Dynasties & family wars
The great business families and the fights over the fortune.
- ArticleKerry Packer: cricket, casinos and the tax line he never quite lived down
Kerry Packer built World Series Cricket, gambled in millions and told a Senate committee why he wouldn't pay more tax than he had to.
- ArticleRupert Murdoch: how a single Adelaide newspaper became a global empire
From a modest inheritance on North Terrace to Fox News and The Wall Street Journal — the Australian origins of the Murdoch media dynasty, told straight.
- ArticleThe Hancock dynasty: iron ore, the Pilbara and the fortune Gina Rinehart rebuilt
Lang Hancock stumbled across the world's richest iron ore deposits in the Pilbara. What his daughter did with that discovery is an even bigger story.
- ArticleThe Myer dynasty: a Bendigo pedlar's cart and the store that became Melbourne
Sidney Myer arrived from Russia with almost nothing. He built Australia's biggest department store empire — and a family whose giving still shapes Melbourne.
- ArticleThe Packers: three generations of Australian power, money and gamble
From Frank's Depression-era tabloids to Kerry's television monopoly to James's casino empire, the Packer dynasty reshaped Australian business — and ultimately fractured under its own weight.
- ArticleThe Smorgon family: from smallgoods to steel, and a dynasty that chose to end well
How a family fled Europe with almost nothing, built a smallgoods-to-steel empire in Melbourne, and then did something rare: wound it up on their own terms.