John Huxley, “SINCLAIR HILL: NOT YOUR AVERAGE BUSHIE,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, June 12, 1993, p. 39.

Four thousand feet above the parched, brown Queensland cattle country west of Roma, Sinclair Hill sits at the controls of his Mooney M20E plane. He is cooling a cup of black billy tea in the draught from the overhead air-nozzle, marvelling at a wedge-tailed eagle as it soars and swoops through the cloudless skies, and musing, characteristically, about Canberra’s contribution to this once great nation.

“They should bomb — neutron bomb — the bloody place,” he rages above the drone of the engines. “It’s a monster. It distorts reality … disorients politicians … full of people who believe shit doesn’t smell …”

Suddenly, he breaks off. The tea slops and the plane banks sharply, slicing earthwards. Only after several seconds in apparent free fall does it level off. “Just checking a water trough,” explains Hill casually before resuming a familiar diatribe.

Behind Hill — cramped in among an eclectic cargo that includes rose bushes, briefcases stuffed with papers, oil bottles and supplies of his favourite corned beef fritters — Phillipa Morris scarcely glances up from her book, a biography of Lady Astor.

After almost three years working for Hill as — well, what? — secretary, shopper, dishwasher, devil’s advocate, general factotum perhaps, Morris has learned to expect only the unexpected from a man whose passions are as paradoxical as they are powerful.

Hill counts among his acquaintances Prince Charles, whom he taught to play polo in the Orangerie behind Windsor Castle; yet he favours Australia becoming a republic. He describes the advertising man John Singleton, a friend, as “the Voltaire of Australia”, but says the dead person he would most like to meet is the Russian revolutionary, Lenin. He admires politicians as diverse as Neville Wran and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen. “Both great Australians.”

He is as happy eating steak at the Bellevue Hill home of another friend “the formidable, the intimidating” Kerry Packer as he is munching sugar sandwiches with the “salt of the earth” bushies, Andy and Joan Twist, who manage his remote Tooloombilla property.

He is scathingly critical of present immigration policies, which, he says, allow too many Asians into Australia, but devotes much of his time to helping the “blackfellas” of Moree, in northern NSW. He is a product of inherited, old squattocracy wealth, descended from the Arnott’s biscuit dynasty and went to The King’s School, Parramatta. But he rails against the vicious narrow-mindedness of the local “picnic race set”, and blames the rural crisis partly on “boarding school programming” of generations of landowners.

He complains that “the whole green thing” has done too far. But will risk serious injury trying to free a kangaroo trapped in a fence on his Moree property.

“In his zest for life, in his rages and enthusiasms, he embodies the best and worst in all of us, but on a larger canvas and in brighter colours,” says Chris Ashton, a family friend and the author of a forthcoming book on polo.

Some may be offended by his megalomania. “He’s a bloody dictator, always wanting to orchestrate the world,” says one subordinate. Even the loyal Morris, an English political scientist graduate, describes him “as a throwback to feudalism when feudalism worked“.

Some may be wearied by his hard-driving personality; one of his own farm managers has even banned him from driving the property’s 4WD truck. And some may be infuriated by his obstinate unpredictability. “Sinclair’s changed his mind” is a complaint frequently heard through his far-flung cattle empire.

But few would dispute Ashton’s assessment of one of Australia’s most remarkable men. As the barman at the Moree Club, where the Hills have dined and drunk for four generations, puts it affectionately: “Jesus, he’s a terrible man. A real character.” Irritating, irascible, but never boring. And, ultimately, irresistible.

In his 58 years, Sinclair Hill has been many things — the world’s greatest polo player, failed politician, art gallery patron, multimillionaire beef promoter — but he insists that he remains first and foremost a cattleman. And, right now, like most other cattlemen, he is struggling to keep his business together as the drought burns ever deeper into resources and resilience.

“We’re not just talking drought strategy now; we’re talking survival strategy,” says Hill, as he contemplates another week of hectic activity, balancing his different interests.

“The death of the bush is the biggest calamity facing Australia today,” he says. “We’ve got drought, recession, low commodity prices. People out there are starving, and what are our politicians all excited about? Winning the Olympics. Planting a few palm trees at Homebush. I … I …”

Words for once fail him.

He is standing in the kitchen of his Centennial Park home, the Sydney base for his wife, Wendy, and younger daughter, Alice. Across the park stands the Royal Agricultural Society Showgrounds that he is trying to protect from destruction. He has been campaigning hard, “taking the bull by the tit” as he puts it. “The showgrounds are the heart and soul of Australia,” he laments.

On the table in front of him are papers for another project — Geebung, Ashton’s history of polo. Hill, who has conquered childhood dyslexia, is simultaneously checking the manuscript and telephoning to check that artwork is proceeding.

His main preoccupation, however, is with events many kilometres away at the battle for the bush. “That’s the front line. I’ve got to get back there as soon as possible.” Though based in Moree, the Hills manage properties extending over several hundred thousand hectares across northern NSW and Queensland. They are engaged now in what their son, Noel, describes as a grazier’s “game of chess”, aimed at ensuring the survival of thousands of head of cattle. It has become a daily battle, balancing cattle and prices, feed and water. Slowly, but inexorably, it seems, the options are becoming exhausted as the drought continues, unbroken by recent showers.

Even by Hill’s frenetic standards, it promises to be a busy week. On Monday, after a typical late change of plans, Hill is to be found in Brisbane. His priorities are to negotiate a property deal, which could ease his feed problems, and to sign up more sponsors for the polo book. The first deal falls through, but a Queensland company has been persuaded to be $25,000 towards publication.

There’s another unexpected bonus from the Brisbane trip. Hill finds himself on the same flight from Sydney as Bob Hawke. Never one to let an opportunity slip, Hill tries to persuade the former Prime Minister to talk free of charge at a fundraising event for the local Moree Boomerangs, the largely Aboriginal football team Hill is helping. He’s confident Hawke will come. “If he tries to wiggle out of it, I’ll set Singo on him like a bulldog.”

Tuesday, and after more negotiations, Hill drives south to Moree. The trip takes him “seven hours, no milkshakes”, meaning no stops.

Shortly after 5pm, he arrives at the Moree Plains Gallery, which is now showing Aboriginal artwork from the collection of Janet Holmes à Court. It is a huge coup for the small-town gallery, which Hill describes as another project, aimed at encouraging “cultural fusion” between blacks and whites in a town traditionally blighted by poor race relations.

As the chairman of the local Cultural Art Foundation, Hill helped to raise finance for the gallery. But, typically, his involvement has also been heavily hands-on. “One day we found him up on the roof take pot shots at the pigeons that were crapping on the gallery,” says Leigh Purcell, a former Sotheby’s expert recruited by Hill to be gallery director.

After a quick beer at the Moree Club and visits to the butcher for meat and the store for milk — “all ours is frozen,” he apologises — Hill arrives at the family homestead of Terlings, a short drive from Moree.

Dinner is in the formal dining room, in front of an open fire and surrounded by pictures. They include a fading photograph of the original Terlings, in Essex, whence the Hills came in the 1880s, and oils of a cricket match at Birdsville and of a landscape in the Kimberley. “Patrick Hockey said it was chocolate-box stuff when he came, but so what,” says Hill defiantly.

By 6.30 Wednesday morning, Hill is up and at ’em again, telephoning for progress reports, checking recent copies of The Land and talking to Noel, who now manages Terlings, about possibly buying a second-hand tractor at a clearance sale next day at nearby Croppa Creek.

On one wall of the kitchen, where Phillipa is cooking bacon and eggs, are pictures of Hill having his hat playfully pulled down over his eyes by a youthful Price Charles. On another is a photocopy of a newspaper report recording that one Henry Baldwin was transported to Sydney in 1791 after being found guilty of steeling an overcoat from a man in England.

“That’s my father’s mother’s great-great-grandfather,” says Hill proudly after a couple of attempts. The discovery that his ancestors had come to Australia in chains excited this tearaway son of an abstemious father.

Moree lies within what the guidebooks call the “richest agricultural shire in Australia”, but times are tough even here. The area has been drought-declared almost continuously since October 1991, according to Graham Rowland, a rural counsellor. In his Moree office hangs a sign: “We don’t believe in miracles, we rely on them.”

Not Hill. He is looking for solutions of his own as he tours Terlings with Noel, one of a family of four daughters and two sons, in the four-wheel-drive Pathfinder.

“You’ve done a great job, son,” says Hill as he inspects cattle distributed over the 5,000 hectares. There are plans to build more “turkey’s nest” dams to catch the prayed-for rain, talk of stretching finances further to buy feed, and discussion of the pros and cons of investing in road trains to help shift cattle south if the drought continues.

The overall prognosis is not good: almost every paddock “needs a good drink”, agree father and son. But bushman Hill is clearly in his black-earth element, clambering over fences, assessing cattle (“fucking yak!” he grunts at one beast) or chasing feral pigs. “Yo! Go! Go, you beauties,” he yells with childlike enthusiasm.

As Suzie Ward, of the Moree business centre, says: “Sinclair loves being a cowboy.”

Over dinner that evening, the conversation flows as freely as the Koonunga Hill claret. Princes, Wales and Edinburgh, are a taboo subject. But there’s the polo: “Don’t play any more. Too old and not enough time.” The Packers, whom he admires: “They’d sooner fight you than feed you.” And politics.

Hill once stood for the Senate as No. 1 candidate for the Workers’ Party formed with Singleton (who was also his partner in the abortive attempt to reorientate the beef industry’s promotion in the 1980s). The main slogan (Less tax. Less government. More freedom.) could have been written last week.

Eighteen years on, he suggests: “The public misunderstood. Got the idea it was something to do with communism and the class struggle.”

Asked what he wants government to do, he replies: “Get out of the bloody road. Stop all this nonsense about level playing fields.”

Early the next morning, the 25-year-old Mooney plane is swinging in over the manicured lawns and green roofs of the Twists’ homestead to land at Tooloombilla, close to the Warrego Highway, near Mitchell. It is the first in a two-day series of property-hops by the tireless Hill, who clocks up about 50,000 kilometres in his plane each year.

The welcome is as warm as the macaroni cheese lunch prepared by Mrs Twist, for whom Hill has brought a present of a big bottle of Yves Saint Laurent perfume. Though by his own admission he cannot pay them enough — perhaps $400 a week for his managers — Hill’s love of these “wonderful, warm, resilient people” is genuine. He “looks after” them” in various ways, such as ensuring their children are properly educated and that they can afford to visit ailing relatives.

And they may grumble about his bloody obstinacy and inconsistency, but they repay Hill with a loyalty which city folk would find difficult to comprehend. “We stick together through good times, bad times,” says Hill.

Even from the air, the brown, bad times are instantly apparent: cattle are running out of feed.

From the other Hill properties, Babbillora, Fernlea, Redford, Taylor Plains, Hoganthella and the rest, the story is the same. Or worse. On Friday, Hoganthella’s manager, Dominic Logan, has little feed to show Hill on a four-hour long tour of his 36,000 hectares.

Throughout the two days, Hill directs operations, be it out in the paddocks or in yards. His shirt-collar turned upwards in a trademark style borrowed from his childhood hero Don Bradman, he stands in the Tooloombilla stockyards, chasing the cattle up the ramps and into the road train to tack them south to feed at Terlings.

And when he’s not out on the front line, he’s almost always on the telephone. Payment for an artist working on the polo book has to be arranged. Terlings has been told to expect the road train, ETA 2 am. Noel has been outbid for the tractor at the Croppa Creek clearance sale. And so on …

According to Phillipa Morris, after ruining one mobile phone there, Hill has at least been stopped from conducting business in the shower.

Before heading back to Sydney, via Roma, where has has other business to conduct, Hill pauses briefly to reflect. As Phillipa says, far from slowing down, her boss has probably sped up. “Maybe he feels he’s running out of time.”

Right now, though, he’s tired. “I’ve spread myself a bit thin lately,” he admits in a rare moment of weakness. He’s down. “Of course it depresses me to see things the way they are.” But he’s bloody well not out.

Peering down 4,000 feet through rheumy, dust-scratched eyes for signs of fresh life in the sunburned bush, he says: “Look, the smart people are still there. They’re still fighting. It’ll be tough, but they’ll — we’ll — survive. We’ve got to, for Australia’s sake. We’re the ones who produce its real wealth. Now, those wankers in Canberra …”