BRIDGING THE GAP
She’s a master at bringing people together, helping others get started, bridging the gap between city and the bush. Meet our Chief Entrepreneur Julia Spicer
Growing up on a cattle property near the tiny Queensland town of Bymount, the state’s newest Chief Entrepreneur, Julia Spicer, was always expected to pitch in. Bymount, about an hour north of Roma, had a hall, a tennis court and a primary school where Spicer was, for several years, the only child in her grade – and half the kids in the other classes were her siblings.
Spicer, now 43, laughs. “It was so small, a one teacher school, and in its time it has had as few as three children, and as many as 50. But it’s still going today because schools and services like it are vital to rural families.” Families like hers (parents Susan and Glenn, now in their early 70s, sister Raine, 40, and brother Angus, 38) who had to – as rural families always have – make their way, and their own fun.
“There wasn’t a lot of ready-made entertainment or activities, so you had to create them yourselves, and you were very much expected to join in,” Spicer says.
“So all the families in the area would come together to put on theatre restaurant evenings, where the kids would be expected to be the waitstaff, or tennis tournaments where you were expected to play and your partner could be anywhere between eight or 80. That’s the beauty of these small communities, they teach you to just get on with it. You are pretty much expected to answer from a very young age, ‘Well, what is my contribution to this? What is my part in the greater good? How can I serve my community?’”
It was this rural upbringing (complete with a pet kangaroo) that would serve Spicer well all her life – and in her new role as Queensland’s Chief Entrepreneur. Appointed in November last year, Spicer is one of only four in the role since its inception in 2016.
There are 12 “chief” roles in the Queensland government, including that of Chief Health Officer. Courtesy of a worldwide pandemic, that role has become very well known in the past three years, but the voluntary, Chief Entrepreneur title, perhaps, not quite as much. Its purpose is to foster, promote, and link businesses and industries in Queensland. From helping start-ups get started, to connecting and supporting individuals and businesses, and finding innovative solutions within industries, Spicer is particularly well placed to bridge the gap between city and country endeavours. Because while she may have grown up in the bush, and continues to live in regional Queensland’s Goondiwindi, Spicer has a big, wide view of the world, how it operates and how to bring people together from all walks of life.
Like so many country kids before her, Spicer was sent to boarding school for her high school education; Downlands College in Toowoomba, where she would go on to become school captain, and make lifelong friends. But leaving school, she would cast her eyes much further – to Switzerland, where she had won a Rotary scholarship.
“In 1997 I was selected by Rotary to attend a year of high school in Switzerland,” Spicer recalls. “It was a pretty big culture shock, because I went from being a person who everyone knew and who knew everyone and these tight, friendship circles at home and in Toowoomba, to living in with a Swiss German family in a little village called Biel beside a lake, and attending a French Swiss high school,” she laughs.
“It was pretty daunting actually, but I learnt two really big life lessons that year. One, that the world could continue quite comfortably without me, and (two) I needed to do the work. I needed to step in. I needed to learn the language if I wanted to make friends and I needed to make the most of the experience while I was there.
“So if I had time on my hands I would say to my host family I might go to Zurich for the day, and they’d be so shocked – ‘But that’s two hours away’, and I’d think ‘Growing up, we did that round trip just to get to netball!’”
Returning to Australia, Spicer studied Environmental Management at the Gatton campus of the University of Queensland and then spent the next few years working across the agricultural sector, from a stint as a vegetable industry development officer in Queensland, the Northern Territory and northern NSW to a Landcare co-ordinator working across 500 sqkm in western Queensland.
In each role, Spicer brought people together – from helping farmers better use their horticultural levies, to bringing farming and business interests together in managing drought. In 2007, she returned to the family property to roll up her sleeves and help her parents manage their property for several years before moving to Goondiwindi in 2012, the town where she would meet her husband, Tony Mcgregor, 55, at (where else) the picnic races, start her own consulting businesses, and really make her mark. And all of this, all of these different turns and paths would also lead her to the Chief Entrepreneur role – and an Order of Australia medal (OAM) for her service to the Goondiwindi community.
From algae farms to accountancy firms, Spicer has been a driving force behind many of Goondiwindi’s most successful start-ups and innovations for the past decade. She’s taught small businesses in regional areas the art – and it