of major works to Sellers paid $540,000 for Seller's Fred Williams' Fire Burning on the Ridge of 1969 (Lot 36). The $450,000 (hammer) bid which secured it, was below the $500,000 to $700,000 estimate, and Savill may have been surprised to have secured it at that.
However, earlier this year Sydney dealer Rex Irwin had sold numerous works from this bushfire series from the estate and the bushfire season had just opened again with a vengeance in NSW.
"Walk ins" to Sotheby's overseas offices of work by Australian expatriates including Roy de Maistre, Rupert Bunny and John Peter Russell were well received after giving added freshness to a market which had grown stale through the reluctance of vendors with the ability to sell who choose to sell not to consign.
Barry Pang, an art consultant and collector who 18 months ago, was back in the market strongly following a $280,000 Sidney Nolan purchase the day before at Mossgreen, competed with dealer Scotty Livesey for one of the Sheumack bronzes, Rodin's Baigneuse aux Sandales (Lot 27) which went to an unknown buyer for $43,200 against a $30,000 to $40,000 estimate.
Brisbane dealer Philip Bacon chased some of the de Maistres together with the Carrick and Phillips Fox's with limited success. The de Maistres showed a rare link with the London art world through the artist's affair with Francis Bacon.
Francis Bacon's Queensberry Mews Studio (Lot 53) was keenly chased by both the unrelated Philip Bacon, and McIlroy and appeared to go to the former for $102,000.
Sotheby's reduced commitment to Australia appears to represent a more sanguine view of an international nexus. But the result of the sale made up for some of the trauma to staff resulting from the shock sale of the company's Australian operation.
Standing ovations were given to Justin Miller; and to a near tearful Georgina Pemberton, whose sadness at her decision to leave the changed operation will be offset by departure for Argentina to play polo.
