Content area
Full Text
OBITUARY Baillieu Myer. Born 1926. Died 2022. Businessman, philanthropist. Long ago in a black and white world of vacuum tubes and test patterns, suburbs radiated out from capital cities along railway lines often built by speculators so that inexpensive outlying farmland could be chopped up into quarter-acre blocks and triple-fronted cream brick veneer houses placed on these like Monopoly tokens. While this wasn’t the world of Baillieu Myer, he lived surrounded by it. And by the time he joined the board of the family company, Myer Emporium, in 1955, Melbourne’s population of 1.6 million mostly lived in its suburbs, increasingly at greater distances from the city’s GPO.
About 16 per cent of Australians owned a car then – most likely paying it off in monthly instalments – but this statistic was certain to change quickly, as Baillieu well knew. He always analysed and acted with mercantile calculation – so too his brother Ken, who had joined the board seven years earlier, although the older sibling could be volatile, if charming.
The brothers were welcome new blood for the board. And they had seen the future of retailing. It was the US, where each had worked to gain experience. They co-authored a submission that Myer should follow its customers out to the suburbs. The board – two of whose members had been born in the previous century – were at first reluctant, but after Ken and Baillieu had consultants assess their proposal, they came around and soon the company bought about 12 hectares in the southeastern Melbourne suburb of Malvern East from the Sister of the Good Shepherd, an order – like the family to whom they sold their land – dedicated to investing in the society around them.
Not for the first time Ken and Baillieu were proved right. “Although based in a broad way on the pattern of shopping centres in the United States, Chadstone has been individually designed to suit local needs and its own location,” the board stated on the Chadstone shopping centre’s opening in October 1960. It had cost £6m. These days Chadstone has 520 shops, parking for almost 10,000 cars, 20 million customers...