Westcoast Wool & Livestock Kulin Bush Races sells out within 12 hours

Twelve hours was all it took for the Westcoast Wool & Livestock Kulin Bush Races to sell all 4200 tickets on offer.

“We knew it would go quick, but quick to us would have been a couple of weeks, so when we had to pull the pin on it on Sunday lunchtime, in 12 hours, that’s just absolutely blown us away,” Kulin Bush Races chairman Tom Murphy said.

Established in 1995, the bush races offer camping, live music and children’s entertainment alongside its famous races.

Tickets for the competition started selling at midnight on August 1, and even then, things felt different.

“One of the guys in charge of our ticketing put a message out on the group chat and said ‘not to alarm anyone but we’ve just sold 800 tickets in the first 20 minutes’,” Mr Murphy said.

After the sell-out, committee members moved quickly to establish a waitlist before meeting to crunch the numbers and check whether boosting capacity was an option.

But Mr Murphy said the tough decision had to be made not to sell any extra tickets.

“We do apologise to those who miss out because we set a pretty high bar for those who come along ,and if we had 6000 or 8000 people, we feel like we couldn’t give them the experience that we want them to have,” he said.

“We’ve got to cap numbers because we’ve only got a finite capacity for the number of toilet blocks and showers that you’ve got for everyone.”