"You got to give it a go mate"

Victor James Browne has good advice after four careers in 88 years.

Born between the First and Second World Wars on 11 April 1935, Victor James Browne embodies all the best traits of that Silent Generation – except for one: their famous thriftiness.

A gambler all his life, this deceptively mild bookkeeper and skinny cook has always done business the Aussie way: he went big, or he went home.

And while he made sure to play by the rules and give everyone a fair go as Australians do, he would also cheerfully bend those rules as far as they could go, as is also the Aussie way.

“Because… you got to give it a go mate,” he said with a shrug and a twinkle in his eye.

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Summarising his four careers over 88 years on his Facebook profile, this octogenarian simply posted: “I have made – and lost – lots of money”.

Those eight words hide over eight decades of fantastic adventures, two marriages, several company listings and the hardest work of all – a lot of fencing on remote stations.

He remembers the first two decades best for the experiences he had while working as a newly married Wesfarmers stock and station agent in the southern parts of Western Australia. 

“When you fall flat, as long as you have a bit of health left, get up, dust yourself off, take a breather and look around you. There is always something you can have a go at.”

Then, when he was in his mid-30s during the mining boom years of the 1970s, Victor went from station overseer to becoming a wheeling and dealing company director in Perth.

The bigger the deals became, the bigger became Victor’s ambitions... until it all came crashing down in England, where a trip to put in a bid on the Australians Estate companys’ sheep and cattle stations in Queensland instead ended in him languishing 18 months in jail, before being set free by the High Court of England.

“That was my biggest venture, but it was doomed from the start,” Victor said.

Infamous ancestors

Victor’s spell in English prisons gave him a certain notoriety among his siblings, but he was not the first in the family to stand in front of a judge (though he was the only one to be fully exonerated). 

His grandmother on his mother’s side, Phoebe Hills, was half Maori from Waikiki island and by all accounts a wife who brooked no nonsense from any of the five husbands she had outlived. Asked if any foul play was ever suspected with all those dead husbands, Victor mulled the question a bit.

“As far as I recall, they all died from natural causes, but then, she did shoot one of them in 1923, only wounding him. When the court in Darlinghurst, NSW, fined her £25, she told the judge, ‘I’d shoot him again!’”

The Browne family had an infamous start in Australia.

His mom’s mom was not the only infamous character in the family. Australia’s original convict adventurer and well-connected Free Mason, Sir Henry Browne Hayes (1762-1832), had an entire book written about his pro-Irish and anti-English exploits by author Rolf Grunseit.

Ironically, when Victor was jailed in England after a £1,500 cheque he had written out for a second-hand Volvo bounced, he spent six months in Winchester’s jail alongside members of the Irish Republican Army who had been arrested during “The Troubles”. 

“They had yellow stripe sewn down the back of their shirts, but were no trouble. But old Henry would have approved of my company.”

By all accounts, Victor was a model prisoner. “After a few weeks, the head warden, Mr Barnett, even gave me the keys to the goal. He could see I was not a criminal and I ended up locking and unlocking after the wardens when they went for their smoko.”

‘Live and let live’

Victor would not have ended up in jail were it not for a business partner who was only honest on days not ending on y.

That cheque that bounced was because this partner in a hotel venture in which Victor was a silent partner, had “misplaced” the decimal on a credit note for £50,000, making it worth only £50. This left Victor’s account empty and himself jailed in England, but he holds no grudges, despite later learning he had also been crooked out of thousands in the hotel venture, which somehow never made money despite being the only pub in town.

“I say live and let live. None of us are perfect and we will all make mistakes. 
“Look at me, I got one eye and only three toes left, on top of four bypasses and two ex wives.
“When you fall flat, as long as you have a bit of health left, get up, dust yourself off, take a breather and look around you. 
“There is always something you can have a go at. Then you got to give it a go mate!”

Hunters Hotel newly restored in 2017

Feeding hundreds

After being exonerated in England, Victor returned to Australia, but he had enough of wearing a suit and tie as a director. He opted instead to embark on a fourth career, feeding people, and soon got a job at the iconic Hunters Hotel in Queenstown, Tasmania, where he worked as a chef for nine years.

This was not a big leap for Victor. For despite qualifying as a bookkeeper to start his first career, Victor is a big foodie and quite demanding when it comes to food preparation.

“Life is all about luck. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But if you want to get lucky, you first got to give it a go mate.”

This meant he soon ended up preparing food at stations wherever he worked as Wesfarmers agent in his second career, so planning menus and cooking for events that hosted up to 250 people easy to him in his fourth career.

“I always cooked whenever it was needed at the stations, doing it all, from butchering the animals and getting fresh vegetables from the gardens to setting the tables, so I knew about catering for many people,” he said.

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‘A bit banged up, but otherwise fine’

After spending nearly a decade cooking at Tasmania’s legendary hotel, Victor returned to Australia and took a job cooking at a station near Baldwin.

But now over sixty years of hard work had caught up with his heart, and Victor started thinking of retiring. But as always, he went big. This after he saw a “chef wanted” advertisement by Retirement Services Australia (RSA).

He “had a go”, got the job and the former bookkeeper, stock agent, station overseer and director on the boards of 13 companies became RSA’s chef for the next 26 years.

“I first worked in the kitchen and managed one of the RSA villages, then I trained the chefs at each of the more than 20 new retirement villages opened by RSA.”

Retiring from the Retirement Services but still feeling strong and healthy, Victor joined the Grey Nomads, again doing it his way. For instead of a getting a caravan, he went on a “cooking walkabout”, working as a station cook on stations big and small across Australia.

“A good meal is about providing both quality and quantity. To achieve this out at a station, you have to be imaginative with the best ingredients you can get.”

“I don’t smoke and drink, so I have not been sick one day in my life, not even the flu,” he said. 

Except for that time in 1997, before he started at RSA, when he “felt a bit breathless” while working on his cooking walkabout at a sheep station.

An alarmed nurse took one look at Victor, then aged 63, and had him rushed to Melbourne Royal Hospital, where he got a quadruple bypass. Four days after being discharged, Victor was back in the station’s kitchen.

“Mr Skillington did the job, they said my new heart would last 25 years, but it has now been almost 27 years, so I called them the other day to say ‘thank you, I gave you my heart, and you handled it with great care’.”

While never sick, Victor has had several injuries. His right eye is blind due to an advanced case of diabetic retinopathy, though Victor blames the needle the doctor used to inject his eye with in an effort to stave off the build-up of fluids. 

His only other major injury came from a dog bite while working cooking during shearing at Jumbuck’s Rawlinna station, one of Australia’s largest sheep stations.

“The irony is that is was my second time to Rawlinna and the first visit was just as unpleasant. I was on basic training when we got stuck near Rawlinna on a train, having to wait two days for the flooding to subside. I never thought I’d go back there, but in the early 2000s I did, to cook for the crew of 50 during shearing. One of the farm dogs tore into my arm a bit and the Flying Doctor flew me to Kalgoorie for a bit of stitching and a tetanus shot.”

Food preparation at the Glenforrie sheep station. 

Victor’s last job was cooking for the construction crew who built the modern staff village at the Angus family’s $30 million abattoir some 70 km from Moranbah in central QLD. 

“I know what the crews like to eat and I enjoy feeding them up. A good meal is about providing both quality and quantity. To achieve this out at a station, you have to be imaginative with the best ingredients you can get.”

‘It’s all about luck’

Victor would still be on his feet behind the stoves, cooking for station crews at 88, if it wasn’t for having had seven toes amputated due to what the doctor called diabetic mellitus ulcers, but which Victor calls bad luck.

“Life is all about luck,” he said. “Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. But if you want to get lucky, you first got to give it a go mate.”

Victor grew up in Sydney, the fifth of three brothers and four sisters in an era when children were to be seen but never heard – the so-called Silent Generation. This generation basically raised themselves, playing on the streets while their parents struggled to put food on the table during the depression years of the 1930s.

Victor was four years old and riding on the handlebars of a bike being pedalled by one of his brothers when his left heel got caught between the spokes of the front wheel and the fork. The heel was all but cut off by the whirring steel wires.

“It was hanging by a thread and had to be stitched back on, I still remember the 18 thick black threads sticking out of my heel. 

“As accidents go I suppose it was pretty common in those days, though mostly it was toes that got caught in the spokes. But the shock left me with a very bad stutter for the next 8 years, until I was 12 and Mrs Hicks – an angel of a teacher at Regent’s Park Primary School in NSW – cured my stutter by getting me to sing.

“But kids being cruel, I was teased mercilessly while I still stuttered, especially by the school bully. So one day while he was mimicking me, I told him to ‘duh- duh- drop du- du- du- dead!’

“That was on a Wednesday. That Saturday, he got hit by a train, which dropped him dead on the ground. I’ve never since used those words on anyone else!”

‘Don’t work for money’

Victor went on to Bankstown Boys High, where he “enjoyed the numbers, but the reading not at all”. 

Like most teenagers in 1950, Victor left school at Grade 9. He took a job as junior clerk at Woolworths in Burnwood, New South Wales. 

Four years later he had enrolled with Hemingway and Robertson’s Correspondence School for a bookkeeping diploma and had been promoted to office boy at Woolworths’ Head Office in Sydney.

Woolworths' Head Office in Sydney.

“It was all quite grand for me. The head office was on corner of Market and Pitt streets, where the Sydney Tower now stands.”

That same year in 1954 he received his call-up from the Royal Australian Air Force, where he spent six months getting his basic training at Amberley Base in Ipswich. Unbeknown to the junior officers yelling at troop nr A212184 to run faster, his oldest brother Ernst was squadron leader at the same base.

“Compared to fencing, almost any other job is easy. But that is a lot like life, isn’t it? Setting your borders and getting to know your limits. It takes great effort.”

Big brother Ernst went on to establish Australia’s first school for air traffic controllers at RAAF East Sale base in Victoria, but as a stickler for military discipline, he never interfered with his younger brother’s training.

“After basic training, I was back at Woolies, earning about £10 a month. I had been doing the work for a year when I saw a job advertised by a steamship trading company for a clerk to work in Papua New Quinea at £25 a month, tax free, plus company accommodation for four of us clerks.” 

It was 1956 and Victor had just turned 21 and thought he’d give it a go. He had his year-old bookkeeping diploma and a good track record at Woolies to back his application.

Port Moresby has a colourful history.

“So I gave it a go and got the job and spent the next two years in Port Moresby. They were two good years – not for the money mind, but the memories. 

“In all my years I’ve never worked for, or worried about money.

“Like the time my pension dropped from $500 to $23 a fortnight while I worked as a chef at Anna Creek in the Northern Territory.

“I had declared all my income as chef on top of my pension, and the taxman took most of it, but I got to keep the memories of working on the biggest pastoral lease and cattle station in the world.”

“I didn’t like doing business in the pub. I would arrange to meet the farmer at home to do business over the kitchen table, where the real hero of our farms, the farm wife, could put in her orders too.”

The history of Wesfarmers

Working for Wesfarmers

When he left the job in Papua New Guinea in 1957, Victor went back to the family home in Sydney where he visited the Employment Agency to look at the jobs they had listed.

He took at a job Mai Mai station as overseer and bookkeeper. By Australian standards, Mai Mai was a medium-sized sheep station, with 20,000 Merinos and an eight-stand sheering shed. There he soon noticed the governess working at the farmstead, Miss Nancy Barkley. They married when he was 25.

Needing a house for his bride, he applied for a job at Wesfarmers, a company that then provided housing for staff on stations.

Back then, the War Service Land Settlement Board were in the last years of leasing 1,000 acre (404 ha) farms to ex-servicemen to show the Commonwealth’s gratitude for their service during the Second World War. The new farmers got a farm with a house, a dam, 300 sheep and a knapsack in case of fire. For everything else they needed, there was the Wesfarmers agent. Hence the company was always looking for agents to advise the new farmers.

It took a while for Wesfarmers to respond, but when Victor rang them up again to ask how about that job then, “Mr Hunter gave me a job as stock and station agent, based at Mount Barker near Albany.

“Agents sold everything: cattle, sheep, machines, houses, farms, even wool clippers.

“But unlike the other agents, I didn’t like doing business in the pub. I would arrange to meet the farmer at home to do business over the kitchen table, where the real hero of our farms, the farm wife, could put in her orders too.”

While this strategy was very successful, it did mean Victor had to eat a lot of lunches with the family. 

“The wife would always set aside lunch for visitors. It’s how it’s is still done on farms. Not to eat would be very rude. I remember one busy day, I forced down four lunches one after the other. They were the kind of meals I serve too, heaped plates and no skimping. I was stuffed to the gills that day, burbing all the way back to town.”

Rocky Gully started out as a tent town.

To be nearer his in-laws in Bridgetown, Victor took a new posting at Boyup Brook. From there he commuted the 200 km to visit the servicemen who had been allocated land around Rocky Gully. 

“When I started, we had few clients, but I soon signed up the whole valley for Wesfarmers. The servicemen got government wages of £11 a month as part of the settlement scheme. 

This lasted until 1959 and provided me with what we called ‘free business’.”

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Boyup’s biggest auction

Victor’s success as a farm advisor caught the attention of local landowner George Woodward Pearce, “Woolly” to his friends, which Victor soon became. 

The pair signed a contract for Victor to oversee the farm at the usual wage plus 10% of the assets. 

Back then, Woolly had been in a bit of a bind, owing Wesfarmers £48,000, but Victor had a plan…

“Stations in Western Australia were running short on ewes, but I knew Southern Australia had too many ewes. So… I gave it a go and arranged credit through Dalgety and Co.

“Their agents were my competitors while I was at Wesfarmers, but my former employer did not want to give Woolly more credit, especially not for the grand plan I had in mind.”

Sheep on a double-deck wagon. 

That grand plan was to buy some 75,000 ewes using Dalgety and Co credit, then put them on trains to Kalgoorlie, where any ewe with wool longer than half an inch was shorn to prepare the animals for the bushes of Western Australia. From there the trains went to Perth and then down to Boyup Brooke. 

“The farmers around us also needed wethers for wool production, and I took a bit of a gamble and also bought some 70,000 castrated rams. My plan was to auction the lot in one day.

“It was a massive logistical operation, getting all the stock together on the station took several months. On the day of the auction, we had some 140,000 head on only 10,000 acres.

“Bear in mind, the carrying capacity was normally only three head per acre, but we had good rains that year so we could feed all the animals.” 

Victor’s plan worked beautifully. All the farmers in the district came to bid, the ewes going under the hammer for £11 each, the wethers a bit less. Woolly got to easily pay off his £48,000 debt to Wesfarmers and Victor’s farm ledger showed a handsome profit even after all the transport expenses.

‘Luck like a fairy tale’

That auction was just the start of what would become a very successful partnership between Wooly and Victor. 

When the calendar had moved on to 1969, all of Western Australia was firmly in the grip of prospectors’ fever. This was after Lang Hancock had spotted the world’s largest iron ore deposits in the Pilbara region from the air in 1952 and people realised there was lots of money to be made from Australia’s rocks.

Two of them, the brothers Albert and Peter Engelbrecth, approached Woolly to raise $6,000 for a 10% stake in their mining company. (The Australian dollar had replaced the pound in 1966.)

At that time, Western Nickel had the rights to a lot of the undeveloped land in Western Australia but the Engelbrecths realised “undeveloped land” meant this automatically excluded the little ghost town called Broad Arrow in the middle of Western Nickel’s claim. 

Broad Arrow.

Broad Arrow had been declared a municipality in 1897 and at its peak had a population of some 2,400 people with eight hotels, a stock exchange and a modern hospital. The town closed down in 1901 after the gold seam had petered out. 

So it was a sizeable piece of developed land and the canny Engelbrecths had staked their claim precisely along the municipal borders of the old town. 

“Woolly and I agreed to float a company with the brothers. Now you have to bear in mind we had no idea of starting companies, but we got good advice from a geologist, Jeff Barrow, and in November 1969 we registered a no liability company, Westralia Nickel. 

“At that stage, the Poseidon nickel mine next door was booming and their shares exceeded $200 each, but we listed at only 20 cents a share, floating 2 million shares. 

“We listed on a Friday, not expecting much. But others must have seen we had a big stake in the middle of Western Nickel’s claim and by Monday, our shares were trading at $14,20.

Chalk Boys changing prices at the Sydney Stock Exchange.

“I said to Woolly, ‘we’d better sell some shares mate’. So I rang up our broker, Michael Baums and told him to sell 200,000 shares at $10 each. 

“Well, that put me on the path to become a suit-and-tie director of 13 companies in Perth, most of them subsidiaries of Westralia Nickel. I recall Baum later became Australia’s ambassador to the US.

“And it was all luck, more like a fairy tale than any planning on our part.”

All in a day’s work: First skinning a sheep, then chairing a board meeting.  

A director like no other

Victor may have worn the regulation tasteful blue suit and red tie to board meetings, but he is proud of being the only director of companies in Perth who started his day on a working station. 

“I don’t think there were any other directors in my time who got up in the morning to dress the sheep he had skinned the day before, milk a couple of cows by hand and then dress up in a suit and tie to drive the few hours to Perth for a board meeting,” he said.

“Business is a lot like a cricket match, it’s often not about winning, but about not losing.” 

Victor was also known to use the company rules to his advantage. 

“Business is a lot like a cricket match. It’s often not about winning, but about not losing. Sometimes, you just have to stand there and block. 

“My partner, John Martins, was a barrister and he understood this very well. During one hostile meeting with another company whose directors were trying to vote me off the board, he advised me as chair of the meeting to adjourn the meeting after acceptance of the minutes, before moving on to the next point on the agenda – the vote. 

“I adjourned that meeting for a whole month! It left my attacker sitting there with all his solicitors. And I was being decent to them, I was fully in my rights to adjourn the meeting for six months.”

“We keep hearing how it’s us humans causing all this climate change, but I’ve been around the Sun 88 times now and can tell you, it’s Earth’s egg-shaped spiral around the Sun that makes for all the changes.”

Victor fondly recalls how back then, businessmen still had bank managers who actually managed their banks, instead of just ticking boxes on an algorithm.

“At one point, a prominent Perth family approached us to buy shares in their company to enable their listing. I needed $300,000 to buy the shares and went to see my bank manager to arrange an overdraft on my account for three weeks. The money was in my account that same afternoon.”

Fencing paddocks in Australia is very hard work.

Setting borders is the hardest job

Asked what he considered the hardest work, bookkeeping, overseeing  directing or cooking, he answered without missing a beat.

“None of that is hard work. Fencing, now that is hard work. On several stations, the ground was so rocky, we had to cut down trees and drag them in line and drill holes in them to plant the fence posts in. 

“Compared to that, almost any other job is easy. But that is a lot like life, isn’t it? Setting your borders and getting to know your limits. It takes great effort.”

Talking of trees, the topic of climate change is where Victor draws a new line.

“We keep hearing how it’s us humans causing all this climate change, but I’ve been around the Sun 88 times now and can tell you, it’s Earth’s egg-shaped spiral around the Sun that makes for all the changes. Telling young people they are to blame for storms and droughts when most if not all of it is down to astronomical movements and clearly cyclical, that is just despicable.”

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