John Dunnicliff, who died last week aged 75, built a multi-million dollar beef cattle business from scratch but, in the words of his old friend and accountant Mick Boyce, “always had an equation in his head that was never quite solved”.
That was partly because Mr Dunnicliff was seldom without a challenge, most of them set by himself. Over five-plus decades, he turned a “starvation block” at Bundarra, NSW, into a million hectares of fine Barkly Tablelands grazing country in the Northern Territory, and was close to meeting his goal of stocking it with 100,000 cattle.
Every step of the way, he pushed past convention in order to test what was possible. His final play, the $40 million development of Beetaloo Station in the NT, was astonishingly bold and ambitious, but it was by no means a gamble. Mr Dunnicliff and his family had successfully executed the elements of the plan before.
In the mid-1960s, when Mick Boyce had just opened his doors as a newly-minted accountant in Sydney, a young John Dunnicliff was the first client to walk in. It was the start of a remarkable relationship that held through to the Sydney hospital where Mr Dunnicliff last week died after a protracted battle with pancreatic cancer.
Both men prospered. Boyce Chartered Accountants is today the largest independent professional services firm in regional NSW. (Mr Boyce has long retired from the company).
Mr Boyce dug into Mr Dunnicliff’s career to provide background for this article, as a supplement to his own intimate knowledge of a friend he also describes as “my super-hero”.
When they met, Mr Dunnicliff was on his second property, “Tobermory”, near Gulargambone, NSW.
Sydney-bred, he began farming in 1961 with the small, hard Bundarra block bought by his metro journalist father and schoolteacher mother. After clearing, fencing and watering it, he sold the block to enough advantage to buy the Gulargambone property - although that was still not large enough to make a living from.
Development of “Tobermory” financed him into the 1966 purchase of run-down “Gilgai”, at Coonamble, for $120,000, including stock and plant.
“Gilgai” was the place that laid the ground for the future Dunnicliff business model.
“We borrowed $60,000 of the purchase price,” Mr Dunnicliff told a 2014 conference.
“By 1970, with the wool slump, wheat quotas and poor cattle prices, our value was $60,000, so we were technically broke - but we always paid our interest to the bank. They have to run a business as well. Sell what you have to, but pay the interest.”
“We managed to convince the development bank to lend us another $20,000 so we could develop the property, by sowing it down to lucerne, fencing it into thirty 100-acre paddocks, and watering it properly.”
“This gave us a low-cost, productive operation. From then on we made profit and the bank backed us into another property, and we did the same. This gave us growth and a pattern to work on.”
Few farmers would have the confidence to seek a substantial loan on zero equity, and fewer could pull it off.
That Mr Dunnicliff could was enabled by a philosophy of building close, rock-solid business relationships.
His financial and stock records were always immaculate, Mr Boyce said. Rather than avoiding his bank in challenging times, he maintained an active conversation with it.
Most importantly, Mr Dunnicliff respected the fact that everyone else needed to make a profit too. Mr Boyce remembers that trait with gratitude.
Each year, when it was time to work through the Dunnicliffs’ finances, Mr Boyce stayed on-farm with John and Trish Dunnicliff. In those early days, Mr Boyce said, “If we were doing things a bit tight, he’d ask if we’d like the cheque before we left”.
That gift for business relationships also held the Dunnicliff family in good stead through the 2011 Indonesian live export debacle. With a relationship built around annual visits to the Dunnicliffs’ Indonesian partners, Beetaloo’s shipments of cattle to Indonesia resumed as soon as the export suspension was lifted. The incident barely disrupted the family’s business.
Northern Territory Cattlemens’ Association (NTCA) executive director Tracey Hayes recalls Mr Dunnicliff as “a true gentleman” who was ready with a generous word.
When in 2014, Ms Hayes took the reins of the NTCA, she stepped into the outsized expectations left by her predecessor, Luke Bowen, who put the Association on the political map while navigating it through the aftermath of the 2011 suspension.
“To get words of encouragement from someone like John Dunnicliff at that time meant an enormous amount to me,” Ms Hayes said.
“You knew you were on the right track if you got a pat on the back from John.”
The development of “Gilgai” in the early 1970s was a long way from a big Territory cattle run, but it was an important step up the property ladder.
When the legendary Coonamble run “Wingadee” was sold up by the New Zealand Australian Land Company in 1977, Mr Dunnicliff claimed several blocks.
“Wingadee” added some important foundations to Mr Dunnicliff’s growing store of business acumen.
According to Mr Boyce, it taught him that there was good buying to be had from corporate enterprises selling up, and that increased scale (he also leased some “Wingadee” blocks) supported better profitability.
He also learned about the value of being at the vanguard of land-use change.
The Coonamble district was at that time discovering wheat. Mr Dunnicliff bought his “Wingadee” blocks as pastoral land, and sold them several years later at a handy premium because of their cropping potential.
The profits went into another renowned run, “Sandy Camp” at Quambone, where Mr Boyce recalls the warm floodwaters that irrigated the property’s native pastures creeping through after upstream rain.
In 1982, “Sandy Camp” went under the auctioneer’s hammer in the Coonamble RSL Hall. Mr Boyce was sitting at the back of the hall, filled with several hundred people, “white as a sheet” with apprehension.
It was a Dunnicliff seat-of-the-pants moment. Mr Dunnicliff had already signed to buy the iconic “Isis Downs” at Ilfracombe, Qld, and the whole business was on the line if “Sandy Camp” failed to sell well.
It did, and between 1982 and 1987, Mr Dunnicliff reworked the infrastructure of 1,227 square kilometre “Isis Downs” to ramp up labour efficiency - another trademark of his business strategy.
By Beetaloo, labour efficiency had been honed to an edge. In an industry that employs a full-time equivalent person for every 1200-1300 head of cattle, Beetaloo runs on 10,000 head per full-time equivalent.
Through the Wet, management of the 1.05 m ha station and its 95,000-odd cattle fall to five people. Until Mr Dunnicliff’s death, four of them were the Dunnicliff/Armstrong family (chiefly daughter Jane and husband Scott, backed by John and Trish); the fifth is the property’s only permanent stationhand.
Back at “Isis Downs”, where Mr Dunnicliff began to practice the arts of efficiency deployed at Beetaloo, he built laneways, state-of-the-art yards and new waters to reduce the costs of production.
But Dunnicliff tenure at the legendary sheep station came to an abrupt end in 1987. Kerry Packer made an offer for the place - reportedly around $10 million - that Mr Dunnicliff found impossible to refuse.
Partly to assuage the pain of parting from a property loved by his wife Trish, Mr Dunnicliff took her and their daughters Jane, Emma and Kate travelling overseas for a year.
When they returned, he dived head-first back into agriculture, buying Cherrabun Station in the Kimberley.
Kidman-style, he then spread his risk by buying Upper Wantagong Station at Holbrook in southern NSW, and 3230 hectare “Scheelite” on King Island in Bass Strait.
Cherrabun, bought for $2.25 million, was carrying 7000 cattle on 12 bores. The Dunnicliffs spent $2.5 million adding another 42 big dams and related fencing, boosting the station’s carrying capacity to 21,000 head.
“Scheelite” carried 1200 head when it was bought by Mr Dunnicliff. By the time it was sold to finance the purchase of Beetaloo, it was carrying 2000 head.
The King Island adventure expanded to include two dairies, run by Dunnicliff daughter Kate.
Another daughter, Jane, and husband Scott Armstrong took over the management of Cherrabun. Thus, for a while, the Dunnicliff agricultural business extended at one end to the lush pastures of King Island, where Dunnicliff dairies were the largest suppliers to the King Island cheese factory, to the rugged rangelands of the Kimberley - but with the whole knitted together by Dunnicliff family capability.
Diversification was followed by consolidation in 2002.
Everthing in the portfolio was sold up and traded for a $20 million investment in the 1.05 million hectare Beetaloo and Mungabroom aggregation. The property lies on the western end of the Barkly Tableland and almost exactly midway between Darwin and Alice Springs.
Mr Boyce described Mr Dunnicliff as a peerless evaluator of land. Beetaloo was partly a bet on that ability.
The Barkly grasslands are justifiably renowned for their productivity, and Mr Dunnicliff’s research indicated that Beetaloo occupied a zone of particularly reliable rainfall - less reliant on monsoon storms than country to the north, and consistently wetter than the semi-arid country of central Australia.
Another investor might have been happy with Beetaloo’s carrying capacity of 20,000 head, and its 40 turkey nest water storages. Based on decades of hard-won understanding, Mr Dunnicliff had an entirely different map of the property’s capacity in his head.
His reasoning was entirely rational, backed by evidence from Cherrabun. He observed that in a one kilometre radius around every watering point, the country was battered by grazing cattle. In a 2km radius, pastures were less flogged, but still grazed constantly enough that perennial seedlings had a hard time establishing. Beyond a 3km radius, the country was hardly touched - and when cattle did venture this distance, any energy they gained from grazing was burnt up in walking.
These grazing patterns meant that only a fraction of the property was being used by cattle. Where vegetation built up in the absence of grazing, it often burned in the lightning fires of the late Dry season. Every year, a large part of the property’s grazing capacity literally went up in smoke.
Mr Dunnicliff’s solution: 600 135,000 litre tanks, about 3000 kilometres of 75 mm poly pipe, more than 3000 km of fencing, and 70 bores. Together, it made for a development bill of about $40 million.
Across Beetaloo’s more fertile grasslands, water is now available in a four-kilometre grid, so that stock are never more than two kilometres from water and every hectare of grass is available.
(Even during Mr Dunnicliff’s last weeks in hospital, Mr Boyce said, he was questioning whether he hadn’t gone hard enough, and whether a 2km grid would have delivered better productivity.)
The project was completed last year - in time for Mr Dunnicliff to see his ambition of Beetaloo carrying 100,000 cattle come within a whisker of completion.
What was likely the largest development program ever undertaken on an Australian family farm required expansive financial backing. As the pipe rolled across Beetaloo and expenses mounted, Mr Dunnicliff began to exhaust his bank’s appetite for risk.
That’s when he went to Sydney and, in Mr Boyce’s words, “beat the bushes” for an investor who shared his optimism about the untapped capacity of the rangelands. He found his investor in Brett Blundy, an entrepreneur cut from similar cloth to himself, but with a fortune built in retail.
As a 20-year-old, Mr Blundy bought a run-down record store in Pakenham, Victoria. On that slender foothold, he built Sanity Music, and from there a retail empire that has included names like Bras ’n Things and Adairs. Mr Blundy’s private company, BB Retail Capital (BBRC), was in 2013 assessed as being worth about $1 billion.
In 2010, a new company appeared in BBRC’s list of holdings.
BBRC Beef began as Brett Blundy’s bet on John Dunnicliff’s vision. In the past six years, the company has apparently decided the bet was a good one. It added 316,900 hectare Amungee Mungee for $6.5m in 2014, and nearly a million hectares late last year when it bought Walhallow and Cresswell Downs from Paraway Pastoral Company for a reported $100 million.
Not coincidentally, the latter three purchases have been in partnership with Adrian Brown and Emma Brown, née Dunnicliff, daughter of John and Trish.
The Browns’ Katherine-based manufacturing company, Northern Stock Water, supplied the water infrastructure for the development of Beetaloo, and is supporting the rollout of similar developments on BBRC Beef’s other pastoral interests.
The northern pastoral industry has been watching John Dunnicliff’s innovations, and the progress of his protégés, with cautious interest.
If no-one else picks up his ideas, it won’t be because of secrecy. Mr Dunnicliff was open about sharing his ideas, and the gaps in his understanding. Beetaloo was to host a field day that, as it turned out, was scheduled for a few days after his death.
To get from conventional thinking about the nature of Australian pastoralism to the Dunnicliff model of rangelands intensification is quite a leap - one that involves a way-above-average tolerance of risk, and Mr Dunnicliff’s ability to flush investors out of the undergrowth.
Time, and BBRC Beef’s 2.3 million hectares, will tell whether the knowledge gained over one man’s lifetime keeps moving into other lives, and influencing other lifetimes.
