‘Untapped potential’
The owner of Grampians pyrenees business of the year believes Stawell district is perfectly placed to develop into a major regional manufacturing hub.
Action Steel Industries’ Martin Grace said while industries such as tourism had attracted considerable development attention, manufacturing also represented untapped potential.
Mr Grace added, while reflecting on award success, that Stawell had proven to be strategically ideal for his family business.
He said Stawell’s geographical location had allowed for a free flow of freight to and from the Wimmera centre, providing a reliable connection for goods and services to the western suburbs of Melbourne, across Victoria and interstate.
“Stawell is absolutely brilliant for us. I am very passionate about regional areas and see huge potential for manufacturing generally in Stawell,” he said.
“We are involved in freight deliveries every day. We are incredibly well positioned considering the area we can cover in a two-and-a-half-hour radius.”
Action Steel Industries, a third-generation family business that specialises in pre-engineered steel-framed industrial, commercial and rural buildings, won Business of the Year at Neoen Grampians Pyrenees Business Awards at St Arnaud Town Hall.
Its win from a high-quality field of businesses from across Northern Grampians, Ararat and Pyrenees municipalities was the highlight of the dinner presentations.
The business, which employs a staff of about 20 and eight sub-contractor teams, is an in-depth family affair, with Mr Grace’s sons Vince and Lennie operational directors and wife Elspeth and daughter Kristy also involved.
Mr Grace confirmed the firm was exploring expansion through sustained growth. It has planning approval to develop an office complex to improve the working environment at its Playford Street factory.
“We will be launching that fairly soon,” he said.
Action Steel Industries also won an Excellence in Manufacturing category on the night and Mr Grace revealed it was the first time the business had entered the awards.
“Someone sent us some information suggesting we enter and we thought ‘yeah, why not?’ – we had never pushed that side of things before,” he said.
“We were surprised to win the first award and then when we were announced as business of the year it was very humbling – but we also felt very honoured,” he said.
Mr Grace said he was keen to support a regional area when he shifted to Stawell from Adelaide in January, 1993.
“We had diversified out of steel fabrication into buying and selling metal-working machinery and we basically ran that until 2001,” he said.
“But I went back to what I knew best, steel fabrication, concentrating on specialty steel-framed buildings.
“We service a wide area, with 80 percent of our work within a 200-kilometre radius. But we’ve also built in northern Queensland, the Northern Territory and Tasmania and even sent a large workshop to Cote d’ivoire on the west coast of Africa.”
A variety of guests including Regional Development Minister Jaala Pulford, local government leaders, development officials and sponsors and business representatives spoke at the event.
All you need to do in the Wimmera to feel small in such a busy and complicated world is to stand in the middle of a lonely paddock where nothing surrounds you except the sky bleeding into a distant horizon.
If you think too hard about it, the sense of insignificance can be overwhelming.
But we should never fall into the trap of believing that people in our part of the world can not make a significant impression in global, let alone national or state affairs.
While our vast landscape, stretching from the Pyrenees and Grampians to the Mallee, and our relatively tiny population suggest we’re little more than dots on the planet, history suggests much more.
We only need to consider last weekend’s First World War centenary commemoration in Horsham of a famous Australian cavalry charge on the wells of Beersheba in the Middle East.
The battle, which helped pave the way for Allied forces to reach Damascus, played a significant role in knocking Turkey out of the war. It was a significant achievement.
The event, history’s last full-scale cavalry charge, involving soldiers riding full tilt with drawn bayonets across three kilometres into the face of enemy fire, is the stuff of legend.
And it’s our legend. Many of the men in the saddle of their thirsty whaler horses who snatched a decisive victory were from regional areas across Australia.
Their numbers included young men from western Victorian communities including the Wimmera and Mallee.
In fact, Beersheba is on campaign colours of what eventually evolved into the Australian Army 15 Transport Squadron.
The squadron has its headquarters in Horsham and its depot, the former Horsham Drill Hall, is named in honour of Rupanyup’s James Lawson.
Lawson led the 4th Light Horse Regiment’s A Squadron during the charge.
A message in this is that we should never sell ourselves short, regardless of where and the circumstances involving, we live.
The Beersheba charge occurred in a fierce time of conflict and in reality is only one incident where Wimmera people had a profound influence in battle by putting their lives on the line.
It is also important to remember that our region, as humble as it might seem, has also heavily influenced international circumstances in times of peace.
We only need to consider our most glaring example – our farming communities – that do it every year as major players in efforts to feed the world.