Sidney Kidman

Sir Sidney Kidman (born May 9, 1857 near Adelaide , † September 2, 1935 ibid) was an Australian self-made man .

Life

Kidman grew up near Adelaide. His father passed away when he was six months old. When he was only 13 he bought a one-eyed horse for £ 2 10s and relocated to New South Wales . He got his first job at a horse station near Broken Hill . Later he started his own business with a team of cattle drovers and opened a butcher's shop and a shop in Cobar during the onset of the copper rush . At 21 he inherited £ 400 from his grandfather and bought horses and cattle. He later bought a 1/4 stake in the Broken Hill Proprietary Mine, paid for 10 cattle at £ 4 each, and later sold the stake for £ 150. In 1886 he bought "Owen Springs Station" and expanded his business to Queensland . In 1899 he founded the company “S. Kidman and Co ”. He was a millionaire during the First World War. He and his wife support the Australian armed forces. In 1921 he donated his farm "Eringa", near Kapunda , to the state, with the condition to set up a school there. Kidman was beaten for the Knight Bachelor in the same year and from then on carried the suffix "Sir". Sidney Kidman moved to Adelaide and passed the business on to his son.

In 1885 he married Isabel Brown Wright and had three daughters and one son. Kidman was nicknamed "The Cattle King".

The company "S. Kidman and Co ”is today the largest private landowner in Australia with a total of 124,000 km² (corresponds to the area of ​​the two Alpine countries Austria and Switzerland together). She owns the Anna Creek Station , one of the largest cattle ranches in the world.

literature

• Ion Llewellyn Idriess: The Cattle King - The Story of Sir Sidney Kidman . New edition. HarperCollins Publishers (Australia), Sydney 2001, ISBN 978-0207197826 .

Web links

• "Dictionary of Australian Biography at Project Gutenberg" (English)
• Website of "S. Kidman and Co " (English)