The Myer dynasty: a Bendigo pedlar's cart to Bourke Street

Walk down Bourke Street on a Boxing Day and you'll still see it: the queue outside the Myer windows, the crush at the doors when trading opens, the sort of retail theatre that's supposed to belong to another century. It mostly does. But the Myer dynasty's name above the door belongs to a story that started with a Jewish migrant from the Russian Empire selling drapery out of a horse-drawn cart in country Victoria. It's worth asking why, more than a hundred years on, that name still means something in a city that has buried plenty of other department stores without ceremony.

Sidney Myer, born Simcha Baevski in 1878 in what is now Belarus, landed in Melbourne in 1899 with, by most accounts, very little capital and less English. The details of his earliest years in Australia are patchy, as they tend to be for migrants who weren't yet anyone worth writing down. What's well established is that he and his brother Elcon started out hawking goods around regional Victoria, and that by 1900 Sidney had set up a small drapery business in Bendigo, then still a substantial goldfields town with money to spend and a main street, Pall Mall, that could support a bit of retail ambition.

How a hawker's trade worked

It helps to understand what hawking actually involved. A pedlar carried or carted soft goods such as cloth, haberdashery and clothing to customers who lived too far from a town shop to browse one. The margins were thin and the capital needs were small, which is exactly why it suited a newly arrived migrant. You bought stock on whatever credit a wholesaler would extend, sold it on the road, and used the proceeds to buy more. The skill lay in judging what a district wanted and getting paid promptly.

A drapery shop was the natural next step. It meant a fixed address, regular customers and the chance to build a reputation rather than rely on a single sale. Goldfields towns like Bendigo suited that ambition because wealth there was concentrated and visible, and a retailer who offered decent quality and fair dealing could build a following quickly. That grounding in direct selling shaped everything that followed.

From Bendigo drapery to the Bourke Street gamble

The Bendigo store did well enough, but Myer's real gamble came in 1911, when he took a lease on a struggling drapery premises in Bourke Street, Melbourne, and turned it into something closer to the American department store model he'd apparently studied with real attention. This wasn't just more stock on more shelves. It was theatre: elaborate window displays, a strong emphasis on customer service, and a retail experience designed to make shopping feel like an event rather than a chore. Melbourne hadn't quite seen it done at that scale before.

The logic of the format is simple enough. A department store gathers many product categories under one roof and one management, so a customer who comes in for one thing is tempted by several others. Fixed prices, returns policies and attentive staff signalled trust, and the building itself became part of the sales pitch. The model rewards size, because buying power, advertising and a prime city site all spread their cost across more sales. That's also why it punishes a store that stops growing.

By the 1920s the Bourke Street store had expanded into a full city block, and Myer had begun the acquisitions that would turn one store into a network, buying up competing retailers across Victoria and eventually into other states. The company listed publicly in 1924, which by itself tells you how quickly a drapery hawker's business had become a serious enterprise. A public listing lets a business raise capital by selling shares to outside investors, in return for accepting disclosure obligations and the scrutiny of a share market. For a retailer set on buying rivals, it was a sensible way to fund the next purchase.

Sidney Myer died in 1934, comparatively young, but the business he'd built kept growing under family and professional management for decades afterward. It eventually merged in 1985 with the Coles Group to form what became one of the country's dominant retail conglomerates, before Myer was later spun out again as its own listed entity. For the longer corporate narrative, our history of the Myer department store follows the chain from its drapery roots through to the trouble at Bourke Street.

I'd argue the more interesting story isn't the retail mechanics, impressive as they were, but what Myer did with the money once he had it, because that's the part that actually explains why the family still matters in Melbourne today.

The philanthropy that outlasted the stores

Sidney Myer gave money away with a consistency that was unusual for his era, and arguably unusual for any era. During the Depression years he funded free Christmas dinners for Melbourne's unemployed, an act of practical generosity that's still commemorated in the city's civic calendar. He backed the construction of the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, though that particular structure came later, funded by the family in his memory. He also supported a wide range of causes from public health to the arts, often without much fanfare given the scale of what he was contributing.

That instinct didn't die with him. The Sidney Myer Fund and later the Myer Foundation became fixtures of Australian philanthropy, quietly bankrolling arts institutions, social welfare programmes and community initiatives across generations. A family foundation of this kind generally works by holding a pool of capital and distributing grants from its returns, which lets giving continue long after the original donor has gone. It's the kind of long-run, unglamorous giving that doesn't generate headlines the way a Packer casino float or a Rinehart mining stoush does, but it's arguably had more direct effect on ordinary Melburnians' lives: the concerts in the Bowl, the grants that keep smaller arts organisations afloat, the public health initiatives that never carry the family name loudly enough for most people to notice.

Compare that with some of the other dynasties this masthead has covered. The Packers built and spent fortunes with considerably more noise. I wrote about Kerry Packer's cricket, casinos and the tax line he never quite lived down, and our wider look at three generations of Packer power shows the contrast in temperament with the Myers. Where Packer treated wealth as something to be wielded, tested and occasionally gambled with in full public view, the Myer family's instinct has generally run toward stewardship, building institutions rather than headlines. Neither approach is inherently more admirable; they're just different theories of what money is for.

Kenneth Myer, Baillieu Myer and the second generation

Sidney's sons Kenneth and Baillieu Myer took the business through much of its mid-century growth, and neither simply coasted on their father's reputation. Kenneth Myer was heavily involved in the company's expansion and also carried forward the family's philanthropic bent, chairing the Sidney Myer Fund for years and pushing money toward Australian arts and cultural institutions at a point when public funding for such things was thin. Baillieu Myer likewise stayed active in both the retail business and the family's charitable structures well into his later years, becoming something of an elder statesman for corporate Melbourne.

Second generations are where most family fortunes get tested. The founder's authority rests on having built the thing; the heirs have to earn theirs, and they must also decide who gets a say in the business, who gets paid and who gets to sell. Families that don't settle those questions early tend to settle them in public.

What distinguishes the Myers from several of the other dynasties on our books is the relative absence of the kind of boardroom warfare and sibling litigation that has periodically consumed families like the Hancocks. There's more on that in the Hancock dynasty's iron ore fortune and the family disputes Gina Rinehart inherited along with it, and the difference in tone is stark. The Myers certainly haven't been free of internal disagreement; no family with this much money and this many generations ever is. But the disputes have generally stayed out of the courts and largely out of the newspapers, which either speaks to genuinely good family governance or simply a family that's been better at managing its own publicity. Possibly both.

What happened to the stores

The retail business itself has had a rougher few decades than the family name might suggest. Myer merged with Coles in 1985 to create Coles Myer, at the time one of the largest retail groups in the country. Private equity interests took the department store chain private again in 2006 and then relisted it on the ASX in 2009. For the other half of that merger, see our account of the Coles story.

The private equity sequence is a common one, and worth understanding. A buyout group acquires a listed company, usually with a large share of borrowed money, aims to lift earnings and tidy the balance sheet, and then sells the business back to the public through a fresh listing. Whether the investors who buy in at that point do well depends largely on what price they pay and what the business can earn afterwards.

Since then it's been a fairly familiar story for bricks-and-mortar department stores everywhere: pressure from online retail, closures of underperforming stores, and share prices that have spent long stretches disappointing investors who remember the brand's earlier dominance. The format's old strengths turn into costs when shoppers can compare prices on a phone. Big city floorplates carry heavy rents, and a broad range means a lot of stock that has to be marked down if it doesn't sell.

The family itself divested most of its direct shareholding in the retail operation decades ago, which is part of why you can talk about the department store's struggles and the family's continuing prominence as almost separate stories. The Myer name on the Bourke Street awning and the Myer family's philanthropic and business interests today aren't really the same enterprise any more, even though most Melburnians probably don't draw that distinction cleanly. I think that's actually the smartest thing the family did. Separating the name's civic reputation from the fortunes of one increasingly troubled retail chain meant the Myer name kept its shine even as the stores lost some of theirs.

The Myer dynasty measured differently

Anyone who writes about Australian business dynasties gets used to a certain shape to the story: spectacular rise, family feud, messy succession, sometimes a spectacular collapse to round it off. The Myers don't fit that template especially well, and that's worth sitting with rather than smoothing over.

There have been business setbacks, certainly, and the retail chain's performance over the last twenty years wouldn't impress anyone. But the family's civic standing in Melbourne has proven remarkably durable, built less on maintaining a single business empire and more on a multi-generational commitment to giving money away thoughtfully. Whether that's a more admirable model than the empire-building of a Murdoch or a Packer is a matter of taste. I've written about how Rupert Murdoch turned a single Adelaide newspaper into a global media empire, and there's no question that story has more scale and more drama. But scale isn't the only measure of a dynasty's significance, and the Myer Music Bowl on a summer evening, full of Melburnians who've never thought twice about who paid for it, might be the more honest legacy.

For more on the families that built and occasionally broke modern Australian business, the Tycoons & Dynasties hub has the rest of the ledger.