The urge to give, Paula Fox explains, comes from within. “From the heart,” she says. “Nothing gives me more pleasure.”
The art of philanthropy is convincing others to give as well.
This is where Fox, the 87-year-old matriarch of the billionaire Fox family, is a notoriously difficult woman to say no to.
“I have a friend who calls me ‘the extractor’,” she laughs. “Every time he sees me he says, ‘Here she comes – she’ll get money out of you!’”
On Monday, Fox will be recognised by being appointed a Companion of the Order of Australia (AC) for her services to the arts, medical research and children.
Businessman Gerry Ryan, one of the first people Fox rings – after her husband, Lindsay – whenever she wants to drum up support for a cause, describes her as a tenacious giver.
“She never stops,” he says. “It is easy to write a cheque, but she does more than that. She gets behind a cause, rallies people around her to support it and just gets involved. She has always got time for someone who has an issue or a problem.”
But even for the extractor, raising funds is becoming more difficult. “It is pretty hard to get money out of people today,” she says. “There are people who have got so much who don’t give.”
There are also people who, after giving generously for decades, are questioning whether their help is still wanted.
It is rare to walk into a public hospital or significant cultural organisation in Melbourne without seeing on a wall or embossed on a plaque the name of a prominent Jewish family. Fox is dismayed that since the NGV was last year targeted by pro-Palestine protesters because of the gallery’s relationship to its long-term benefactors John and Pauline Gandel, Jewish philanthropists are having to weigh the risks associated with giving.
“It is really sad,” Fox says. “They are very generous towards the gallery, but I think they are nervous about what happens if their names go up on anything. Let’s hope it has all finished. That protest devastated them.”
Fox’s philanthropic work began in St Kilda, the suburb she moved to at the age of eight from the Queensland town of Mackay with her single mother, brother and four sisters.
This is the neighbourhood where she went to school, spent weekends at Luna Park and, at the age of 15, met a teenage Lindsay Fox at the St Moritz ice skating rink on the Esplanade. She was a speed skater; he was an ice hockey player. “A very good one,” she says. “He was always in the penalty box.”
Decades later, after Paula raised six kids and Lindsay built a small trucking company into a logistics giant, she was drawn to two local causes — the Very Special Kids paediatric, palliative care service established by Sister Margaret Noone, and the Sacred Heart Mission built on the Grey Street site of Paula’s old primary school.
Sister Noone needed somewhere to house a hospice for terminally ill children and Fox convinced the then premier, Jeff Kennett, after some gentle arm-twisting, to grant the not-for-profit permanent use of an old psychiatric hospital in Malvern.
“He said, ‘You can have the building, but we are not giving you a penny. You’ve got to raise the money to restore it’,” she says.
From there, the Foxes teamed up with the founders of Just Jeans, Connie and Craig Kimberley, and other friends to raise the funds. “It was such a challenge, because it was so run down. Now they have over 140, 150 children that we look after. It is unbelievable.”
Today, Fox’s philanthropy is reshaping the city on a different scale.
In 2022, as Melbourne was emerging from the pandemic, she was revealed as a driving force behind two ambitious projects. The first is NGV Contemporary, a modern gallery to be known as “The Fox” when it opens in 2028 as the centrepiece of Melbourne’s arts precinct redevelopment. The second is The Alfred hospital’s standalone Paula Fox Melanoma and Cancer Centre, which treated its first patients in 2024.
The Fox family pledged an extraordinary $100 million towards NGV Contemporary. Paula Fox, who sits on the NGV Foundation board, says further fundraising, including more money from the government, is needed to finance it. She predicts it will produce one of the world’s great galleries. “It is going to be amazing,” she says.
The architecturally striking Melanoma and Cancer Centre, which is designed to feel more like a health retreat than a hospital, was Fox’s idea, inspired by her own history with skin cancer. It houses a $24 million Quadra PET scanner, the first to be installed in a Victorian public hospital, which enables faster scans and earlier detection of small cancers.
When Fox declared to her dermatologist, John Kelly, that she was going to build him a hospital, he initially laughed at the idea. A short time later, the Foxes sent a video pitch to their friends, inviting donations. The biggest one came from the Minderoo Foundation of Andrew and Nicola Forrest and the majority of funding was provided by the state and federal governments.
While Paula and Lindsay’s daughters, Lisa and Katrina, oversee the family’s philanthropic interests, all Fox children are trustees of the Fox Family Foundation, which last year made $12 million in donations.
As Fox reflects on the causes she has supported over the years, she is sitting next to her husband in their Portsea home. They’ve woken that morning to a newspaper story claiming Lindsay has a serious illness and speculating about the future role in the family business of their eldest son, Peter, who has taken an extended break from work.
Paula Fox is incredulous about what has been written. “Now, you look at my husband,” she says. “Do you think he has got a serious illness?
“We are getting older but my friends say to me, ‘Where do you get the energy from?’ I’ve still got a bit left in me.”
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Chip Le Grand leads our state politics reporting team. He previously served as the paper’s chief reporter and is a journalist of 30 years’ experience.Connect via email.
