Jack Seymour AM
RASV President - Jack Seymour’s involvement with the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV) and the Royal Melbourne Show stemmed from his professional background in banking.
Jack Seymour’s involvement with the Royal Agricultural Society of Victoria (RASV) and the Royal Melbourne Show stemmed from his professional background in banking. In 1994 Jack was asked to join the RASV Board, which was in a pretty poor financial state at the time. Jack immediately put his experience to work. While he had not grown up on a farm, Jack had spent a lot of time in the agricultural sector, working with farming communities, and this experience helped in his role with RASV.
Jack’s immediate reaction to the state of things at RASV was that it was in need of change:
It was as progressive as it was able to be given its financial position [but] change can only be part of what you want to do when you can afford to change and of course, they couldn’t afford to change to any great extent.
Discussions about redevelopment had been happening since the 1980s but with no external funding or support, nothing had eventuated. With Jack’s arrival and expertise, things began to progress. After selling a parcel of land, RASV had enough money to clear its debts and start planning for the future.
Jack established a relationship with Premier John Brumby and was able to secure government funds to begin the redevelopment of Melbourne Showgrounds. Under a Public Private Partnership, RASV and the Victorian Government worked together to redesign the showgrounds. Jack remembered it was a very complex process:
The plans we’d drawn up … they were never going to work because the contractors came in with proposals of $130, $140, $150 million, you know silly numbers. So in the end the government just said to the contractors ‘you’ve got $100 million, you tell us what you can do’.
When he joined RASV Jack said he would stay until the redevelopment was complete, thinking this would be a few years. However, Jack ended up serving as President for eight years (1999-2007) before finally stepping away with the redevelopment complete. ‘It's a massive undertaking, the redevelopment’, Jack reflected, ‘and you had to survive during the course of it’. That he did, and Jack was able to enjoy the fruits of his labour for a number of years before he passed away in 2015.