For nearly two hundred years, the Yabsley name has been woven into the story of rural Australia. 

It begins in 1838, when William Yabsley stepped ashore from the HMS Beagle on the Northern Rivers of New South Wales, built ships, and founded the town of Coraki. Four generations later, his great-great-grandson Bob Yabsley picks up that story — and adds a chapter of his own that is by turns adventurous, hard-won, and deeply personal.

Bob grew up riding horses to school in the Richmond River valley, learning early the rhythms of drought, flood and fire, and the quiet cooperation that held tight-knit rural communities together. That grounding carried him across a working life spent managing properties throughout eastern Australia and the Pacific, including years mustering wild cattle in the Solomon Islands. Always looking for a better way to work the land, Bob became one of the first Australians to pioneer the use of helicopters in large-scale property management, transforming mustering, pest control and flood response on properties too vast to work any other way.

At the centre of the book is Mobandilla, an irrigated cotton property near Goondiwindi that Bob built from a modest leasehold sheep stud into a substantial agricultural enterprise over three decades — recognising, well ahead of most, the value of secure water in a land defined by its absence. It is a story of genuine innovation: establishing new irrigation schemes, growing some of the district's first cotton crops, and building an operation that supported jobs and community for years.

But Unfinished Business is not simply a success story. Bob writes candidly about what came next: a receivership in 2012 that took Mobandilla from him, despite decades of hard work and a competing offer of refinancing that the bank declined. Former federal MP John Forrest personally intervened on Bob's behalf, and the fight, and its cost, sit at the emotional centre of the memoir. It is an unflinching account of what happens when financial institutions treat working farms as numbers on a balance sheet — a story that resonates well beyond one family, amid renewed scrutiny of how banks treat rural Australians.

Bob never set out to write a book. For most of his life, it was the furthest thing from his mind. But as he watched the experiences of his generation begin to disappear — stories of hardship, sacrifice and determination that are too often lost once the people who lived them are gone — he felt a responsibility to put it all on the record. Unfinished Business is his answer: an honest, sometimes uncomfortable account of triumph and setback in equal measure, written not out of bitterness but in the hope that greater awareness might lead to greater fairness for the farmers who come after him.

Spanning almost two centuries, from a shipwrecked ancestor to a modern banking dispute, this is a memoir about legacy, land, and the cost of holding onto both — a candid, sweeping portrait of Australia's farming heartland and the people who have shaped it.