Richard Tindale as a young man lasted four years in the public service in Canberra before he decided he'd rather "do something in which you benefited from extra effort".
As a 22-year-old "with no experience", he got a job with the Reg Daly real estate agency in Civic, eventually taking over the business and helping to create the foundations of the Independent Property Group.
The Mittagong-born businessman, who moved to Canberra with his family as a seven-year-old, also founded the residential building firm Madison Constructions, building mainly units, including the Somerset complex in Kingston.
Yet there was always a nagging desire that there was another life out there for him.
"I just wanted to do something more," he said.
In the mid-1990s, he sold his businesses and with wife Maureen and their children, travelled the world, fulfilling a desire to see big cats in the wild.
By 1998, the family had bought a zoo. Well, an existing but ailing aquarium and small native animal park on the banks of the Molonglo River, that had "gone broke twice" before the Tindales bought it.
And with those bare bones, they did put in the effort and created something.
Twenty-five years later, the National Zoo and Aquarium is a gold-standard Canberra tourism institution that attracts 250,000 visitors a year. Added to that is the luxury Jamala Wildlife Lodge, also developed by the family, that hosts an additional 15,000 guests a year. The facility has expanded from less than three developed hectares to now stretch over more than 30 hectares. And there are now about 900 animals on the site, from sharks to tigers to emus.
The Tindales are marking the zoo's 25th birthday by inviting the public to celebrate with them, with special activities scheduled for every day during July.
"We're absolutely thrilled to have been here for 25 years," Mr Tindale, 71, said.
"It's been a great adventure for myself and family and all the staff and I've got to say, 25 years seems to have gone very quickly."
The Tindales say the zoo educates the public about the natural world and contributes directly to the conservation of threatened or endangered species. When he was approached to take on the white lions, Jake and Mischka, Mr Tindale wasn't sure he could, but when his contact in South Africa said they would otherwise end up in a Third World zoo in the Philippines, "I was on the next plane there, and they were on the next plane here".
"I think everything we've worked towards has been trying to make a contribution to animal conservation and animal welfare," he said.
Mr Tindale said he was glad to see local families making regular trips to the zoo, working their memberships to the nth degree.
"The aim is to get the kids of Canberra to grow up in the zoo and that's happening to a much more significant extent than it's ever happened before," he said.
"Our membership program has increased dramatically in the last few years. We've gone from about 5000 members to 25,000 members and a lot of those come every week or every fortnight or even twice a week.
"And the benefit of that is the kids get to grow up with the animals. They learn to learn to love the animals and they learn all about the animal kingdom."
The logistics of running the zoo are mind-boggling. The aquarium, alone, requires a tanker of salt water to be transported from the South Coast once a month.
The facility has been threatened by bushfires twice, in 2001 and 2003. The Tindale Family - Richard and Maureen still live on site - moved in on Christmas Eve, 2001, as fires threatened the facility and 40 to 50 spot fires were burning within its grounds.
Mr Tindale said had the 2001 bushfires not happened and all the pine plantations remained, the zoo would have been "wiped out" in the later firestorm, in 2003.
"It turned out the first fires, for us, were a bit of a blessing," he said.
The zoo is always trying to evolve, with one of the new features an art trail including mosaics, sculptures and photography across the zoo grounds.
Mr Tindale doesn't shirk from the question of whether, even in the face of all this success, zoos have had their day.
"I understand people's reluctance to see animals in captivity," he said.
"We obviously believe that there's a benefit for the animal kingdom to do it. It's certainly not to benefit as a business and there's no way anyone would go into building a zoo as a business ...You've got to feel that there's something worthwhile that you're doing for the animal kingdom."
There was speculation the zoo and Jamala were on the market, but Mr Tindale says that wasn't strictly the case.
"It was never actively promoted as being for sale. We were approached by a couple of guests who had stayed here who were in a position where they could have afforded to buy Jamala and the zoo," he said.
Mr Tindale said the facility was still not strictly for sale.
"It's not on the market. I've still got one group looking at the zoo and Jamala but we've decided that we're quite happy to keep going with it," he said.
"We've never actively pursued a sale of it, it was just there if someone wanted to chat with us. The conditions that were put on a transfer were pretty onerous, so we never expected too much to happen.
"We thought we had to make sure that if someone took it over it would stay as a zoo and not be developed as something else and the animals would be looked after to the high level of care that they already have."
- All the details on activities to celebrate the National Zoo and Aquarium's 25th birthday are here.
