Ownership of Vesty's

[Bruce Tuncks]

It has always been my understanding that the biggest cattle property in Australia was Victoria River Downs ( or was it Wave Hill )  and it had been bought by the Vesty Brothers, ( successful meat packers).

At the time of Whitlam, the original brothers had long since died and the place  was "owned" by an english octogenarian lady who had never left england in her life.

So Whitlam gave the cattle station to the local indigenous, and people like me thought is was a good idea. Well, I didn't think the old pommy lady deserved as much as she got, but on the whole, I agreed.

But the indigenous didn't manage the place properly and it fell into unprofitability .

Is this account right? can anybody add more to the story?

[willedoo]

I seem to remember VRD possibly being the biggest in Australia quite a few years ago. I think parts of it were sold off and it lost that status. As a lot of them aren't on the one title, the status as the biggest can change over time. These days the biggest in Australia (and the world) is Anna Creek Station on the west side of Lake Eyre. I love that country around there. I spent a full year in 1984 doing oil and gas exploration in the region. We started on the east side of the Flinders Ranges at Frome Downs, then worked on Macumba Station west of Lake Eyre for a few months. We worked from the SW part of the lake, up the west side and eventually north of the lake towards the edge of the Simpson.

 

There were  lot of big dunes north of Lake Eyre. I remember one about 80' we used to have a lot of fun getting over. That's where the old HJ-45 and 47's were  good with their 4 speed box. Great for getting over dunes where you had to hold your mouth right and it was all about momentum combined with the gear change. Whether you were in low or high range (depending on the dune), the change down from fourth to third was critical. It had to be done at warp speed right at the critical point. That's why all our Toyotas had the gear stick heated and bend backwards a small amount, so you didn't hit your knuckles on the dashboard when making that change.

 

But apologies for thread drift; back to VRD. I don't personally know what happened there, but quite a lot of cattle stations went downhill after reverting to the traditional owners. Downhill as in the way they were managed as a cattle producing business. I think that side of it might have improved over the years. I remember doing work on Billiluna Station in W.A. in the early 80's. The Aboriginal owners had a different way of doing things. When they wanted to do some work on the cattle, they would head out to a set of yards in Toyotas and not much else but a rifle or two. They didn't take food; they would just shoot a beast and carve pieces off it to cook on the campfire. They were only at the one place for two or three days, so never stayed long enough to get food poisoning from non refrigerated meat.

 

If you were on a high point and wanted to know where they were, you just scanned the horizon until you spotted a black swarm of crows in the distance. That would be the crows getting into the dead beast being used for tucker. Sometimes the women and kids would go along as well. They'd all sit on a flat top, four wheel articulated trailer pulled by a tractor. They were large trailers, similar to hay hauling trailers. At least when the women came along, the men would get a bit of variety in their diet. The women would spend the day catching snakes and lizards, and gathering bush tucker. It's amazing how many critters are crawling around in that spinifex sand country and it just teems with life. Quite a lot of them didn't have swags; they would just camp in the sand.

 

I would guess a lot of those Aboriginal stations these days employ experienced managers to try to make it profitable. I remember some horror stories years ago. One was of a good, productive cattle station given over to Aboriginal ownership. The first thing they did was muster and sell all the cattle, then spent the money and didn't have any left to restock. But I think that would be a rare extreme.

Edited August 9, 2022 by willedoo

[spacesailor]

A large station in north Queensland, went to ruin after the new Indigenous  owners let a big portion of stock starve.

VERY Big Anthills there !. ( termites ).

spacesailor

[Bruce Tuncks]

I also think they ( the aborigines ) learned about not ruining businesses by selling all the stock and  spending all the money.

Kittle bros in Alice Springs is an example...  it looks just like a big car business run by whitefellers.  It is actually owned by the Central Lands Council.

Yeperenye shopping center is another example. I bet there are more. All donated by the government of course.

[onetrack]

There's also a major fuel distribution business, a transport business, and a Camel company, that are owned by the Ngaanyatjarra Council. Of course, it's mostly white people that run the businesses.

 

https://www.ngaanyatjarra.org.au/ng-businesses

[facthunter]

There's some pretty ordinary "white trash" around too in some of these places, though I don't believe the First nations People are better than about 60 years ago. grog is always part of it.   Nev

[Jerry_Atrick]

Statiscally something like 70% of business fail in their first year and 90% by year 3. Given the tiny relative population of Aboriginal businesses, there would not be a statistical skew to include them if we *think* they are disproportionately worse. So, that doesn't say too much about the white (or not-black) fella.

 

Aboriginals, like everyone else learn from their mistakes, it would appear. It's called experience (both individual and collective).

 

[Bruce Tuncks]

Jerry, I don't think your comment is relevant. You may well be correct about start-ups, but these businesses were very well established long-standing and profitable.

[Jerry_Atrick]

I picked start ups because the stats are the easiest to obtain. But, when you think about it, there is often little difference between a stasrt up  and an M&A (takeover deal). Think of those big Aussie breweries takeovers int he 80s and 90s... How many SME businesses have been taken over and gone to the wall in not too long? I worked for Coles Myer.. they were the largest retailer by market capitalisation, revenue, and profitability, but the companies they took over experienced less proftiablity and many eventually were closed. Where are Coles Myer today, and apart from Bunnings (which wasn't part of Coles Myer), how are those origtinal busijnesses going?

 

M&A consistently delivers less value to the new owners, although it gives the existing (or subservient) owners a get out. Its why the share price of the dominant company in an |M&A annoucement always losees on annoucement... well, almost always.

 

Whether it's a start up or taking over an existing company, it is the same. You have to invest, set up a [for existing company, new] strategy, and run the business.

 

I think they are very comparable. M&A businesses want you all to think differently.

 

[Edit] The only difference when taking over a business is, you buy a cash flow.

Edited January 6, 2023 by Jerry_Atrick

[onetrack]

The big difference with the Aboriginal Corporations is they are fully funded at all times by Govt money. And whenever they fail financially, the Govt steps in with more money to cover the losses.

There is a constant desire at all the upper levels of Govt and policymakers, to ensure that Aboriginal businesses are made out to look like the major successes they regularly aren't.

 

Add in the "white trash" these Corporations usually manage to employ, to look after their funds - which "white trash" regularly steal millions from those corporations - and the "aboriginal business" model has to be the greatest fiasco and permanent bottomless pit, in the history of our nation.

 

The three cases below are just 3 examples I could dig up in 30 secs of searching. These 3 typical fraud cases are just the tip of the iceberg.

 

https://thewest.com.au/news/wa/ex-boss-ripped-off-aboriginal-group-ng-b88560972z

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-09-11/thomas-graham-greenaway-guilty-of-theft-aboriginal-charity-trust/100451816

 

https://www.cdpp.gov.au/case-reports/former-aboriginal-art-centre-boss-jailed-ripping-artists

 

Edited January 7, 2023 by onetrack

[onetrack]

More here .... I could probably make up a list of Aboriginal funding fraud that would occupy multiple pages on here. The first article talks of 44 cases of fraud in Aboriginal entities being discovered - that is only the ones they've found.

 

https://www.buzzfeed.com/allanclarke/millions-stolen-from-black-communities

 

https://www.bunburymail.com.au/story/5489068/netball-mum-avoids-jail-after-stealing-hundreds-of-thousands-from-aboriginal-co-op/

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-16/man-stole-1-million-from-indigenous-business-group/6861048

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-05-26/aboriginal-community-benefit-fund-youpla-and-missing-millions/101003884

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-12-13/major-developers-given-millions-axed-indigenous-employment-fund/10606500

 

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-11-04/groote-eylandt-trust-fund-what-happened/6905600

 

 

 

Edited January 7, 2023 by onetrack

[Bruce Tuncks]

I once knew a woman who owned and ran an aboriginal women's art shop in Alice Springs.  She had to keep the men away cos they kept coming to get money from their working women. I reckon she worked real hard for her money, much harder than the artists under her protection. I'm sure she was honest, but I wouldn't have blamed her if she took a bit out of the till.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Once, I told the grandkids that if they couldn't do arithmetic, they would use a 50 dollar note and get back change as if it were a 5 dollar note. I said it happened all the time with aborigines. Onetrack has shown this is true. Note that it was whitefellers who found the fraud.

[Bruce Tuncks]

Thinking about the $50 note, do you realize that it contains the image of a deceased person, an aborigine to boot... I think of this when I see the warnings " Aboriginal and Torres Strait viewers are warned that the following may contain images of dead people"

[willedoo]

22 minutes ago, Bruce Tuncks said:

I once knew a woman who owned and ran an aboriginal women's art shop in Alice Springs.  She had to keep the men away cos they kept coming to get money from their working women. I reckon she worked real hard for her money, much harder than the artists under her protection. I'm sure she was honest, but I wouldn't have blamed her if she took a bit out of the till.

In the 80's I was doing a job on Roper River Station for a while. We had some dealings with an old aboriginal bloke and his wife, who were the only traditional owners living on the station. They had the unenviable job of custodians of the land and it's cultural heritage, and were answerable to the rest of their mob who lived in town. The old bloke used to carve his totem out of a local wood and sell them to make a few dollars. A mate and myself bought one each, and the old bloke charged us his going rate of $50 for a totem. Not long after that I was in Darwin and saw his totems in a white owned aboriginal art dealers shop. I can't remember the exact price, but they were around $300 each. Not  bad profit for the dealer. In those days, their biggest market was the Japanese tourists.

 

The old bloke was very anxious about what we were doing. He used to go ahead of us with a surveyor and check the prospect for cultural heritage sites. He said the mob in town hardly ever came out to the area, but if we damaged a site, they would spear him. He was a nice old bloke, one of those full bloods who didn't drink. You can learn a lot from those old blokes if you take the time to listen. Listening carefully helps as often their form of Pidgeon has more meaning than what was initially thought. Just one example, maybe doesn't always mean maybe. More often than not, it means definitely.