The British company ‘Vestey Group’ was founded in 1897 by brothers William and Edmund Vestey. Around the early 1900’s the Vestey family company had begun purchasing agricultural land in South American countries and Australia, and over the decades the company developed vertical integration – cattle stations, meatworks (eg at Wyndham [WA], Bullocky Point in Darwin [NT] and Lakes Creek at Rockhampton [Qld]), canneries, butchershops and a shipping company (the Blue Star Line). Vesteys owned a huge amount of pastoral land in northern Australia, particularly in the NT and East Kimberley region of WA. Vestey cattle stations included: Flora Valley, Sturt Creek, Gordon Downs, Ruby Plains, Nicholson, Louisa Downs, Spring Creek, Mistake Creek and Ord River in WA. (It seems like the list of cattle stations in the East Kimberley that had never been owned by Vesteys, would be much shorter than the list of cattle stations they owned at one time.) Vesteys also owned Qld stations, such as Oban and Morestone, and valuable NT cattle stations including Kirkimbie, Waterloo, Willeroo, Glencoe (now part of Ban Ban Springs) and Helen Springs, and Wave Hill Station, when the Gurindji aboriginal stockmen famously walked off in 1966. The Vestey Group had sold all their Australian cattle stations by the early 1990s.
The Vestey family still own large cattle ranches in Venezuela, trading under the company name of ‘Agroflora’ and President Hugo Chavez has just announced that the Vestey family’s 290,000 hectares is to be taken over by the Venezuelan Government. The Vestey family had been negotiating with the Venezuelan Government in regard to reparation for resumed land, and according to Hugo Chavez, negotiations broke down because the Vestey family insisted on payment in U.S. dollars rather than Venezuelan dollars.
The reasons given by President Chavez for the resumption of land, are related to improving social equity, food security and environmental management. In recent years, a number of significant assets owned by other private companies have been seized by the Chavez government.
For more information on the Vestey land resumption in Venezuela, see William Hayes’ ‘Meat Trade News Daily’.
Tags: Australian Beef Industry, Pastoral companies, Rural properties for sale and ownership, Pastoral history, Rural foreign investment