COVER STORY
Josef Chromy fled war-torn Czechoslovakia as a 19-year-old. He worked hard to establish a business empire – and at 87 he’s still going strong
Meet Josef Chromy, the 87-year-old post-war migrant who has built a business empire on the Apple Isle
Josef Chromy is a man who is always ahead of the curve. Sometimes it is because he anticipates the rising wave of something and rides it in, sometimes it is because he creates the wave.
An almost compulsive businessman, and living in Launceston, Chromy has built himself up steadily from his arrival as a post-war migrant with virtually nothing, to become one of the state’s biggest movers and shakers.
Almost from the moment he set foot on the North-West Coast, he started identifying opportunities and niches.
He saw a need in the 1950s in Tasmania for a continentalstyle smallgoods butcher business, suitable for Australian palates, and grew it into the iconic Tasmanian Blue Ribbon Meats.
When he saw the Tasmanian wine industry struggling to produce the volume of grapes needed to make winemaking profitable in the 1990s, he bought three established wineries and grew them into viable enterprises, taking what he learnt and turning it into his own successful vineyard and winery.
And at a time when most people would be thinking about slowing down, the now 87-year-old businessman is busily expanding his property portfolio, continuing to acquire and resurrect some of Launceston’s most iconic buildings and breathing new life into them, and into the local economy.
Having turned the former Launceston General Hospital building into a stunning hotel, luxury apartments and commercial space, and more recently acquiring the Penny Royal site and turning it back into an exciting tourist attraction, he is now turning his sights on the TRC Hotel site, with plans for another luxury venture, the Gorge Hotel, at a time when the state is crying out for more accommodation.
“It is currently in a planning phase,” Chromy says. “The plans are for a 140-room 4.5-star hotel overlooking the Tamar River and Launceston Seaport. “The hotel is to be built next to the existing TRC establishment on the corner of Paterson and Margaret streets and, as well as the accommodation, the plans include a conference centre with a capacity for up to 1000 people, rooftop bar and a spa.
“We are currently preparing a development application to go in front of the council and, if all goes well, hope to start building within the next 18 months.”
Chromy is a man who has become accustomed to creating change, to seeing his visions become real, and it is something he has worked hard for. Even now, his speech impaired by a stroke he suffered in 2005, he becomes frustrated when the words refuse to form properly in his mouth. He prefers to answer questions by email, ensuring the thoughts and words in his mind can be properly expressed and sent into the world in the way he intends them.
Chromy says he has a bit of a thing for old and significant buildings. He feels a need to preserve them, but says they need to be useful somehow, as the best way to keep an old building standing is to keep it busy.
The Launceston headquarters of Chromy’s business, the JAC Group (which stands for Josef and Alida Chromy), is ensconced in one such building, the old Custom House building on the banks of the Tamar River. The grand 1885 building, with its soaring columns and intricate decorative flourishes, once housed one of the most important government departments of its time, controlling everything that came in and out of the port of Launceston. Today, as the offices of JAC Group, it still serves an important role in the city’s prosperity, with Chromy’s ongoing endeavours to give something back to the city that has been so good to him for so long.
“It is great to give back to the community in a form which is also financially viable, and restoring existing buildings is an ideal case because you usually start with an existing structure and certain amount of infrastructure,” Chromy says.
“I’d never be able to build The Charles [Hotel] without using the bones of the old Launceston General Hospital.”
Chromy was born in 1930 in a town called Zdar in Czechoslovakia. From the age of 10 he worked in the family business, following in his father’s footsteps and becoming a qualified butcher by the age of 16.
His teenage years unfolded against the backdrop of World War II, with Czechoslovakia being occupied by the Nazis and Chromy’s home town used as a base for regional German command. Even once the war ended in 1945, the Nazi occupation was replaced by Soviet Russian occupation, and Chromy says life was scarcely any better under communism.
Despite the oppression he kept up his studies, determined to make his mark in the meat industry, and by the age of 19 he had earned his Master of Meat Technology qualification.
It was shortly after this that he decided he could no longer live under Stalin’s rule and started making plans to escape his home country. He made plans with two friends but did not tell his immediate family, because they could have been arrested for collusion if they had any knowledge of them.
After making the dangerous border crossing into Russianoccupied Austria, avoiding landmines and guard dogs, Chromy and his friends planned to board a train for Vienna and eventually reach US-occupied Salzburg. Both of his companions were captured while trying to board the train, and later were returned to Czechoslovakia and imprisoned. Chromy evaded capture by travelling on a different train. “I managed to board a train that was headed for Vienna, but we still had to pass through Russian-occupied Austria. On the train, the conductor was walking through the carriage checking tickets. I was terrified that he would ask me something and because I only spoke Czech, he would realise I was escaping and would report me to the Russian soldiers and I would be arrested or possibly shot,” Chromy says. “I quickly decided to leave my ticket in my top pocket and pretended to be asleep. I was hoping he would punch the ticket and keep moving but he prods me and wakes me. Scared at what might happen if I am discovered, I pretended I was deaf and dumb and moan and dribble and wave my hands around. He looked quite shocked, so he punched my ticket and kept going. I believe this quick thinking saved my life. I arrived in Vienna safely. It teaches me to always have a backup plan, in life and in business.”
Once safely in Salzburg, Chromy was granted refugee status but only spent 10 days in a refugee camp before being told he had to leave. He spent roughly five months fending for himself and scrounging meals wherever he could before eventually migrating to Australia in 1951 to start a new life on the NorthWest Coast at the age of just 20. He says the harsh years in Czechoslovakia and Austria had left him prepared for anything with the resilience to weather whatever life threw at him.
“I did know one Czech man who I met on the boat and later on I got to know another refugee, Milan Vyhnalek, who founded the cheesemaking factory Lactos. However, there was no help coming from [other] refugees as everyone was busy looking after themselves.”
He managed to get a job in Railton at the Goliath Cement factory, working with asbestos. “When I was at Goliath, my accommodation was a 4½m x 3½m shed with another immigrant. My bed was a farm gate with hessian bags stuffed with straw. We later found out the dangers of working with asbestos. I was very happy to have work. Sadly, my friend I shared the shed with died of mesothelioma many years later. I was very lucky that I did not suffer the same fate.”
He then had several different jobs in the North-West, gaining experience in butcher shops, smallgoods and ham and bacon production. “So when I was ready to start my own business the help came from the locals, namely the Field family, who owned a butcher shop in Quadrant Mall in Launceston, and the Oliver family of Railton who provided me with a loan for setting up my first butcher shop in Burnie.” It wasn’t all smooth sailing in the early days of running his own businesses. In 1953, one of his first enterprises, Prague Meats, failed after three months. At the time he cited, “lack of capital, limited English and no wife to look after me,” as reasons behind its demise. At this point he says: “I was very unhappy, but I made sure all my creditors were paid.” After the disappointment of Prague Meats, however, things soon turned around. “The owner of the Dutch butcher shop [in Penguin] had asked me to come back and work for him again,” Chromy says. “It wasn’t long before he made me the production manager. It was here, in 1953, I met my beautiful Alida, a Dutch girl. However, I didn’t speak Dutch and she didn’t speak Czech, but we fell in love and learned English together. We married in 1954.” In 1957 Chromy opened his own European-style butcher shop in Burnie, eventually giving it the name Blue Ribbon Meat Products, a name which went on to become synonymous with the Tasmanian meat industry. Blue Ribbon expanded steadily, Chromy opening more shop fronts and distribution centres, buying farms and abattoirs, and absorbing other meat businesses. After consolidating Blue Ribbon’s operations in Launceston, Chromy moved there to live in 1984.
Chromy floated Blue Ribbon on the stock exchange in 1993, which enabled him to form his group of companies, the JAC Group, and expand into what he could see was the next up-andcoming industry in Tasmania: wine.
Chromy believed the state’s fledgling wine industry had great potential but many operators were undercapitalised and were struggling to attain the economy of scale required to be viable. So he set about acquiring vineyards and wineries – including Heemskerk (starting to produce the now famous Jansz sparkling), Rochecombe and Buchanan vineyards – and using his considerable business experience to strengthen and expand them.
In 1998 Chromy sold the reinvigorated Heemskerk Wine Group to Pipers Brook, and invested the sale profits in building his own vineyard and winery from the ground up, Tamar Ridge Wines at Kayena. By 2003 Tamar Ridge was a thriving and award-winning winery, and Chromy sold it to Gunns Ltd, this sale once more allowing him to move on to his next project: Josef Chromy Wines at Relbia on the outskirts of Launceston.
With 61ha of vineyard, a winery, a restaurant and cellar door, Josef Chromy Wines has become something of a cultural landmark in Launceston, even hosting A Day on the Green concerts.
Even as he was developing his wine interests in the late 1990s, Chromy had begun investing in various significant properties around Tasmania, including Launceston’s Customs House, Trinity House in Hobart (which he no longer owns), the former JAC Group office on Elphin Rd, originally built in the 1890s, and other commercial properties in northern Tasmania.
In 2008 he bought the old Launceston General Hospital on Charles St and converted it into a hotel, restaurant and luxury apartments. A few years later in Hobart he acquired the former Bureau of Meteorology Building in Battery Point and converted it into a luxury apartment building. The almost-forgotten Penny Royal site in Launceston soon followed and was also reinvigorated, and the Gorge Hotel proposal is a sure sign Chromy has no intention of resting on his laurels.
But for all his success, Chromy is no stranger to great loss.
“My amazing wife Alida suffered from Alzheimer’s disease, which took her from me in May 2010, after 55 years of marriage. It was a huge loss and Alida was my biggest supporter and the love of my life. Our only child, our daughter Margaret passed away from cancer a few years ago,” Chromy says.
He did see his parents again after fleeing Czechoslovakia. In 1968, 18 years after Chromy escaped, they flew to Australia. It was a warm reunion but tinged with sadness. “They were leaving to go back home from Sydney airport on August 20, 1968 – the day Soviet armies invaded Czechoslovakia,” Chromy says. “I still have a photo of my father sitting in an airport lounge in
Sydney reading the [newspaper] with the whole front page informing about the Soviet invasion. I urged them not to go back, to stay with me, but they wanted to return to our homeland and their family.
“I never saw my father after that, as he passed away in 1969. My mother never came to Australia again but I saw her on several occasions during my subsequent visits to Europe before she passed away in 1985. I still have very strong ties to my home country. I still remember my first trip back to Czechoslovakia in 1970, which was still under the communist rule at the time. You have to understand that I was considered a criminal by the authorities for illegally crossing the border back in 1950. So 20 years later, despite receiving all the proper documents allowing me, as an Australian, to travel to Czechoslovakia, before crossing the border I was still wondering whether I would be arrested or not. I wasn’t.”
Chromy has kept his family close in his business. His grandson Dean Cocker is managing director of the JAC Group, his grand-nephew Petr Kriz is an executive director focusing mainly on land development operations, another grand-nephew Jan Pesl is a business development manager, and his third grandnephew Pavel Cernik takes care of the company’s IT.
Chromy retired as chairman in 2011 but remains directly involved with the company as founding director. Chromy and his businesses have won accolades and awards, and in 1997 he was awarded the Medal (OAM) of the Order of Australia.
But he maintains one of his proudest moments was being invited to lunch with the Queen during her visit to Tasmania in March, 2000, along with eight other prominent Tasmanians, including cricketer Ricky Ponting and then-premier Jim Bacon.
“We did have a good conversation, as it was a very private setting. I still owned Tamar Ridge Wines at the time, so my conversation with the Queen was mainly about Tasmanian wine.”
At 87, Chromy acknowledges he probably should be easing up, but mentally he’s as alert as ever. “My mind is always full of ideas and I will keep on contributing. I enjoy both working and taking time for holidays, but my work is always foremost in my mind. I would not be able to do this today without the support of my chairman, directors and my loyal staff and I am pleased that I was able to turn my childhood dreams into a reality.”