Big business has played a major role in Australia’s development. Rhetoric swings from celebrating big business as the source of innovation and capital, to the pejorative tone of ‘the Big End of Town’ that suggests dominant firms have controlled the Australian business community to the detriment of others. Although inter-firm relations have been an important feature of the Australian business landscape, the negotiation of competition and co-operation amongst them remains largely unrecorded. In this paper we investigate the coordinated behaviour of a business elite – large woolbrokers in Melbourne in the 1920s. We draw on complementary methods – social network analysis (SNA), prosopography, and archival content analysis – to understand the interactions amongst this elite groups of firms and individuals, and the ways in which this influenced the operation of Melbourne’s wool trade. Regular, localised, daily interaction between senior woolbrokers fostered a cohesive business elite that was simultaneously a fiercely competitive group of firms fighting over their share of the booming Australian wool trade, as well exhibiting co-operative behaviour to improve the efficiency of connecting Australian wool to the world. This illuminates the importance of business interconnection for both Australia’s economic development and for the successful operation of commodity trades.