Moxon & Company was incorporated in 1903 by Tony Moxon’s great grandfather, Thomas Frank Moxon, – a very successful English sea captain from Yorkshire.

Tony Moxon’s grandfather, Julius William Harold Moxon, enjoyed the fruits of Thomas’ crop, and lets leave it at the fact that he married in 1930 at the trough of the Great Depression and embarked on an extended honeymoon on The Queen Mary whilst at the same time being a founder of the Royal Queensland Golf Club , Indooroopilly Golf Club and a player off scratch at both.

Julius Moxon also founded the Queensland Subnormal Association now known as the Endeavour Foundation. Jules’ third child and second son Robert who was a Mongol, died at a little over 60 years old in 2003.

Thomas Jules took over and came to Brisbane around 1964, taking over a basically comatose Moxon & Company in Manning Street South Brisbane, having been sent as a 22 year old to Cairns to be the company accountant/secretary and general cleaner up of the huge publicly listed sawmilling and hardware group, CTL

Tom took over by necessity and happily acquiesced in his sister Beth’s request to convert an old butchers shop into Tom Jones Tavern and then next door Dirty Dicks restaurants, as well as sawmills at Tully and Vila, New Hebrides and a clothing distributorship in Townsville. Clearly he was an enthusiast of the business buzzword of the time, ‘diversification’. Elizabeth (Beth) Wilson is a remarkable and hugely talented landscape architect who has left an indelible mark on Brisbane and her wider family.

Tony Moxon qualified as an accountant and computer programmer at University of Queensland and wrote software that enabled his father to keep track of such diverse things as payroll tax rate changes, log inventory at Tully and wine, spirit and food stocks at Dirty Dicks and Tom Jones Tavern.

Tony Moxon started part time in the accounting department in late 1976.

Tony Moxon was despatched in 1987 to open a branch in USA and did so with AUD 50k of his own money and an AUD 150k line of credit. Luckily he made USD 70k nett profit in the first year and that amongst quite a few other $ is now sitting in stock in Winchester Virginia. From then until now the operation has never been ‘rescued’ by anyone.

The wine division was formed in 1988 when a free flow of information from the then Adelaide rep Bruce Smith to the USA branch took place.

Little did anyone realise at the time, but not only did that division prop up and fund a fairly moribund, people hungry timber trading operation for 30 years, it provided the platform for the survival of Moxon Timbers Inc. ( MTI) when the GFC struck the world.

MTI’s turnover in its traditional housing based business plummeted by 80%

And today, it still hasn’t recovered much from those depths. It is a tribute to Shayne Lachlan and his team that they embraced this huge change in direction and preserved what remained of our heritage whilst prosecuting with vigour the great unknowns of the wine industry.