Simon Fraser

Sir Simon Fraser (21 August 1832 – 30 July 1919)

According to Fraser, his mother spoke fluent Canadian Gaelic and one of his grandfathers spoke "very little English". In 1906, he became the inaugural patron of the Gaelic Society of Victoria, an organisation devoted to keeping the Scottish Gaelic language and customs alive in Australia. In an address to the society, he said that he could speak only a few sentences of Gaelic, but that he could still understand most conversations.

In 1839, when Fraser was seven years old, his father was killed in a sawmilling accident. He began working on the family farm at a young age, and received limited formal schooling. Attracted by the Victorian gold rush, he immigrated to Australia at the age of 21, arriving in Melbourne in 1853. He immediately went to the goldfields at Bendigo, where he turned a profit selling supplies to miners.

Business career In 1855, Fraser moved to Melbourne and opened a store on Elizabeth Street, where he engaged in horse trading and imported produce from Sydney. He later expanded into construction and began tendering for government road, bridge and railway contracts. His business partners included Jenkin Collier and William McCulloch.

One of his more notable contracts was to supply ballast to the Deniliquin and Moama Railway Company, a privately owned railway which connected Moama on the Murray River to Deniliquin in southern New South Wales. Instead of supplying blue metal, Fraser supplied quartz from the slag heaps of Bendigo gold mines. It met the specifications of the contract, but was not what was expected by the owners of the railway.

In the mid-1860s, Fraser established the Squatting Investment Company with Thomas Craig, William Forrest, and George Simmie. The company acquired pastoral leases on the Dawson River in Central Queensland, which were consolidated into Mount Hutton Station,