Sidney Myer

Origins and early life

Sidney Myer was born Simcha Myer Baevski on 8 February 1878 at Kritchev in the Pale of Settlement of the Russian Empire, the son of Ezekiel Baevski, a Hebrew scholar, and he remained a Jew all his life.

Work and career

He followed his brother Elcon to Australia in 1899, landing with almost no money and no English, and began by hawking drapery from a pack around the Victorian goldfields town of Bendigo, where he learned the trade and the language together. The brothers opened a small drapery shop in Bendigo in 1900, and in 1911 Sidney bought a store in Bourke Street in Melbourne that became the Myer Emporium, the largest department store business in Australia.

He built it on aggressive advertising, low margins and spectacle, and during the Depression he refused to sack staff, cut his own salary, raised wages against the trend and funded Christmas dinners for the unemployed of Melbourne. He gave away large sums in his lifetime for the Melbourne University conservatorium, the National Gallery of Victoria and free public concerts, and his will left a tenth of his estate to charity, creating the Sidney Myer Fund, which has continued through five generations and remains one of Australia's principal philanthropic foundations.

The Sidney Myer Music Bowl in Melbourne, opened in 1959, keeps his name. He died suddenly in Melbourne on 5 September 1934, and an estimated hundred thousand people lined the route of his funeral.