Prime Mover Still Making His Mark

On April 12, 1944 he went to Nettlefolds in Hobart and paid 637 pounds five shillings and elevenpence cash for a five-ton Chevy, a sum he scraped together from savings, a bequest and borrowings from family. He drove the truck to Margate, where entire houses could be bought for a lot less.

The Chevy went straight to work, hauling loam for gardens, wood for fires. After ten months he’d made enough to pay off the loans. “I rang my brother Rowley. That was the beginning of Hazell Brothers.” Don had just turned 17. Five years on, Don married his childhood sweetheart, a girl called Gwendoline Smart who he’d met at Sunday school. Gwen was sensible, spoke her mind and kept Don on the straight and narrow.

Trucking, meanwhile, was a good business, and provided entree to others; building roads and dams became the expertise for larger projects. Critically, the brothers owned the machinery that turned raw bush into valuable pasture. While Don was building the Bruny airstrip, for example, a Mr. Denne noted the ‘dozer would be useful clearing his land. He then offered to sell the land for 9000 pounds; a deposit was in Mr. Denne’s hands the following day.

From the farm overlooking Northwest Bay (where the family home still stands), the Hazells added sheds as they added machinery, and eventually moved to a former cool store down the highway. “I didn’t worry about debt,” notes Don,” because I made sure we had the assets to back it.”

The vehicle and equipment fleet grew in a way that became Hazell’s method of operation. Kingborough’s 500 kilometres of dirt roads needed regular grading and dressing; Hazells bought the necessary machinery. “I saw cranes drive past,” says Don. “I thought: we’ll buy one and do the work those Hobart blokes are coming here to do.”

Hazell’s first crane arrived in Margate just as tragedy struck. It was February 7, 1967 when Tasmania’s worst bushfires killed 62 and burned 1400 homes. The Channel was ground zero, a scorched landscape of animal carcases and smoking trees, homes and lives in ruins, machinery – including the Chevy – gone. “There were tears,” he remembers, “an enormous sadness for everybody around us.”

In the aftermath, a huge amount of work awaited. “For our part, we had a Caterpillar D4 bulldozer, trucks and graders, a crane -- enough to start.” Not for the first time, there was a confluence of interests, those of the company and those of the community around it.

By their late teens, Don and Gwen Hazell’s four boys were involved. “The business was run from our dinner table,” says Geoffrey Hazell. ”Mum would organise us and dad worked out the balance sheet on an envelope.” The generational shift enabled Rowley Hazell to return in 1971 to farming. It was an amicable parting.

A voice down the phone spurred the next expansion. “Don?” said a bloke at Hobart Quarry in Lenah Valley. “Your trucks are here but we can’t fill them.” The sole local gravel supplier couldn’t keep up with demand and it was hurting Hazell’s business.

At the time, 1979, Don half-owned about 3500 acres (1100 ha) at Leslievale; its dolerite formations indicated a quality gravel, and Hobart Blue Metal Industries was born. An ex-HEC crusher, however, couldn’t produce the right stuff. “Gravel is a science, and I had no experience,” he now admits. Hazell’s partners dropped out.

A specialist told Hazell the business had potential, but needed two more crushers, secondary and tertiary units. “If I do nothing, I’m broke,” thought Don. “But if I do something, there’s a chance.” He ordered crushers over the phone, a quarter of a million apiece. Even with Hazell’s assets, it was a gutsy move.

The new units quickly began delivering fine crushed rock, an essential road-building aggregate, and a profit. HBMI was in the right place at the right time: projects like the Southern Outlet meant demand, and opened the way for long-overdue growth through Kingborough. With more transport, construction and road work, Hazells opened its own concrete plant and by the early 1980s – with the sons at the helm – had become Tasmania’s largest private earthmoving and trucking company.

Elected to council in 1980, Don brought old-fashioned sensibilities; this was a man who kept Hazell’s balance sheet in his head. “Kingborough was in bad shape, with debt about four times income,” he says. After 10 years and a couple of mayoral terms, the equation was $20 million in costs and $30 million in revenues. “That’s not great either,” he points out. “Councils should not hoard ratepayers’ money. Spend it, but be smart about it.”

Today, Don Hazell questions whether Tasmania needs councils at all. Eyeing a fat cheque to Southern Water, he points out that local government is not responsible for water or sewerage any more. “They‘ve lost the biggest job, and planning is being done by state government. Tasmanians, with twenty nine councils, state and federal government, are over-governed,. It’s time one tier of government pi**ed off!”

With justification, Hazell harbours suspicions about other governments, too. He’d bought 700 acres (280 ha) behind Blackmans Bay, soil that was too poor for farming but had potential for housing. Indeed, a Whitlam-era Better Cities initiative acquired his acreage, among others, and after winning a court fight to get market price, he saw plans. “Homes for 10,000 people,” he says. “Exactly what the area needed.”

Suddenly, 460 acres became the Peter Murrell Reserve. “That was stupid,” says Hazell, reverting to farmer mode. “It was building land, lousy for agriculture or parkland,” he emphasises. “Want to remember Peter Murrell? There’s plenty of space along Northwest Bay River, too low-lying for development but it’s got water and will make a great park. Now that would take foresight!”

On the business front, the 1980s were hardly smooth sailing, Hazell is the first to admit. He’d bought Ayers’ bus services, put 64 new buses onto extended routes to the Huon and Dover and across Tasmania. If the opportunity presented itself, he did some driving. But while close to his heart, the bus business was barely viable; the same was true of boatbuilding and waste management ventures.

Don has long recognised the need to separate the personal from the professional. “Protecting the jobs of employees -- many of whom have put in two or three decades and are part of the Hazell family – that’s got to be the priority,” he says. Even if it meant divesting some of those things that had been important to him all his life.

His active involvement in the Hazell Bros business began to slow in the late 1980s. “It was time,” he says. “I would ask for an overview of our finances, and I’d be handed a computer printout.” The company had grown beyond the dinner table and figures on the back of an envelope.

Today, Don Hazell is still an imposing 188 centimetres, six foot two in the old money. Despite his 80-plus years he’s quite capable of cutting a load of firewood and taking it to someone who can’t afford to heat their house. Every day, he visits his beloved Gwen, now at the Bishop Davies Court aged care centre in Kingston. He remains passionate about Kingborough and its people. And the company he created.

“I like living here,” he says, of his view over Kingston, across the green swath of the high school and the Channel highway as it rises in its new path across Summerleas. From here, he can see the comings and goings of the gold-liveried Lady Gwendoline, a new Kenworth truck Hazell Bros. has named after his wife.

He also enjoys a front row seat over construction on the $42 million Kingston Bypass. He knows this place, these roads, this work. He knows these machines – the earthmovers, excavators, haulage trucks and cranes. He may not drive them now, but he’ll be watching.

STORIES ABOUT DON:

Don Hazell had a quiet way of getting things done, even as a councillor. Told council didn’t have funds to fix potholes just off Kingston Beach, he arranged a Hazell truck to bring gravel and supervised the repair himself.

Hazell Bros. new CEO Bob Bennetto found himself being closely vetted by Don. Studying Bob’s ears, Don explained that good machine drivers had thick ones and administrators thin. How did I do? Bob asked. Okay, said Don. You got the job.

Hazell loves ‘dozers. Clearing a quarry edge, he was suddenly nose-down in loose rock. He got off, hitched plough reins through the steering clutches, and standing on the quarry top, used the ropes to remote-control the ‘dozer down the pile. He saved the machine.

New employees, even those pushing a broom, found themselves alongside Don Hazell in their first few days on the job. Don would seek them out to talk to them: it was his way of letting them know they were valued.

Citing a below-market price for housing land compulsorily acquired by the Commonwealth, Hazell went to court. The judge asked to see the land in question: aboard his ‘dozer, Hazell created tracks so His Honour could see the property’s true value and its views over Storm Bay. The Commonwealth doubled its price to $900,000.