Alexander Charles Grant
Inverness-born pastoralist and businessman Alexander Charles Grant (1843-1930), son of Demerara sugar merchant Peter Grant, arrived in Queensland in 1861 to work for his uncle Chesborough Claudius Macdonald in the Burnett district. After working as an unpaid jackeroo and store superintendent, he drove 20,000 sheep north to Macdonald's Logan Downs, near Clermont. Grant and his brothers, John and Peter, bought Dartmoor, inland from Mackay, in 1868, but sold out two years after the country proved unsuitable for sheep.
After James Venture Mulligan discovered gold on the Palmer River, with prospects of high prices for cattle, Grant crossed country in 1873 with 300 head of cattle from Bowen and established Wrotham Park, between the Mitchell and Walsh Rivers. Severe malaria and an inability to find a partner for a wholesale meat concern prompted him to sell his share of Wrotham Park in 1878.
Grant recuperated overseas and returned to Brisbane to join P. D. Morehead and Company, of which he became the manager when the firm was restructured following the collapse of the Queensland National Bank. In that role, he was closely associated with the establishment of wool sales in Brisbane and played a significant role in the development of the frozen meat industry.
Living at Kelvin Grove, he devoted much of his spare time to literature and journalism, contributing sketches to Brisbane papers about pioneering life in North Queensland. Earlier, his Bush Life In Queensland, or John West's Colonial Experiences," which was published in two volumes in 1852 by Blackwood and Company, of Edinburgh, and subsequently reprinted in one volume. Grant produced a fictionalised account of his experiences on the frontier, serialised in Blackwood's Magazine in 1879-80 subsequently appeared as Bush Life in Queensland or John West's Colonial Experiences (https://electricscotland.com/history/australia/bushlifeinqueensland01.pdf) (William Blackwood and Sons, London and Edinburgh, 1881).
Financial losses caused by the 1900-01 concerns for his children's prospects and fears of radical political trends prompted Grant to sell up his Queensland interests and relocate to the USA with his wife, three sons and eight daughters. He died in Los Angeles in 1930.
Sources:
Chris Tiffin, Alexander Charles Grant (1843–1930), Australian Dictionary of Biography, Volume 9 , 1983
Mr. A. C. Grant, The Week (Brisbane) 17 January 1930. Page 11 (Trove: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/182580168?searchTerm=A. C. Grant)
