The Australian art market is not only booming but exploding, with record turnovers, huge prices and too many would-be collectors and investors chasing too few top quality pictures. So much so that an increasing number of paintings are being recycled every two or three years.

With the final art sales for 2007 going off with a likely big bang on Wednesday and Thursday, the year will end with total sales expected to exceed $160 million for the first time.

If realised, that astonishing sum will be 53 per cent up on the record $105 million set last year and nearly triple the turnover of a decade ago.

Sotheby’s, the first international auction house to establish an Australian offshoot in 1983, has been the market leader for much of the past 25 years. According to John Furphy’s Australian Art Sales Digest, the New York-based company boosted its own turnover from $32 million in 2006 to $51.5 million this year – a 61 per cent rise.

But multi-millionaire Melbourne cleaning magnate Rod Menzies, having merged his two eponymous salerooms – Deutscher-Menzies and Lawson-Menzies – into the Menzies Art Brands company, will probably take top place among the dozen auction houses with sales exceeding $60 million.

In 2006, the Menzies’ salerooms generated turnover of $40 million while tis year’s sales have already hit $50 million. If they achieve the expected $13-$15million at this week’s two auctions they will have increased income by close on 60 per cent.

At the higher-priced Deutscher-Menzies auction on Wednesday, the saleroom is now predicting at least four pictures could well exceed $1 million. But each has been up for auction before and a couple of them several times. Menzies himself often buys works at his own auctions.

Brett Whiteley’s oil painting of his naked daughter Arkie bending down in the shower to pick up the soap carries an upper estimate of $1.8 million. It last appeared at Christie’s in 2003 and sold for almost $800,000, so if the saleroom’s guess is correct, it will have shown a 150 per cent price hike in a mere four years.

Likewise, another nude painting, two Biafran-looking nudes in this case by John Brack, sold at Deutscher-Menzies in 1999 for $486,500, reappeared five years later when it was knocked down for $494,250 and the catalogue now carries an upper estimate of $1.75 million

A second major Brack, Beginning 1984, has also been through Deutscher-Menzies twice before, once in 2001 when it sold for $416,500, again in 2003 ($528,750) and is back again this week with an upper estimate of $1.3 million. Is there any one object other than art work that can add nearly $1 million to its value in six years?

Yet up to 2006, no work by Brack had fetched more than $530,000 and it wasn’t until April last year that The Bar sold for $3.1 million at Sotheby’s, while last May his The Old Time fetched $3.36 million in the same saleroom.

Deutscher-Menzies’ other top lot, a large 1911 work by Fred McCubbin, Violet and Gold, has similarly had its turn in the same saleroom’s catalogues. It sold in 2002 for $1.12 million and this week carries an upper estimate of $1.3 million.

Neither changes of government nor stockmarket frights on Wall Street seem to have alarmed the cashed-up collectors who continue trying to outbid each other at Australia’s art auctions.