The last outing of Christie’s Australia, its $5 million fine art sale on April 10 and 11 in Melbourne, will be at once a celebration and a wake. So there was always going to be a sad note to Thursday’s “party” – the opening night of the Sydney viewings for the sale, which continues over [...]

A dinosaur-era tree long believed extinct went on sale in Australia on Thursday.
A park ranger discovered a small stand of Wollemi Pines in mountains outside Sydney in 1994, stunning botanists since the trees were virtually unchanged since the Jurassic period 200 million years ago.
Last October collectors paid thousands of dollars for cuttings of selected Wollemi [...]

An auction of cricket memorabilia relating to South Africa’s world-record score of 9-438 against Australia in the fifth one-day international at Johannesburg on March 12 was held to raise funds for the Desmond Tutu Diversity Trust, as part of celebrations of Tutu’s 75th birthday.
The major item for auction was a framed scorecard of the match. [...]

Bidders in an internet auction are offering over €13,000 ($A22,066) for a wartime German encoding machine, similar to ones whose messages were cracked by British code breakers in World War II.
The portable Enigma encryption machine made in 1941 has a keyboard and a series of rotors designed to scramble messages. It is up for sale [...]

The work, which would have been worth about $6000 when it was painted, will be auctioned as part of Sotheby’s Fine Australian Art sale in Melbourne next month, where it is expected to fetch more than $500,000.
It is among 57 lots – with an estimated total value of up to $7.5 million – unveiled in [...]

One of New Zealand’s most prestigious wineries, the Goldwater Estate, has been sold for over NZ$10m (£3.5m).
The purchaser, the New Zealand Wine Fund, has already bought Marlborough’s Vavasour Wines in 2003. It expects combined sales this year of NZ$12-15m from around 200,000 cases of wine a year.
The Goldwater Estate winery was the first winery [...]

Two paintings by great New Zealand artist Frances Hodgkins sold for more than $A86,000 under the hammer at Bonhams and Goodman auction in Sydney last night.
Auctioneer Tim Goodman said it had been speculated that the Hodgkins’ works would go to a New Zealand bidder but they both sold to a local Sydney collector with a [...]