NIOA has been a part of the shooting community since 1973. From modest beginnings in regional Queensland, it is today the leading firearms company in Australia – and it’s still family owned. As the business celebrates 50 years, we look back at how Bill and Barbara Nioa, with little money but lots of grit, laid the foundations of an Australian success story.

The NIOA business that has developed into the large operation that it is today had its roots in the fertile ground of Owanyilla, a dot on the map near Maryborough in regional Queensland.

After quite some time turning the soil with a draught horse-drawn single blade plough, Bill and Barbara Nioa gradually developed their small produce farm well enough to have regular crops of fruit like pineapples, rockmelons, watermelons, bananas and cucumbers.

Barbara would lead the horse while Bill would operate the plough. Barbara remembers plenty of cuts from the barbed wire at the end of a paddock as she dragged the horse as far forward as she could to get extra inches of planting room.

Between late 1965 and early 1967, all while Bill worked a Monday-Friday (and often Saturdays) job with Maryborough transport and removalists firm Woodhead and Moore, they would load their fruit onto a box trailer and hook it up to their vehicle.

Bill would take Barbara a little south along the highway where they would unhitch the trailer, on the western side of the northbound lane, and leave Barbara to sell their fruit to passing motorists.

The weekly routine was for their two school-age children to be picked up by the school bus near their home while Bill would drop Barbara and their youngest child off at the fruit stall enroute to Maryborough to work for Woodhead and Moore then pick them upon his return journey.

This was regular daily life for more than two years. It was a far from comfortable existence, with initially no shelter, no toilet, just the dust churned up by passing cars as they detoured off the highway, flies, sun, rain and loneliness.

When Barbara’s younger brother Bill, a Maryborough real estate agent, learned that a disused service station at Tiaro was on the market, he advised them to buy it. The ‘servo’ on the western side of the Bruce Highway’s northbound lane had been vacant for five years, and it offered something the family farmhouse didn’t – electricity.

The Nioas sold their farm at Owanyilla and bought the property for $800. From hard graft as farmers and fruit traders to a service industry that would have them on call 24/7, as the service station was a popular truck stop and many drivers liked to travel by night. They lived in a two-bedroom fibro cottage opening up behind the shopfront of the Neptune service station.

They were new to the industry, but it took little time to adapt and they continued to sell local fruit and basic food items over the counter and added basic groceries and household daily needs to their stock as well as meals and takeaway snacks for the truckies.

The Shell Oil Company owned and distributed Neptune fuel and was quickly impressed by the Nioas’ entrepreneurial sense, and within months rebranded the service station with Shell signage.

In 1971, Bill and Barbara took quickly to managing the established Shell fuel depot/wholesale distribution outlet in Kent St, Maryborough along the banks of the Mary River next to the old sugar mill.

Within their first few years of managing the depot, the Nioas had diversified their business and also leased a service station in town from Shell, called the Five Ways on the junction of Kent and March streets. Later, after selling tyres successfully from the depot, they opened a tyre sales and service outlet in Bundaberg, and a similar set-up in Gladstone.

It was 1973 when Bill moved to Gladstone and started selling guns and ammunition from the service station there. The catalyst was that the gun shop that supplied Bill, a keen weekend shooter, was haphazard in his delivery of ammunition so Bill thought he would set up his own distribution for the region and was soon after also roaming through many towns selling from a Pantec-style truck.

This became the genesis of what we see today as the NIOA company’s expanding empire with its state-of-the-art headquarters near Brisbane Airport and Bill and Barbara’s youngest son, Robert, sitting at its helm as group CEO.

Those who knew Bill Nioa – a ‘man’s man’ who lived life a little on the wild side, who worked hard, socialised hard and smoked far too much for most of his life – would not have expected him to live long. Yet, when he suffered a fatal heart attack in August 2002 after slowing down somewhat in previous months, it was still a shock.

Bill had worked effectively with Robert in the crucial first five years after the Port Arthur fallout to reshape the firearms industry in Australia with the Howard government’s change of legislation banning the private use of semi-auto guns and rifles. They didn’t always see eye to eye but shared the same view about survival of their business; they had to throw themselves into finding new suppliers and clients.

One was the old hand with an intimate knowledge of the field, street-smarts, the right contacts, a rather unique perception in reading people and an idea’s potential, but who often conveyed a rather gruff manner. The other added a more refined approach, limitless peripheral business vision and ambition, an eye for detail, and a large capacity to absorb information and decipher its value.

Together, they virtually relaunched the company by aggressively, yet strategically, seeking and mostly achieving, national distribution contracts for some of the world’s leading arms manufacturers like Glock, Zoli, Emillio Rizzini, B.R. Rizzini, Anschutz, Leupold, Marlin, Nico Pyrotechnik and Saco Defense.

By the late 1990s, a significant statement of their confidence and intention to become a long-term player in the industry was the investment in a purpose-built complex in the north Brisbane suburb of Banyo.

After Bill's sudden passing Robert, in his early 30s, became the sole boss of the family company that employed 14 people at the Banyo complex.

The quest to expand, and keep expanding, was already entrenched in his ambitious mind way back then and he has cleared many hurdles since in taking the business to a level that only he would have envisaged.

Today, NIOA is headquartered on Lomandra Drive in Pinkenba, Brisbane, with offices and operations in Melbourne, Canberra, Benalla, Lithgow and Auckland and, with the 2023 acquisition of iconic American rifle maker Barrett, in Murfreesboro, Tennessee.

In 2020 came perhaps NIOA’s biggest breakthrough to date and most ambitious goal-attainment when the company broke a 25-year monopoly on Department of Defence munitions manufacturing by becoming a co-tenant at the Australian Government-owned site at Benalla in Victoria, 220km north-east of Melbourne.

In May 2022, NIOA announced the 100 per cent acquisition of leading New Zealand firearms and ammunition wholesale distributor Sportsway Distributors, building on relationships that already included the New Zealand Defence Force and New Zealand Police. On 1 January, 2023, NIOA acquired iconic American firearms manufacturer Barrett from the Barrett family.

NIOA continues to embrace the values of its humble, self-made founders, namely hard work, loyalty and trust in their staff, their business activities and the communities in which they operate. Like both his parents did, he uses these values to create a highly trusted and respected reputation.

As Rob says: "It's always been a case of knuckling down and really trying to grow the business and making sure we kept people happy by doing the right thing."