Pinkus ben Shmuel Zev (Hebrew: פנחס בן שמואל זב) (21 June 1921 – 7 April 1985), known professionally as Paul Fayman, was a successful Jewish property developer and businessman based in Melbourne, Australia.
Paul Fayman | |
---|---|
Pinkus ben Shmuel Zev (פנחס בן שמואל זב) | |
![]() | |
Born | 21 June 1921 |
Died | 7 April 1985 | (aged 63)
Resting place | Springvale Cemetery |
Monuments | Paul Road, Forest Hill (Forest Hill Heights Estate) |
Years active | 1952–1985 |
Known for | Property development Wholesaling |
Board member of | Wright & Bros (1956–1964) Development Consolidated (1960–68) Masaga Investments (1964–85) Hanover Holdings (1969–78) Austram Corporation (1980–85) |
Spouse | Faye Fayman (m. 1946) |
Parents |
|
Personal life
editFayman was born in Pilica, a small village in east-central Poland. His father, Shmuel "Wolf" Fayman was a livestock trader. Yitzchok Dovid Groner, a good friend of Paul, described his upbringing as "very Jewish".[1] Fayman recalled his youth in a 1969 interview with The Herald:
"Then the nazis marched through. We were Jewish, and in 1942 they split us up and carted us off to various concentration camps ... I managed to survive the camps, mainly by good luck. I ended up being liberated from Buchenwald by the Americans. I spent the next year or so as a refugee tramping through Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland looking for my family, but I couldn't find anyone. Back in our home town they gave me various leads and I finally discovered that little Cesia was alive and living in a town in Germany."
Paul married Fela "Faye" Fayman (28 April 1924 – 28 October 2007) in 1946 and they had two children. When the Berlin Blockade started in 1948, Paul's sister, Cesia Fayman (5 April 1926 – 8 November 1976) made the decision to move to Australia, fearing another European War. Paul decided a few months later to also leave Europe. He picked America and had his papers ready, his bags packed.
"When I rang Cesia in Melbourne she was so upset at the thought of the two remaining member of the family splitting this way that I decided, on the spot, to make Australia my new home too." [2]
The Faymans departed the Port of Genoa in December 1951 and arrived at the Port of Melbourne in January 1952.[3] They had enough money to buy a home in Northcote, and Paul began looking to buy a small business.[4] Once he became successful, Paul commissioned a double-storey modernist house at Balmoral Court in St Kilda East, where he lived for virtually the remainder of his life. It hosted multiple meetings of Jewish communities and was famously broken into by serial burglar "The Cat" (real name John Harvey Rider) in March 1970, who stole around $15,000 worth of cash and jewellery just days before the Faymans were set to go on a holiday.[5][6]
Paul died on 7th April 1985 due to unreported causes and is buried at the Chevra Kadisha Cemetery in Springvale. His interests were inherited by his descendants who oversee the Fayman International Group of Companies, which is mostly active in produce wholesaling and biochemical production. The Paul Fayman Memorial Scholarship at Yeshiva Beth-Rivkah Colleges was named in his honour to "give the opportunity to children of families who would otherwise be unable to financially provide them with a Jewish education".[7]
Career
editAfter learning most of his family had died or been killed in war camps, Fayman began looking for a job. "For a long time I didn't know what to do. I had somehow lost the urge to work. Then I got a break. The Americans were selling some disposal goods from their PXs – chocolates, soap and other items. I became a wholesaler". His refugee card from 1951 listed his occupation as "shoe-upper maker".[8] At some point between 1947 and 1951, while working in Munich, Germany, he funded the production of a film about the Holocaust. He wanted to show people what the Germans had done to the Jews. Although it was completed, he got into "political hot water" and it was never publicly shown. The film is now lost media.[2]
Upon arriving in Australia in 1952, he invested his limited resources into a small wholesale meat business at Oakover Road in Preston.[9] He worked 16 hours, six days a week for four years, then sold out. "I was making money but I was sick and tired of meat" he recalled. Then, he bought a delicatessen in Melbourne and soon had a chain of 33 stores spread around the city. He sold them too, and bought into the Esplanade Hotel in St Kilda just before the 1956 Summer Olympics. He hoped for late closing but lost the gamble with Victorian authorities. "Unfortunately, a large block booking was cancelled, which, coupled with other problems, gave us a hard struggle which lasted two years."[10]
He gave up the hotel, and, pooling funds with four partners, bought a controlling interest worth about $310,000 in Wright & Bros; an old-established string of delicatessens which had branches in the Melbourne CBD and in suburbs like Collingwood, Malvern and Prahran.[Note 1][11] After taking control of the company, he strategically expanded its scope of operations by leading a program to diversify, creating subsidiaries that invested in property development, retail and produce wholesaling.[Note 2] "But, with self-service upon us, I realised the shops were too small. So we sold them off at quite a nice profit". He later bought the Newport Freezing Works, citing in 1969 that he "wanted to develop the area for realestate but decided to keep the firm going, now it employs 900 men and this year will export $20 million of lamb and beef overseas."[2]
The funds realised from the sale of the delicatessens were channeled into his first conventional venture into real estate – home building.[10] "Then I turned to real estate. In those days it was so easy, you could sell of a map, you didn't even need to make roads." In 1959, Fayman started a company called Development Consolidated P/L with business partner John S. Emmanuel, consolidating their real estate interests under one parent organisation.[12] They started building shops and leasing them to Woolworths, Coles and Safeway.[2]
Fayman, who preferred joint ventures, usually a mixed-use strategy in his developments – incorporating residential, commercial and industrial lots. Early examples of this configuration include the Borrack Square Shopping Centre, Central Hotel and a 110-lot housing estate at Altona North (developed 1959–61),[13][14] and a 90-lot housing estate with an outdoor shopping centre and the Monash Hotel at Clayton (developed 1960–63).[15] Perhaps his most successful development was the 200-lot Forest Hill Heights housing estate and adjacent Forest Hill Shopping Centre, which were built between 1959 and 1964 by his company Forest Hill Heights P/L.[Note 3][16]
In July 1960, Fayman advised the Minister for Public Works of his plans to develop an Australian version of America's Disneyland called "Australialand" on a 500-acre site in Laverton. Plans were officially announced four months later in The Age, which proposed “educational exhibits, together with the more customary forms of children’s entertainment”.[17] The Board of Works had issued provisional approval, but the project was ultimately abandoned and the land was sold.[18] Upon hearing the news, Walt Disney's representative in Australia, Walter A. Grainger issued a strong warning on Disney's behalf:
"Walt Disney Productions and Disney Inc. of California, the originators and proprietors of 'Disneyland', deem it necessary, in the interest of the public and likely investors, to state that they have no connection with or interest in any proposed amusement park in Australia … Also, formal warning is given that the misuse of the name 'Disneyland' and the possible deception of the public may involve penalties at law."[19]
In December 1964, Fayman established Masaga Investments P/L to act as the parent organisation for his companies. Developers Maurice Alter and George Herscu joined Masaga as managing directors around 1967. In 1969, the company bought a controlling interest in Allans Finance Limited; the hire-purchase subsidiary of music retailer Allan & Co (Allans Music). Back-dooring into the Melbourne Stock Exchange, they renamed to Hanover Holdings and transformed it into a real estate conglomerate. Hanover was a prominent, controversial name in the early 1970s property sector, capitalising on the coinciding property boom – boosting profits from $67,122 in the 1968–69 financial year to a reported peak of over $1.8 million in 1972–73. But the bubble burst in 1974, causing profits to plummet to $631,000. The company was subsequently bought back by the core directors and privatised.[20] Hanover was delisted from the Melbourne Stock Exchange in 1976 and dissolved by 1979. One of, if not the last projects carried out under the Hanover name was the $32 million Centrepoint Mall in Bourke Street, which Fayman built in partnership with Maurice Alter.[21] Fayman also had extensive interests in the United States, particularly Las Vegas, where he built a block of luxury condominiums.[22]
In November 1980, a company acting on Paul Fayman's behalf made a successful takeover bid for Mascot Industries, which ran meat processing plants in New South Wales. Subsequently, Paul and his son, William, and his nephew, Marvin, were appointed to Mascot's six-man board, replacing Micheal A. McGrath, James O'Riordan and Ron Milne.[22] About a month after the Fayman family gained control of Mascot, it was effectively merged with another wholesale business Protean Holdings, which the Faymans owned about 20% of. The deal involved the sale of Mascot's main subsidiaries to Protean for $7.89 million and the purchase by Mascot of nearly $3.9 million worth of Protean shares and convertible debenture stock. Mascot sold its abattoirs and its operations in tallow, meat meal, fertilisers, tennis strings and small-goods – all areas of which Protean was involved in. Subsidiaries involved in the deal included Australian Conversion Services Limited, Talloman Holdings Limited, Dorahy Bros. (Wholesale) P/L, Team Industries P/L, Cificap Holdings P/L and Gearin O'Roirdan P/L.[23] In April 1981, Protean revealed itself as the purchaser of an additional 20% stake in Mascot, bringing their interest in the company to around 80%.[24]
In 1981, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that two Victorian Liberal MPs, Maurice Williams and Don Saltmarsh, accused Protean Holdings, a company partly owned by Fayman, of having ties with the Las Vegas Mafia. According to the MPs, meat exports were an "excellent way of smuggling drugs out of Australia". They argued that dogs trained to sniff out narcotics found it difficult to detect drugs concealed in meat. Neither MPs could provide any evidence to support their claims, and said that their information was privileged and sources could not be identified. In the same article, it was said that ProFreeze, a business name registered to Protean Holdings, were found to have been exporting cartons which had horse and kangaroo meats. Following the string of bad publicity, Protean cut its Melbourne operations by at least 40% and had to lay off or send on holiday almost one-third of its 350 staff in Melbourne.[25] This, coupled with livestock shortages and high interest bills, lead to Protean losing $1.5 million in that financial year.[26] Protean was placed into receivership in August 1982 after a further operating loss of over $7 million.[27]
Fayman's Mascot Industries indicated in an August 1981 Securities and Exchange Commission filing their intent to seek a controlling interest in the First Artists Production Company Ltd., a company founded in 1969 by Barbra Streisand, Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier and Steve McQueen to make and distribute their motion pictures.[28] The deal was finalised in November 1981 and the Faymans achieved a 56.2% interest in the company. They said they fully intended to revive the company as a production company. Paul's son, William (Bill) Fayman, who was one of the directors, had been making films in Australia at the time in partnership with horror-movie producer Tony Ginnane and the British actor and movie entrepreneur David Hemmings.[29] Mascot Industries was reorganised and diversified in 1983 and renamed to "Austram Corporation". The change was made necessary by widening of the group's activities. The name name was supposed to reflect the group's diverse interests and growing range of investments in Australia and America, which included film production, plastic packaging, ten pin bowling, clothing manufacturing and distribution, chemicals and property investments.[30][31]
Notes
edit- ^ Although Wright & Bros mainly focused on its chain of deli/butcher stores, the company also operated two electronics stores at Maroondah Highway in Ringwood and one at Main Street in Lilydale. Source: "Phone Now to See The Latest in TV at your home TONIGHT!" The Age 16 October 1959 (page 13)
- ^ Wright & Bros. had several subsidiaries including, but not limited to: Wright Bros. (Agencies) P/L (also known as Wright Bros. Builders), Wright Bros. (Narrabri) P/L, Wright Bros. (Provisions) P/L, Wright Bros. (Retail) P/L, Wright Bros. (Wholesale) P/L, Wright Bros. Development P/L and Wright Bros. Television P/L. Source: Australian Securities & Investments Commission
- ^ Forest Hill Heights had also proposed to build a hotel and infant welfare centre as part of the original development plan, but it was not until 1968 that a fully-licensed restaurant opened at the site. This was due to significant delays caused by public outcry and subsequent interference from the local council. The infant welfare centre controversially never eventuated.
References
edit- ^ "Fayman scholarships". The Australian Jewish News. 29 May 1987. p. 6.
- ^ a b c d Sorell, John (29 October 1969). "On the spot: Peddling Paul takes a new change". The Herald.
- ^ Munich, Vienna and Barcelona Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards: Pinkus Fayman. American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives.
- ^ "Butchers fined £80". The Herald. 12 May 1954. p. 3.
- ^ "Cat burglar". Papua New Guinea Post-Courier. 31 March 1970. p. 6.
- ^ Silvester, John (5 July 2019). "The Cat, the cops and the confessions". The Age.
- ^ "The Paul Fayman Memorial Scholarships". The Australian Jewish News. 15 November 1991. p. 5.
- ^ "Munich, Vienna and Barcelona Jewish Displaced Persons and Refugee Cards, 1943-1959 (JDC) > Germany, Munich, Eptstein E - Freilich L > 205 of 1139". Ancestry.com. Retrieved 21 February 2025.
- ^ "Two Butchers Fined £80 for Excess Prices". The Age. 12 May 1954. p. 5.
- ^ a b "He is now watched by 500". Herald?. 1969 – via University of Melbourne Archives: Company research files compiled by JB Were and Son.
- ^ "£128 in Fines Against Collingwood Food Shops". The Age. 20 July 1956. p. 7.
- ^ "Model of New Shopping Centre Excites Interest". The Age. 27 May 1959. p. 15.
- ^ "Altona schemes to be discussed". The Age. 30 May 1958. p. 3.
- ^ "Altona to get its first hotel". The Age. 21 May 1959. p. 10.
- ^ "Licensing acts: Notice of application for a victualers license for premises to be erected at Clayton". The Age. 23 January 1960. p. 63.
- ^ "Shopping centre". Herald. 19 July 1957. p. 13.
- ^ "Disneyland planned for Laverton". The Age. 29 July 1960. p. 14.
- ^ "£5 Million Fun Park May be Built on Big Laverton Site". The Age. 4 October 1960. p. 5.
- ^ Groves, Derham (25 October 2024). "Walt Disney's 'love affair' with Australia". The University of Melbourne: Pursuit.
- ^ McDougall, Graeme (26 November 1975). "Hanover gets inside offer". The Age. p. 21.
- ^ "Centrepoint to boost Mall". The Australian Jewish News. 12 October 1979. p. 29.
- ^ a b "Developer wins Mascot Industries". The Sydney Morning Herald. 8 November 1980. p. 36.
- ^ Webb, Cristopher (31 December 1980). "Mascot's new controllers revamp group". The Age. p. 13.
- ^ "Protean buys Mascot holding". The Age. 8 April 1981. p. 25.
- ^ Wilesmith, Greg (12 September 1981). "Drug ring controls meat, MPs say". The Sydney Morning Herald. p. 6.
- ^ "Protean Holdings $1 million in the red". The Age. 2 October 1981. p. 24.
- ^ "Protean's accounts 'inappropriate'". The Sydney Morning Herald. 17 November 1982. p. 25.
- ^ "Australian Group In First Artists Bid". New York Times. 29 August 1981.
- ^ "THE AUSSIES ARE COMING". The Age. 12 December 1981. p. 21.
- ^ "Mascot changed names after diversification". The Age. 26 November 1983. p. 23.
- ^ "Austram entering US flim production". The Age. 8 March 1984. p. 20.