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BIOGRAPHY
James Fairfax: Portrait of a Collector in Eleven Objects
Alexander Edward Gilly
NewSouth $49.99
The very rich, wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, are different from you and me. James Fairfax, the subject of this fascinating biography written by his nephew, was the eldest son of Sir Warwick Fairfax and therefore destined at birth to lead the family company.
James, who died in 2017 at the age of 83, moved in the same social circles as Patrick White, and might well have been a character in one of White’s novels depicting the Anglo-Australian ascendancy in slow decline.
Even among the so-called Old Families that established pastoral, business and social dominance in colonial Australia, few could match the Fairfax dynasty in wealth, influence and longevity.
James Fairfax (right) with Dr Clive Lucas, president of the National Trust (NSW), at Retford House, which Fairfax bequeathed to the Trust.Credit:
James was a boarder at Geelong Grammar, where he met sons of the Murdoch and Packer newspaper families before following previous Fairfax scions to Balliol College, Oxford and Harvard. He was welcomed at Balliol despite the fact he had just failed his first-year exams at the University of Sydney.
Much of his early life consisted of large houses and being chauffeured around in a Rolls-Royce. His father, meanwhile, actually took a Rolls-Royce on holiday as excess baggage aboard a cruise liner sailing to the Greek islands.
For more than a century, the Fairfax family was enriched by the “rivers of gold” that flowed through The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. Before the internet, there was a time when the Saturday classified ads section of these papers had the thickness of a folded blanket. Back in the 1850s, there was a move to set up a hereditary nobility in Australia, which detractors labelled the Bunyip Aristocracy. The Fairfax family was not aristocratic per se, though their attitude was patrician, not least in the way they collected and commissioned expensive art.
An aesthete by inclination, James was the last patrilineal Fairfax to successfully manage the family company, which had remained within family control even after a public float in the 1950s. In the late 1980s, James’ younger half-brother “Young” Warwick Fairfax launched a disastrous reprivatisation attempt allegedly fomented by his mother, Lady Mary.