The Myer dynasty: a Bendigo pedlar's cart and the store that became Melbourne

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 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, and 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.

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.

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. Sidney Myer died in 1934, comparatively young, but the business he'd built kept growing under family and professional management for decades afterward, eventually merging 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.

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 — and 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. 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 the contrast in temperament with the Myers is instructive. 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 it's worth noting that 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.

What's notable, and 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. I covered some of 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, before private equity interests took the department store chain private again in 2006 and then relisted it on the ASX in 2009. 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 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.

A dynasty measured differently

If you're used to writing about Australian business dynasties — and I've spent a fair chunk of my career doing exactly that — you get 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.