Resort club and the Pearl Coast Zoological Gardens. He bought a stake in a pearl farm, and helped promote the South Sea Pearl. He promoted local culture including Aboriginal artwork. He spent several months a year there, for a time. McAlpine gave to charities as well as startup businesses. The changes were not without controversy, explored for example in the 1990 documentary film Lord of the Bush by Tom Zubrycki. Economic conditions worsened in the early 1990s, and tourism was affected by the 1989 Australian pilots' dispute. McAlpine had to sell his stakes and leave in the mid-1990s. The zoo closed, but many of his efforts lasted, such as the Cable Beach club. When he revisited Broome in 2012 he was described positively in several media stories and the town leaders honoured him as Freeman of the Municipality. Art and collecting McAlpine had been a passionate collector of a wide range of objets d'art and ephemera since his youth. He had a "cupboard of curiosities" as a child, including a snake in a bottle, and a piece of a Zeppelin air ship. Later objects collected by McAlpine included beads, books, furniture, police truncheons, dolls, textiles, ties, sculpture, rare breeds of chicken, Renaissance tapestries, a five-legged lamb in formaldehyde, and a dinosaur penis. He was an early collector of the American painter Mark Rothko. He was very interested in Abstract expressionism and artists such as Morris Louis and Jackson Pollock. He also collected the work of Australian painter Sidney Nolan. He made collections of folk art from various continents. He was also interested in modern sculpturists such as William Turnbull, Naum Gabo, Michael Bolus and David Annesley. He owned a gallery on Cork Street as well. He once owned a warehouse to store his collections, but also he periodically sold or donated portions of them to museums. In 1970 McAlpine donated 60 sculptures to the Tate, including works by Turnbull, Annesley, and Bolus, as well as Phillip King, Tim Scott, William Tucker, and Isaac Witkin. McAlpine also donated hundreds of erotic pictures to the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including works by Bob Carlos Clarke, Karl Lagerfeld, David Bailey, Terence Donovan, and others. Bloomsbury Book Auctions sold many of these items in 2003. The auction was entitled "A (Very) Private Collection: Fashion and Eroticism Photographs 1970–1990". In the 1970s McAlpine and the classical architect Quinlan Terry constructed various follies in