Don Lawson is a beef industry pioneer on genetics, performance recording

From wrestling bulls mid-flight to challenging the bureaucracy, Don Lawson has seen it all — and some — during his decades in agriculture.

Don Lawson is a pioneer of performance recording in the Australian beef industry.

Don Lawson reckons he’s living proof that only the good die young.

With that statement it’s pretty clear that, despite a recent health scare, the 82-year-old beef industry stalwart hasn’t lost his sense of humour or passion for life.

In fact, today of all days, there’s plenty of reason for optimism. It’s AFL Grand Final Day and his beloved Melbourne Football Club are just hours away from winning its first flag in 57 years. This last Saturday in September has “been a bloody long time coming,”, he laments as he potters around his home at Yea in Victoria’s North East.

But it’s not just decades of Demons-associated disappointment that the agriculture scientist-turned-beef producer-turned-educator-turned-industry agitator has had to experience during his time on this earth. There’s very little he hasn’t seen or done, nor a wasted moment to reflect on.

“I know a lot about a lot of things … maybe too much,” he jokes. “That’s why there’s plenty of people out there that wish I’d get dementia.”

Donald Bruce Lawson was born in Melbourne in 1939 into a family with a rich history. Don’s grandfather, Sir Harry Lawson, was a politician from Castlemaine who served as Victoria’s first two-term Premier between 1918 and 1924, before making the switch to the federal senate. Sir Harry, Don boasts, was instrumental along with Sir John Monash in getting Melbourne’s Shrine of Remembrance built.

Politics ran in that generation of the family. Sir Harry’s cousin was Vida Goldstein – one of the first women to stand for election to the Australian parliament in 1903.

Don’s father, also Don, was a gynaecologist and the Lawson family grew up in suburban Melbourne, around the corner from Caulfield Grammar School.

“One record in my life – I was at Caulfield Grammar longer than any other student,” he said. “I was a border at 4½ during the war. We had a dorm of about 26 kids at that stage – most of their parents were in the war (including Don Sr who was serving in the South Pacific) – so by the time I was five years old I knew how you got in and out of trouble.”

Don’s classmates at Caulfield included “the two Rons that would end up running Melbourne” – businessman and later Lord Mayor Ron Walker and champion footy player and former AFL chairman Ron Evans. Ron Evans, he recalls, was also a handy cricketer at school.

“We’d open the batting and we’d make a 100 partnership,” Don said. “He’d make 100 and I’d be stuffed from running up and down the wicket.”

Don Lawson has been a lifelong supporter of Australian agriculture. Picture: Zoe Phillips

Don’s passion for agriculture was evident from an early age. His mother’s family was among the original pioneer farmers at Marnoo, near St Arnaud – “I’d go up and drive the header when I was 16 – maybe younger” – while his father’s family tree had rural roots stretching as far south as Campbell Town in Tasmania.

Always interested in the latest and greatest technologies, Don’s passion for livestock and genetics would be fostered on post-war trips with his father, then a gynaecological surgeon at The Royal Women’s Hospital in Melbourne, to the McCaughey agriculture institute at Jerilderie in the NSW Riverina. At the time, in-vitro fertilisation in humans was just beginning and The Women’s and the McCaughey Institute were partnering on groundbreaking research.

“All IVF came out of agriculture – it moved from sheep to cattle to humans,” Don said. “To this day people still don’t realise the technological advances in ag.”

After school, Don enrolled at the University of Melbourne to study agriculture science. While he had “a bloody good year socially” he passed only geology in his freshman year “and that’s only because we had a great lecturer who had us eating out of the palm of his hand”. Not one to be defeated, the following year, passport in hand, he headed off to New Zealand’s Lincoln University – the oldest agricultural college in the southern hemisphere – where he enrolled in a six-year Masters of Farm Management.

Don wasn’t initially one for uni — he only passed one subject in his first year. Picture: Zoe Phillips

The course – which also sparked Don’s “hobby horse” for agriculture education, which he says too many people see “as a cost not an investment” – involved 48 weeks of practical work that took Don to far-flung places of the world he would never dream of visiting, opening his eyes up to a range of experiences.

“My first job was flying from Port Moresby to Laos in a DC3 with a load of bloody Brahman bulls – I’d never seen one before – and tropical cattle,” he said.

“They said ‘Here’s a pistol’ – it had one bullet in it – and ‘If any play up just shoot’. I said ‘Who do I shoot? Myself, the bloody pilot or the bull?’.”

On his return to Australia, Don lectured at Marcus Oldham College near Geelong. About the same time the Lawsons bought farming country at Yea, where they initially ran 600 wethers, and “a heap of bloody rabbits”, before switching to Angus cattle and founding the famed Ythanbrae Angus stud – later Lawsons – in 1969. Ythanbrae was built using the best proven performance-focused genetics available in the world.

To encourage adoption of proven performance-backed genetics within the beef industry, the Lawsons soon teamed up with fellow Angus breeders, the Grimwade and Smibert families, to form the PertAngus group.

Picture: Zoe Phillips

“We worked on the basis that the only place you win an argument is in the marketplace,” Don said. “The aim was to promote performance recording. At that stage it was like trying to teach evolution in Tennessee.”

That’s because, at the time, performance recording was a controversial issue within the beef industry, particularly among the more traditional stud breeders who saw it as a threat to their existence.

Don said members of the PertAngus group, and other promoters of performance recording, including the Litchfield family’s Hazeldean operation near Cooma, faced significant hostilities from within the livestock sector. “People don’t realise there were letters threatening to burn the Hazeldean woolshed down if they kept doing all this recording,” Don said.

Don was also a pioneer of Australia’s live export industry and was involved in the shipment of the first live animal out of Australia in the 1970s when a Corriedale-Merino – “Cormo” – ram was flown to a trade fair in Tehran.

“When we got the airport in Melbourne, some bureaucrat looked at our paperwork and thought we were exporting a Commo, we had to explain that it was a Cormo – a sheep,” Don said.

It would not be Don’s last run-in with the bureaucracy. In fact he clashed with them frequently by taking an active role in the fight against government eradication of Johne’s Disease in the early 2000s. “What they were doing was wrong … it wasn’t based on science nor was there a cost-benefit analysis done. And I am a bit of an activist – you can’t help your genes,” he said.