Mike Cannon-Brookes buys $15m horse stud for regenerative farming

Tech entrepreneur Mike Cannon-Brookes’s property binge on Southern Highlands real estate shows no signs of abating given he has bought the Think Big Stud from the estate of the late Malaysian billionaire and global property magnate Dato Tan Chin Nam.

Despite paying $15.25 million for one of the region’s top thoroughbred horse studs, don’t expect to see the billionaire co-founder and co-chief executive of software giant Atlassian start taking an interest in the trackside antics at next week’s Melbourne Cup.

A well-placed source says the 120-hectare property that has previously lay claim to two Cox Plate winners, four Melbourne Cup winners and two Caulfield Cup winners will no longer be for horse breeding or racing, but instead for regenerative agriculture efforts like his other Southern Highlands farms.

Think Big Stud was formerly known as Inverness Stud when sold by Jack and Sue Woolridge in 2006 for $3.5 million, and Dato Tan expanded the Burradoo operation by buying adjoining 40-hectare properties in 2010 for $3.2 million and 2011 for $3.4 million on the winnings of horse races.

Dato Tan, who died in 2018 aged 92, was a self-made billionaire whose global empire of hotels and shopping centres included the large-scale restoration of Sydney’s Queen Victoria Building in the 1980s and the Capital Theatre in the early 1990s.

Records show the stud wasn’t Cannon-Brookes’s only recent agricultural purchase. He has also settled on an 18-hectare property in Kangaloon, known as Doudles Creek, for $5 million, directly across the road from his farm Widgee Waa, bought two years ago for $15 million from investment banker Mark Burrows.

It takes his tally of Southern Highlands property to eight properties worth almost $70 million, of which five were snapped up this year alone, including the Matt Handbury-developed Wattle Ridge estate for $12 million.

Cannon-Brookes’ splurge comes amid a busy week for the high-profile climate change activist with a slew of media appearances timed for this weekend’s start of the UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow, culminating on Sunday night as a guest host on Ten’s The Project.

Last week he and his wife Annie committed $1.5 billion towards climate change actions and philanthropy by 2030.

The tech titan has earned a reputation as one of the Southern Highlands’ largest private landholders in recent years, especially since he and his family moved there a year ago, but his portfolio locally is left in the shade by pastoralists Ben and Kimberley Cottle, who have put one of the large-scale properties at Canyonleigh, Bangadilly Station, up for grabs. Inglis Rural’s Sam Triggs is asking $36 million to $40 million for the 1815 hectares.

There is also the 1300-hectare holding being sold by Korean steel giant POSCO for more than $60 million, for which a handful of offers were submitted when the expressions of interest campaign closed recently, but a buyer is yet to be confirmed.