PSP Investments’ Hewitt Cattle Company purchases Tubbo Station

A NSW farm synonymous with Australia’s Merino industry has been sold for about $40 million.

Rob Stein, manager of Tubbo Station at Darlington Point in NSW, which has sold for about $40 million. Picture Michael Frogley

Canadian interests have snapped up one of Australia’s best-known rural properties — the historic Tubbo Station in the NSW Riverina — for about $40 million.

The Weekly Times understands that Hewitt Cattle Australia, backed by Canada’s PSP Investments, has purchased the historic 14,876-hectare property near Darlington Point, west of Narrandera.

Tubbo Station was listed for sale in May by the family of the late billionaire Giles W Pritchard-Gordon, who made his fortune in shipbuilding and farming in the UK, with price expectations of more than $40 million.

Selling agents LAWD today refused to comment on the sale. Hewitt Cattle Australia has been contacted for comment.

PSP — which manages the superannuation funds of Canada’s public service, armed forces and the world-famous Royal Canadian Mounted Police — has flexed its investment muscles in recent years by putting together a huge portfolio of land and water assets valued at more than $4 billion.

Its stamp sits at the bottom of the three biggest deals in Australian agriculture history — the $860 million purchase of Olam Orchards’ almond plantation in northern Victoria in 2019, last year’s $854 million takeover of one of Australia’s biggest landholders in Webster Limited and, in May, the $500 million purchase of NSW-based cotton-farming giant Auscott Limited.

The Hewitt Cattle Australia joint venture operates across 1.15 million hectares of land in Queensland, the Northern Territory and NSW.

Its holdings include the 331,800-hectare Ambalindum Station and the 202,200-hectare Numery at Alice Springs in the Northern Territory, as well as the 127,337-hectare Tandou Station at Menindee in NSW.

It already has a presence in the Riverina with the 1696-hectare Warilba property at Narrandera.

Historians once described Tubbo as “one of the richest and largest sheep grazing properties in the Riverina”.

It was first established in the mid-1800s as part of pastoral run that covered 300,000 hectares and ran more than 120,000 Merino sheep.

Mr Pritchard-Gordon, who founded Pritchard-Gordon Tankers Limited business which builds and operates shallow draft, double hull tankers to transport crude oil, refined petroleum products by ocean, purchased the property about a decade ago from Rodney Price’s Four Arrows Group, which filed for bankruptcy in 2009. Mr Pritchard-Gordon died in 2011.

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