Lady Mary Fairfax’s $600 million will reveals hand of a woman obsessed with her beloved home and generous image
The Sydney socialite’s $600 million will reveals a woman obsessed with two things: the preservation of her beloved home Fairwater and the polishing of her image as a boundless philanthropist.
Opinion
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WHEN the property portfolio was valued, the impressive collection of diamonds, baubles and brooches assessed and the Rolls Royce limousines and silverware counted, the estate of Lady Mary Fairfax, philanthropist, socialite, property investor and compulsive meddler was put at somewhere north of $600 million.
Not bad for a Polish immigrant who spent part of her childhood living in dusty Broken Hill before marrying upwards, twice, the second time to one of the country’s richest men, newspaper scion Warwick Fairfax, into whose Bellevue Hill house she moved while his second wife Hanne was on holiday in Denmark.
The will, unearthed by The Australian newspaper this week on what would have been Lady Mary’s 96th birthday, reveals the hand of a woman obsessed with two things above all else — the preservation of her pride and joy, the Double Bay waterfront mansion Fairwater, estimated value $100 million, and the polishing of the legend of rich Lady Mary, the boundless philanthropist whose “generosity knew no bounds”.
A condition of her meticulously crafted will is that Lady Mary’s four children, three of whom are from her marriage to Sir Warwick Fairfax, never live in the harbourfront house that was their childhood home from 1969 and before that had been their grandparents’ home.
Her surviving “live-in” staff, whose number could stretch to 10 once you’ve accounted for her PA, housekeepers, cooks, drivers and gardeners, can continue to live at Fairwater — for the term of their natural lives.
Surviving staff will also continue to receive a salary as they go about their days caring for the ghost of an eccentric dead woman and her treasured possessions and artefacts, including works by Rodin, Degas, Epstein and Dobell.
In effect Fairwater becomes a grand gothic Dickensian monument to Lady Mary and her romance with Sir Warwick, who, she once said, she fell in love with at first sight and who liked to chase her around the dining table in the evenings.
To mark their love affair Lady Mary had a female Wollemi pine planted at Fairwater for her in the 1990s and a male tree planted at the Fairfax family’s Camden estate, Harrington Park, for him.
The ongoing maintenance of Fairwater, some estimate, could stretch to well over $2 million a year and drain on the “Lady Fairfax Trust” fund for the next 79 years, potentially depleting the estate of one third of its value.
That is unless her executers choose to sell it, which is entirely at their discretion.
The will is not exclusively an exercise in narcissism.
Lady Mary also made provisions for the house to be opened for charity fundraisers, which might see it used a dozen times a year. She has also provided for some of her favourite charities — among them Opera Australia Foundation, Sydney’s Cochlear Implant Foundation and The Irish Fund — something brought home to this columnist on the afternoon of Lady Mary’s 2017 funeral when some of her beneficiaries spoke of her bequests in a sweltering Double Bay park, all carefully co-ordinated by the deceased from the grave.
Lady Mary’s will establishes one other incontrovertible fact — she wanted control over her children and estate in death as she had in life.
She is survived by four children: Garth Symonds, aged about 67, her only child of her first marriage to lawyer Cedric Symonds; her cherished natural son Warwick Fairfax, 57, now a resident of the US; and Charles Fairfax and Anna Cleary, both aged about 50 and adopted in infancy by the Fairfaxes during a 1968 tour of Britain — the pair sent on to Australia while their new parents took a slow train and a slower boat home via Istanbul and Bombay (now Mumbai).
Now well into middle age, Lady Mary’s children are to receive an income from the trust but could die without ever receiving their quarter share of the entire estate, as too may their children, Lady Mary’s grandchildren.
If any are to one day enjoy the spoils of Fairwater’s future sale, it will be an as yet unborn generation of Fairfaxes, post 2096 — unless the will is challenged and her executers are pressed to act.
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None of Lady Mary’s children were named as her executers. Instead she chose three unrelated elderly businessmen, friends, and one faithful personal assistant to head the discretionary trust.
This, say insiders, speaks to Lady Mary’s at times strained relationship with her children, all of whom were estranged from their mother at some point of their lives.
This may have been due in part to her “Mommy Dearest” reputation and her tendency to dictate how they lived.
From 1959, Lady Mary was marked by executives at John Fairfax & Sons as an ambitious woman and an interfering meddler in business matters at the newspaper publisher.
She is seen as having played a key role in fracturing the Fairfax board, leading to her husband’s expulsion from it, twice, and was regarded as the wedge that split Warwick from his relatives with whom he shared business affiliations.
She is also seen as having been the guiding hand behind her dutiful son Warwick Jr’s disastrous attempt to take over the company following his father’s death in 1987, something she consistently denied.
In an interview Lady Mary, a woman of sometimes confounding contradictions, once recalled telling her father: “Daddy, money is beautiful. It makes you free.”
If it does, it is a freedom the socialite’s surviving children will never know to the extent their mother did.