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Joe Procter. Photo by Peter Rae

Australia's only indigenous investment banker is feisty, fast-talking and knows what he wants - a merger of capitalism and land rights - and how to get it.

The wind that roared in from the Arafura Sea ripped the house apart, forcing the family to take shelter in the bath. The Procters huddled together, a blanket the only shield from swirling lethal debris. When the little boy, torn between terror and excitement, finally found the bottle to peep out from under the cover, he was amazed. The lounge room was now outside, and chairs were floating in the pool.

Five-year-old Joe Procter's first memory is cyclone Tracy. Christmas Eve, Darwin, 1974. Seventy-one people died, but the boy was spared. The family lost everything, and were blown, figuratively at least, south, away from the tropics, to Perth, where they would start all over again.

The challenge of building something from nothing appeals to Joe Procter. It shapes his personal narrative and defines his professional mission. The boy in the bath is now Australia's sole indigenous investment banker. Procter, at only 39, has been mentored by the best and the brightest of the Australian business world. This fast-talking upstart, with the chutzpah and the networks to start his own venture-capital firm well before his 40th birthday, wants a new chapter in the land rights debate. He wants to close the book on passive welfarism. He wants to commercialise Aboriginal land rights.

Traditional owners don't need go-away money, or "cultural support" programs, they need ownership: preferably a direct stake in mining developments. "Ownership is everything as far as I'm concerned," he says. "Once you have a stake, your kids have something to grow towards."

Joe Procter is a man in a tearing hurry. And he makes absolutely no apology for it. The Procter CV unfurls like a carefully calibrated life plan, but life is rarely so elegant. It took a while to settle on his mission. In his teens and early 20s he worshipped at the altar of AFL, not high finance. On Aboriginal questions there was free-floating angst - "a chip on my shoulder".

He ran around the paddock for the Perth and West Perth clubs. He chased girls. He bummed through an accounting degree. Clinton Wolf, another up-and-coming indigenous leader from the west, a lawyer who worked with Procter on a landmark resources deal involving the Martu people, played footy with the young bloke in Perth. Procter was good, but Wolf, who played for the Fremantle Dockers, was better. What sort of a footballer was Joe? "He's a competitor," Wolf says.

Procter's father, Frank, was a bookie, from English stock. Procter's mother, Isabelle Adams, an Aboriginal, grew up in the territory's Pratt Camp. She wanted Joe to fulfil his potential. "Mum's five-foot-nothing, but she packs a punch harder than (retired US basketballer) Charles Barkley," Procter offers by way of necessary background.

Melbourne University professor Marcia Langton knew Adams in Darwin, where Adams segued from preschool teaching into the education bureaucracy, becoming superintendent of the Education Department. Joe's mum achieved a master of education degree.

"Distinguished", is how Langton describes her, stressing the close familial ties. "I also know his family from one of his grandparents in Cape York - the Wuthathi," she says.

But it wasn't so much the threat of the go-getting mother, as the siren call of the American business guru that provided the necessary focus. He loved to read. The 25-year-old, flopped on his bed in suburban Perth, started reading the tomes of Jack Welch (the GE chairman who penned works with less than subtle titles such as Winning and Winning: The answers confronting 74 of the toughest questions in business today). Procter also guzzled the success stories of the entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley.

His generalised angst eventually crystalised into a simple observation. The Perth man, courtesy of geography, enjoys a bird's-eye view of Australia's minerals wealth. It lies under the feet of the indigenous landholders - the remote desert dwellers, the poorest of the poor, who were often bought off with "cultural support" programs from big miners. Successive mineral booms had failed to improve the economic circumstances of traditional owners. They have land rights, but no mechanism to turn the rights into sustainable wealth.

The idea in prospect then - just a tiny thought bubble - was one Procter eventually achieved, with his mate Clinton Wolf. When Rio Tinto sold a valuable uranium deposit to a Canadian and Japanese consortium last year, Procter got the Martu to the table. The Martu are from the remote western desert of Western Australia, rabbit-proof fence country - some had not seen white people until the 1960s. They were granted native title in 2002.

The deal has not been fully disclosed, but reports suggest the traditional owners walked away with equity - possibly as high as 20 per cent - royalty payments, and cash. The proceeds will go to a trust, which has taken months to negotiate, and is still not complete. Brother Frank jnr, who works in Joe's firm, is still out on "desert duty" dotting i's and crossing t's, and trying to build consensus among a group with disparate interests. But Procter is determined that the revenue will be distributed in a way that rewards incentive, even if that's contentious with the community. If the traditional owners develop a business plan, they will get a larger share of the proceeds to invest.

To be able to pull off complex commercial transactions such as this, Procter needed a better education, and a rolled-gold business apprenticeship. An MBA seemed the obvious starting point. "At 25, I realised I was on my last legs as a footballer. I started putting together ideas that were important to me. We've been through three cycles and all the traditional owners are still some of the most disadvantaged and disenfranchised people in the country. There is a chasm that hasn't been breached yet between traditional owners and their rights, and creating wealth. I thought a lot about the MBA before I did it," he says.

The thinking paid off. He made the Dean's List, was dux of strategic management and bagged the University of Western Australia executive leadership award. To make good his ambitions, Procter needed a stint in the energy industry, and he needed to master what he calls "business chess". He needed to learn the alchemy of investment banking.

Procter went to Woodside Petroleum. For six years he worked inside the business exposing himself to native title, finance, business strategy and external communication. And then, by chance, he came across a two-page proposal that seemed to represent his thinking on commercialising indigenous rights.

The young bloke picked up the phone and called Danny Gilbert, founder and managing partner of Gilbert + Tobin. As well as establishing one of the country's best known law firms, and working on boards, including his latest directorship of the National Australia Bank, Gilbert has a long track record in indigenous issues, starting with early volunteer work at the Redfern Legal Centre in the late 1970s.

Gilbert says he was thinking about a business model centred around equity and venture capital, where communities could leverage off their lands. "I'd been exploring those sorts of ideas with people like Peter Yu," Danny Gilbert recalls. "Joe heard I was interested in the idea, he contacted me, and said, 'I'd like to set this up with you."'

A nobody blackfella from Perth cold-calling one of Sydney's most prominent business people took gumption, but it didn't stop with the call. Procter promptly put himself on a plane from Perth to Sydney. "Brashness has never been missing from my personality. After I rang Danny, I went over there and I marched into his office and I said I am the man for this job. I told Danny Gilbert I was the man to see this through."

The urbane Sydney lawyer was intrigued by the loud mouth from Perth. Gilbert called an old friend, Mark Carnegie, principal and founder of boutique investment bank Carnegie Wylie, and said he had a proposition for him. Would he take on Joe and teach him about entrepreneurship? "Mark generously agreed to take Joe under his wing," Gilbert says smoothly, as if it were simple.

The Procter version of the story sounds more fraught. "Carnegie thought I was from outer space. Mark is a pure commercial beast. For me to be talking about Aborigines and equity - he thought I was absolutely insane."
But he persisted. He had Carnegie's number. He called it once a week. Realising that talking wasn't getting him any closer to a gig at Carnegie Wylie, Procter started pulling a deal together to tempt the reluctant convert. He won't go into the details, but the tactic apparently worked: "He took me on, with arm-twisting from Gilbert."

But it wasn't sweetness and light. "Mark told me I wouldn't last two weeks." Ignoring a prophesy that didn't fit his ego and ambitions, Procter promptly resigned from Woodside, packed his bags, went to Sydney and turned up for work at Carnegie Wylie, only to find no one was expecting him.

No one at reception had even heard of him, and no one was inclined to take him upstairs. Procter had to negotiate an undignified entry through a side entrance. A bit rough? One of Carnegie's quirks, Procter says without rancour. Four years later, he was still there, like a pig in mud. Venture capital - the high-risk, high-reward, or high-risk, big-bust area of investment banking - was where he wanted to be. "That was my love. There is nowhere to hide, and you can build things. If you've got entrepreneurial flair inside you, you need somewhere to express it."

So what did he learn from Mark Carnegie? "Mark told me the world doesn't need another angry blackfella, they need a black capitalist." That advice from his mentor has become a credo.

Other advice was more difficult to digest, given he's a bulldozer, and the Aboriginal problem is not academic for a kid whose mother grew up in a camp. "Mark told me I had to learn a few more gears, not just go at 150 per cent. And he also told me that you
can't let emotion get in the way of good business. You have got to be impartial."

It is precisely the speed and emotion that troubles Danny Gilbert, as he ponders his protege. Gilbert couldn't be more proud of the younger man, but he frets. "Joe is impatient with prevarication," Gilbert says. "He is very can-do and brash and impatient, and in a hurry, and he's got guts. He breaks a mould. He totally rejects the victim model. Joe wants to make money. But he can be too abrasive and too brash. He needs to temper it. He needs to settle down," the lawyer says.

Procter doesn't reject Gilbert's assessment. He's thought about the advice. He says, given the next birthday has a four in front of it, that he's trying to mellow. He's in a happy relationship with Sydney woman Janie Stabler. He tries to keep blowing off steam quarantined to larking with mates at the races, having cigars, watching the horses go round - not yelling at mining executives, who are unforgiving.

"I think a lot of abrasiveness comes from feeling out of your depth. There's a level of insecurity. It's a defence mechanism," he says. As he's moved on with the business he's gained confidence, he's closed deals, lowered debts. Danny Gilbert, despite all his success, is incredibly "humble", Procter says. Humility is a strength "that's never been a strength of mine".

But out in the desert things are different. He doesn't yell or thump tables. He cops ribbing. Some of the Martu elders dubbed him Ghengis Khan in reference to some Chinese heritage in his mixed-race background. One little kid asked him whether he was black. "What do you reckon?" Procter asked. "Well I've never seen a Chinese man kick a football like that so I guess you're black," the kid said.

Clinton Wolf says he's a marshmallow. "I don't know if you'd actually print this, but he's a mummy's boy," he says. "Danny hasn't seen Joe out with the mob. With the mob, he's a diplomat. There are two sides to Joe. He's a doer. In life there are talkers and there are doers. Joe is a doer. He can be impatient, but he's still young. He's had fantastic mentors. He's a bloke in a hurry."

Katharine Murphy is national affairs correspondent.

Joe Procter CV

• Born: Darwin, 1969.
• Family: From Yadakanna mob of Cape York, Wadaman mob of Katherine, and Adams family in Darwin. Procters are from Liverpool in England.
• Education: Schooling in Perth; bachelor of business (accounting), University of Western Australia; graduate diploma (Aboriginal intercultural studies); diploma, Australian Institute of Company Directors; master of business administration (finance).
• Career: Six years with Woodside Petroleum in Perth. Four years at boutique investment bank Carnegie Wylie & Co, Sydney. Former managing director of Indigenous Capital Limited.
• Football: Aspiring AFL footballer. Played with West Perth and Perth football clubs.
• Interests: Business literature, horse racing.