THE same year John Hewson butchered his explanation of GST and gave Keating another stint in charge, some Queensland Brahman breeders thought about their future.
Their concerns orbited marketing options, or lack thereof. So this group, some from the central parts of the state and others from further north, sought a better way.
They gathered in NQ in 1993, six breeders and two blokes who knew a bit about selling and together they nutted out a plan.
Ken McCaffrey, who stepped away from running Big Country a year ago, remembers the meeting as if it was yesterday.
"There we were, these very successful breeders concerned about how they might sell their cattle but eager to establish a multi-vendor bull sale in the north, Jim Geaney and me," Mr McCaffrey said.
"We talked it around and came up with a plan. It was clear they wanted the sale to be in North Queensland and they had a preference that the sale be run by private agents and not the major agent companies of the day.
"That's how McCaffrey's Australian Livestock Marketing and Geaneys were approached to attend the meeting in the first place and to eventually run the sale.
"In a nutshell that's how Big Country was born."
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Maintaining faith and settling on Charters Towers as the venue township was a stroke of visionary genius. A few years before Mr McCaffrey staged a highly successful sale there and he, and Mr Geaney, shared a premonition about the old gold town.
"I always felt Charters Towers had the makings of becoming a major stud stock selling centre and it has," he said.
As with every sale there is a mountain of minutiae but Big Country distinguished itself through the ground-breaking manner in which its catalogue was formulated.
"Every bull entered for the sale is inspected and approved to be offered for sale," he said. "Buyers didn't want to sit at a sale for eight hours on a hot day when a percentage of the yarding wasn't up to attracting a bid.
"Big Country will keep building with the new agents, who took over last year."
Alan Welburn
Lover of sport, particularly horse racing and all things Olympic. Have spent my entire working life in journalism, mostly with News Corp on its major metro mastheads. Done plenty of things but the best by far is having a teenage son who calls me dad.
Lover of sport, particularly horse racing and all things Olympic. Have spent my entire working life in journalism, mostly with News Corp on its major metro mastheads. Done plenty of things but the best by far is having a teenage son who calls me dad.
