50-odd years in the game
Des says it’s the best the market has been
DES Muller entered the cattle game as a self-taught auctioneer in 1949 at the tender age of 19.
The now 86-year-old has seen all stages of the industry and says the cattle market is the strongest he has seen in his lifetime.
Having held an auctioneer’s licence for 50-odd years, he said it is a solid market wherever you go in Queensland.
The Rural Weekly caught up with Des at the Gracemere Sales last Friday, where he reflected on his time in the industry.
“It was one of those skills I just took on,” Des said of auctioneering.
“I was self-taught, we didn’t have schools in my day or anything like that and it just came naturally to me.”
After mastering the skill of auctioneering, he entered the agency game in 1949, where he would stay until 1984.
“I sold in centres all around Queensland and as far as New South Wales, down as far as the border,” he said.
“I honestly reckon over the years I was in the game we saw the best of most of the cattle business.
“We saw the ups and downs of it but today, with all of the paperwork and systems, it’s just chaotic, out of my range anyway.”
Des said he had seen a lot of changes in saleyards with the major ones being the live weight complexes and the conversion to decimal currency.
“The major differences from then to now, in the likes of a saleyard like here (in Gracemere) and live weight selling complexes, is you’ve taken all the guesswork out of it,” he said.
“I had a saleyards I ran out at Moura for 30 years and we had a live weight selling centre there when I left.
“Then it was currency. In my day we sold in the pounds,
shillings and pence, then we had the conversion over to the decimal currency and that was a fair sort of learning curve I can tell you,” he chuckled.
While Des sold all over Queensland, Moura was his home centre for around 30 years.
“We used to run a sale
there every Friday of the year and in the best of it I think we put 71,000 head of cattle through the yards there in one year,” he said.
“We used to average around to 50,000 to 55,000 a year. It was a full-time job.”
While Des said he misses being in the game, he said
when you hit 86 years of age it’s time to give it up, as the game is all memory.
“I’m retired and living in town now,” he said.
“My family still has property at Comet and I’m just backwards and forwards between here and there, seeing how I can help them.
“We breed and fatten cattle out there. We run about 1500 head of cattle on 19,000 acres of country.”
When Des isn’t out at Comet he makes his best efforts to get out to the Gracemere Saleyards.
“I come out and see what goes on when I can,” he said.
❝We had the conversion over to the decimal currency and that was a fair sort of learning curve I can tell you. — Des Muller