SIR SIDNEY KIDMAN

Southland Times, Issue 18965, 13 June 1923, Page 15

SIR SIDNEY KIDMAN

AUSTRALIA’S RICHEST MAN. HOW HE ACCUMULATED HIS WEALTH The other day I asked a well-known man about town: ‘‘Who is the richest man in Australia?” And he promtly replied: “Sir Sidney Kidman,” writes D. J. Quinn in the Sydney Sun. A good many of the public, I dare say, entertain a similar opinion. For since the death of James Tyson, who was three times and more a millionaire, there has been no one whom the popular imagination has endowed with the Midas touch to the same extent as the “Cattle King” of Kapunda. There is this in common between Tyson and Sir Sidney Kidman, that they both started out. in life with nothing. Each was the architect of his own fortune. Born near Adelaide in 1857, young Kidman left home at the age of 13, and became a cowboy on Mount Gipps Station, near the sight of the present Broken Hill mines. When “the Hill” was discovered, Kidman made his first deal. He exchanged ten steers for a fourteenth share, and sold out for £l5O, which he never got. All his life he was engaged in ventures of a speculative charac- ' ter. Mostly he has won out, but he has ■ had many set-backs, and sometimes very , heavy losses. On one station alone, during ! a spell of drought, he lost 70,000 sheep which he had purchased a year before at a high figure. Ask him how many head of horses and cattle he has, and he frankly tells you he doesn’t know. His particularly opportunity came after the drought of 1902, when numbers of stations in the far west of Queensland, prac- • tically denuded of stock, became almost l valueless, and many leases were thrown in. IMr Kidman (as he then was) bought or { took un a number of these stations and i re-stocked them with cattle from the Gulf | country and the Northern Territory. Giv- | ing evidence before a Royal Commission inquiring into the meat trade in Sydney in 1912, Sir Sidney, referring to that drought, said that lots of owners were obliged to sell out for very little. Cattle stations sold out as low as 10/- a head, though he bought one place in western Queensland for 8/-

“with horses thrown in.” Another station in the Macdonnell Ranges he secured at 12/- a head for the horses “and the cattle given in.”

Some people have been disposed to criticise the system which enables one man to acquire the control of thousands of square miles of land for grazing purposes. In this connection I quote some extracts from a letter written to the Sydney Stock and Station Journal in December, 1919, by Mr R. M. Pitt, head of the well-known firm of fat-stock salesmen: —“All the stations Mr Kidman acquired in Queensland were cattle-runs, and the secret of success in dealing with such is to go in for sufficient water improvements, but keep your other expenses down. ... If Mr Kidman had not stocked those properties out there, the probability is they would have remained unstocked and unoccupied to this day, an obvious national loss. He had the financial resources and the courage to go in and try again where others had failed and given up in despair. And he has held on . . . . Whatever run he takes up he makes it the better for his having been there. Water improvements in particular he concentrates on, spending money freely in this respect, and they are the basis of success in these dry regions. ... In

the far west of New South Wales, in the driest and most precarious parts of the whole State, Mr Kidman is again playing the part of rescurer. The country out there has been the grave of the hopes of many of our most enterprising pastoralists. They went out with hopes running high, made. a. brave fight of it, and failed. Numbers of them have been ruined. It has been, a will-o’-the-wisp country, luring men on to destruction. There have been a few good years, but the bad years have been many, ahd the average has been against the pioneers. . . . What the general public

should recognise is that Mr Kidman goes right outside the settled and safe areas, takes the risk of going where the small man cannot and should not go, and few big men dare go; and there improves the country and adds generally to the meat and wool production of the Commonwealth. He is thereby a benefactor to his country, and as the venture is a pure speculation, if he does have good fortune he is entitled to it, as if he loses no one would want to share the loss.”