(FORTUNE Magazine) – BIG, EXPANSIVE Alan Bond -- Australia's grand acquisitor -- said ''g'day'' in 1988 to anything that wasn't nailed down. First he bought Bell Group, a broad-based conglomerate in Perth, in part from countryman Robert Holmes a Court, hit hard by the market crash. Appetite only whetted, he tossed more shrimps on his barbie: a phone company in Chile, the St. Moritz Hotel in New York, and, in England, shares in the international trading company Lonrho and the food and beverage concern Allied Lyons. In the process he made himself his hemisphere's preeminent conglomerateur. By the end of the year, his empire had ballooned its debt to $10 billion. Critics claim his buying is haphazard -- that Bond lacks a grand strategy. Says a subordinate: ''He has the attention span of a gnat. He feels, he senses. He's not a step-by-step Napoleonic planner.'' If true, then Bond has managed to grope his way to a fortune. Starting as a sign painter at age 14 in the seedy port city of Fremantle, he borrowed $718 from relatives, investing it in land. By 21 he was a millionaire property developer. Going deeply into debt for deals, he faced ruin in the mid-1970s when Australia's property market collapsed. Asset sales and patient bankers bailed him out. By 1981 he had recovered sufficiently to pay $140 million for Swan Brewery, the first in a chain of Bond breweries that today ranks sixth in worldwide beer production. His 1985 assault on Brisbane brewer Castlemaine Tooheys rewrote local record books for leverage. Attacking an opponent seven times his size in capitalization, Bond, already geared to the max, took on $800 million more in loans, then promptly sold off $350 million of the brewer's assets to pay down the debt. Today, cash flows from Castlemaine, Swan, and Bond-owned G. Heileman Brewing of Wisconsin keep lenders satisfied. Roland W. ''Tiny'' Rowland is among those who wish they weren't. The 71- year-old chief executive of Lonrho used to be pals with Bond, 50. The two reportedly even bumped yachts in the Mediterranean. Now Bond's purchase of 21% of Lonrho has Rowland convinced the Aussie wants to tuck Lonrho into his crowded pouch. In late November, Rowland charged that Bond Corp. is ! technically insolvent. Bond denied it, saying Rowland's math did not take into account realized or pending asset sales that will trim his firm's debts by half. How far can Alan Bond go without a plan? His foray into the blimp business provides a clue. While the boat he owned was winning the America's Cup Race off Newport in 1983, Bond admired a Goodyear blimp overhead. Later, by coincidence, he learned that a controlling interest in English blimp-maker Airship Industries was for sale, cheap. He bought, on the notion that it might be nice to have a Swan Lager blimp on hand the next time Australia defended the Cup. Some time later, Airship Industries, teamed with Westinghouse, won a blimp contract from the U.S. Navy worth $168 million. This is known as luck. When you have luck, you don't need a plan. A.F.