In early March, property billionaire Harry Triguboff hosted a lavish 85th birthday party in Sydney.
Delta Goodrem sang for an audience that included fellow billionaires Frank Lowy and John Gandel, former prime minister John Howard and ANZ boss Shayne Elliott.
And at each of the 400 table settings in the ballroom of Sydney's Hyatt Regency was special gift – a Russian-made Matryoshka doll, adorned with the birthday boy's face.
The six wooden Triguboff's showed Australia's second richest person enjoying various milestones of his career: Harry with his Order of Australia, Harry with his hard hat, Harry with the Torah, Harry being crowned No. 1 on the Financial Review Rich List in 2016.
The dolls are also a neat metaphor for the stages a Rich List member's career goes through.
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But they could also been seen as an analogy for the Rich List, which this year celebrates its 35th edition.
Since 1983, when Business Review Weekly named Australia's richest 200 people for the first time, the list has become a crucial tool for not only tracking our biggest fortunes, but also the changing nature of the economy.
Just like Triguboff's dolls, the Rich List has also passed through six distinct and different phases over its rich history.
Rise of new money
The list's early years, through the middle of the 1980s, highlighted the rise of Australia's new money. While names like Smorgon, Liberman and Myer represented the establishment of Melbourne and the Fairfax and Packer families ruled Sydney, a group of different entrepreneurs emerged from different parts of the economy and the country.
Rag trader Abe Goldberg became the king of Australia's textile sector. John Roberts was building Australia's biggest construction group, Multiplex. Lindsay Fox was making his mark as a transport tsar.
In 1985, West Australian Robert Holmes a Court was named Australia's richest man, trumping Kerry Packer despite having gone into business just 15 years earlier; he and Packer were named as the nation's first billionaires two years later.
Fellow Perth entrepreneur Alan Bond, the man who helped win Australia the famed America's Cup in 1983, was also rocketing up the list, with an empire that stretched from beer to media and to mining.
They were very different entrepreneurs, but theirs were stories of the time. Both built their empire by taking over company after company in aggressive raids, were not afraid to use debt to do it and they became household names in a way business people hadn't done previously.
Crash casts long shadow
But within years, it was all over and the Rich List entered its second, darker phase. The 1987 stockmarket crash ended Holmes a Court's days as a billionaire and by 1991, Bond Corporation had collapsed. Alan Bond would later do jail time for siphoning $1.2 billion from Bell Resources into Bond Corp.
The casualties from the crash and the recession that followed were numerous, and debt was the common denominator.
Abe Goldberg's Linter Group went into receivership with debts of $1.5 billion, and he dramatically fled to his native Poland in 1991 as warrants were issued for his arrest. Christopher Skase famously took up residence in Majorca in Spain, leaving $172 million in debt and wife Pixie behind.
George Herscu's fall from grace was perhaps the most spectacular; his Hooker Corporation collapsed owing $1.7 billion and he was sentenced to five years jail for bribing Queensland roads minister Russ Hintze.
Kerry Packer remained the only billionaire in Australia for seven long years, until late packaging magnate Richard Pratt joined him in the rarefied air in 1994.
The long boom
But while the scars from the recession were deep, the third phase of the Rich List involved a decade-long boom, punctuated only by a brief pause for the tech wreck.
While the likes of Packer, Lowy, Gandel, Pratt and Kerry Stokes dominated the list, this decade saw the emergence of entrepreneurs who would dominate the list for 20 years.
Flight Centre co-founder Graham Turner, retail tsar Brett Blundy, Computershare founder Chris Morris, Toll Holdings boss Paul Little, pub baron Bruce Mathieson, property developer Tony Perich and Queensland furniture king John Van Lieshout would rise up the list during the period, as a buoyant economy built on property and consumer consumption propelled retailers and developers to new heights.
To be sure, there was a rough patch around 2001, when a small cadre of pioneering technology entrepreneurs saw their new-found wealth evaporate. The most memorable was surely Jodee Rich, who in 1999 was 12th on the list with a fortune of $775 million from his shareholding in telecommunications challenger One.Tel. By 2001 the company had collapsed, taking Rich's fortune and plenty of gloss from the reputations of directors James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch.
The rich don't waste a crisis
By 2007, at least some of Australia's top entrepreneurs appeared to have realised that things had been too good, for too long.
The fourth phase of the Rich List centred on the global financial crisis, and started when billionaires James Packer, Stokes, Lang Walker and Van Lieshout orchestrated deals to take cash off table in a pre-GFC sell-off that saw Rich Listers offload $15 billion of assets.
Packer, Stokes and Van Lieshout sold parts of their empire to private equity; Walker sold $1.5 billion of assets to listed property group Mirvac. True, all would keep parts of their assets, but this was as close to ringing the bell at the top of the market as we've seen.
Over the next two years, the crisis would eliminate a host of fast-money names. Childcare king Eddy Groves saw his $2.5 billion ABC Learning Centres empire crash to earth, while Babcock & Brown's Phil Green, Allco Finance Group's David Coe and MFS duo Michael King and Phil Adams fell off the Rich List under the weight of huge debt loads.
One of the hardest hit in dollar terms was Perth stockbroker turned mining magnate Andrew Forrest. In 2008, at the height of the mining boom, he had been named Australia's richest person with a fortune of $9.41 billion; a year later, with shares in his Fortescue Metals Group languishing, Forrest was worth $2.38 billion – though he was still entrenched on the list.
Rocks rule
Forrest's rise had also heralded the Rich List's fifth phase – the resources boom.
Typically it was companies, not individuals who dominated the mining sector. But the boom sent a slew of miners towards the top of the list. There was Queensland coal baron Chris Wallin, the mercurial Clive Palmer, Perth heiress Angela Bennett, NSW duo Travers Duncan and Brian Flannery and enigmatic explorer Mark Creasy.
This phase was crowned in 2012, when Gina Rinehart, was named Australia's richest person – and the richest woman in the world – with a fortune of $29.2 billion. It was a milestone five decades in the making, and one that would ironically see her long-running family legal problems resurface.
Gone global
Another beneficiary of the resources boom was Swiss-based billionaire Ivan Glasenberg, chief executive of resources giant Glencore. He joined the list in 2011, when he floated the company on the London Stock Exchange in a $60 billion deal.
Glasenberg's arrival was also part of the sixth phase of the Rich List, where a string of wealthy foreigners featured.
The seeds of this trend were sowed in the 1980s and 1990s, when future Rich List members such as Hui Wing Mau, Ye Lipei, Jamuna Gurung and Shesh Gale, and Glasenberg came to Australia to study or work. They would take out Australian citizenship and therefore win a place on the Rich List.
Ten years ago, only one of Australia's 34 billionaires lived overseas. In 2018, about one-quarter of our billionaires live offshore, with the list welcoming Indian billionaire Vivek Sehgal for the first time.
A new phase
The arrival of Sehgal underlines how the internationalisation of the list is likely to continue. But two other events of the last 12 months are also likely to shape the list.
The first was the decision by Frank Lowy to sell his Westfield retail property empire to European giant Unibail Rodamco in a $32 billion deal, announced last December. This was quickly followed by an announcement by Rupert Murdoch – not eligible for the Rich List after taking out US citizenship in 1985 – that he would sell about $50 billion of assets to Disney.
While the asset selling sprees seen in 2007 before the GFC were driven by fears about debt, it is more likely the next deals will be sparked by fears of disruption. Retail property and media have already been hit by technological change, and there would be many more Rich Listers thinking about whether their empires are next.
The big deals of Lowy and Murdoch have also been driven by succession concerns. Both men are 87 years old, and while few would be game to suggest retirement is imminent, their ability to control how their fortune passes to the next generation is relatively limited.
Indeed, of the 14 "perennials" on the Rich list – those members who have appeared every year since 1984 – only one, 65-year-old Alan Rydge is younger than 70 and the average age of the group is 82.
We've been predicting a wave of succession across the Rich List for the best part of 20 years, but surely it is almost upon us. How will that change the list? Will a new generation of entrepreneurs push the family fortunes into new areas? Will a group of women from these families emerge and become a force? Which fortunes will flourish, and which will been blown up?
No doubt the next 35 years will be as rich with drama as the last three-and-a-half decades.
The full Financial Review Rich List is published in full today in The Australian Financial Review Magazine and online at afr.com
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