Anton de Marillac takes a bow after 37 years

A doyen of the shipping industry is retiring after 37 years in the trade, as Anton de Marillac, currently senior vice-president of the Evergreen Agency in SA, gets set to take his final bow. De Marillac is from anything but seafaring stock. His early years were spent as a farmer’s son in the sub-tropical agriculture town of Tzaneen, in what is now Limpopo province. Apart from a twoyear stint with the BSAP in what was then Rhodesia, he was involved in the farming life until the early 1970s. But getting appropriate treatment for a health problem for his two children forced the De Marillac family to move to Johannesburg where he took on a post as junior seafreight salesman with Ellerman & Bucknall. That was when his anchor firmly dropped in the shipping industry. The next 17 years saw him moving on to take on ever more senior sales positions with Africa Sea Transport Consultants, then agents for AESL from Europe, and later Nantai Shipping Enterprises. In 1992 he became a founder member of Green Africa Shipping with the late Capt JJ Chen, a well-known master of shipping in the SA shipping industry. Early in his career, De Marillac added to his education the Institute of Marketing Management (IMM) qualifications in sales and marketing management and information technology’ (IT) courses in five basic programmes. When he joined Green Africa he was appointed GM sales and marketing for its principal office, Evergreen Line of Taiwan, in South Africa, soon adding to his post the appointment of Johannesburg branch manager, with a further appointment to the Green Africa Board of Trustees. In 2009 came the change of agency ownership with the direct investment by Evergreen Line and the establishment of Evergreen Agency (SA), where De Marillac was promoted to senior vice-president. Come retirement at the end of this month (March), he has no intention of sitting with his feet up. “My late son, Michael, was a game ranger, and was very influential in us becoming involved in the natural environment,” he told FTW. “Wild life and nature conservation became very much part of our lives.” He will shortly be studying nature conservation further as a prelude to establishing a small, specialised safari business. “So retirement for me is a return to the soil and its natural fauna and flora, away from the shipping line agency business which chained me to city life for almost the last four decades,” he said.