The company behind the Gulf Country Frontier Days Festival has gone into liquidation

They had a vision to create a landmark Indigenous festival in remote outback Queensland but it’s all fallen in a heap now

FALLING IN A HEAP

They had a vision to create a landmark Indigenous festival in remote outback Queensland.

The Gulf Country Frontier Days Festival kicked off three years ago, featuring Australia’s only Indigenous rodeo, along with art, dance and music from both Aboriginal groups and native peoples around the world.

Playing out over five days in the salt flats at Burketown, the annual mid-year shindig attracted plenty of tourists keen for an authentic taste of the culture of first peoples.

Sadly, it’s all fallen in a heap now.

We learned this week that the company behind the festival, Goodidja Productions Pty Ltd, has collapsed.

The two owners and directors, Alec and Amy Doomadgee, tapped Brisbane-based bean counter Travis Pullen from advisory firm B&T to wind up the firm.

Amy and Alec Doomadgee

In a report emailed to creditors on Friday, Pullen revealed it went down with debts of $141,556 and had just $16,344 cash in the bank. He said it buckled “due to the effect of COVID-19 on the entertainment industry’’.

Neither of the Doomadgees could be reached for comment.

But Alec Doomadgee revealed last year that he had been inspired to create the festival after attending similar events overseas, including the Calgary Stampede in Canada and the Cheyenne Frontier Days rodeo in Wyoming.

He also spoke of a desire to attract visitors to the lower Gulf of Carpentaria.

“North of Mount Isa there was no cultural festival of this calibre before I came up with this concept,” he said then. “I wanted to put something back in this region.”

Launched in 2011, Goodidja Productions also worked on documentaries, feature films and television specials. Alec Doomadgee, a former radio announcer, won acclaim a few years back for his work on a documentary, Zach’s Ceremony.

The demise of the firm represents a setback for efforts launched last year by the Queensland government and tourism industry leaders to ramp up the availability of Indigenous experiences for overseas visitors.

A Tourism Research Australia report last year found that the number of international visitors taking part in at least one Indigenous tourism activity had risen 40 per cent since 2013. But it still amounted to only one in seven travellers and fewer than half of them did it in Queensland.

FIVE YEAR BAN

A Brisbane businessman who presided over the failure of three recruitment and labour hire companies in the past three years has run afoul of the corporate cop.

ASIC announced on Friday that it had slapped Kevin Humphries with a five-year ban on managing corporations.

The regulator revealed that his three firms—TMS National, Engineering Staffing Solutions and National Workforce Solutions—crashed with collective debts of about $6.5m between July 2017 and this month.

Worse still, the Thornlands-based gent allegedly “used funds sourced from the collection of GST and PAYG withholding tax to meet liabilities other than those of the ATO,’’ ASIC said in a statement.

“Mr Humphries’ conduct fell significantly below the standard expected of a director,’’ it continued.

“His conduct was of particular concern because it shows a pattern of misuse of the corporate structure and a lack of understanding or disregard of statutory obligations.”

Humphries could not be reached for comment.