Annette Sharp: Roxy Jacenko’s Fiji fuss dampens Smorgons’ holiday mood
Jewish and business communities have been agog this week about Sydney PR queen Roxy Jacenko picking a fight with Melbourne’s Smorgon dynasty in Fiji, writes Annette Sharp.
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The battle between Melbourne’s old money and Sydney’s new — and what passes in this cyber-charged modern world as holiday etiquette — has been tantalising much of Sydney and Melbourne’s business and Jewish communities for the past week.
It comes after PR queen Roxy Jacenko nimbly picked a fight with members of one of the nation’s most influential business dynasties, the Smorgons, during her recent spring “vacay”.
The story thus far has it that Jacenko, a woman who has never been described as circumspect and loves public attention, was kicking back at exclusive Fijian resort Kokomo with her mother Doreen 10 days ago when she managed to irritate a couple lounging nearby.
That couple turned out to be Graham Smorgon and wife Annette, members of one of the nation’s wealthiest and most industrious families, although it seems Jacenko was oblivious to their identity and undoubtably their willingness to litigate when she posted angrily about couple’s party to her social media account along with a candid and unsanctioned shot of the Smorgons.
After Jacenko implied she was the victim of some insult, it seems all hell broke loose.
Within hours, Jacenko had deleted the photo and post, though not before it was captured and shared by members of the east coast Jewish community, among whom the Smorgons are regarded as model peers.
Four generations of the Smorgon family have flourished in this country since Graham’s father Moses migrated to Melbourne with his brothers in 1927 and the men went on to found, with their sons, an extraordinary network of businesses, the net value of which was put at around $1.5 billion when Smorgon Consolidated Industries was sold off and the proceeds broken up between seven branches of the clan in 1995.
To say businessman-lawyer Graham Smorgon, now in his early seventies, has powerful connections is an understatement.
His family has been associated with the highest offices in the land since 1939 when his great-uncle Naum turned to then-Australian treasurer Ben Chifley to help get the family’s meat exportation business up and running to the UK — and Chifley came to the party.
In the decades that followed, the Smorgons became pioneers of vast and varied enterprises in meat processing, canneries, paper production and packaging, plastics and chemicals, property, glass, metal recycling, pine forest plantations and steel.
In 2007, Smorgon Steel was acquired by OneSteel for $1.1 billion.
Younger generations of the family have expanded into cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, fashion, football, audio tech, printing and distribution, internet services, solar salt, hotels and cryptocurrency — and intermarried into other influential local families, all of whom are committed to wealth building for the benefit of future generations.
It’s hard to imagine a more powerful family in the country.
Yet despite their impressive hyper-network around the nation and the world, the Smorgons remain fiercely private and largely media shy.
It’s not hard, then, to see how the affluent Melburnians might have been irritated by their encounter with Sydney saleswoman and human billboard Jacenko who was eagerly posting about her Kokomo Island adventure — her plane, her plate, her day trips, her battle with a hammock — to social media and conducting outdoor video-calls from just a few metres away from where the Smorgons were seeking refuge from the outside world.
Indignant at having been reportedly “shushed” by the family, Jacenko, herself the daughter of Jewish migrants, was feeling little love as she leapt on to Instagram with her beef — a lesson that at the very least should have taught the Sydneysider to never underestimate a butcher’s son.
WINTOUR BALL FOR BAZ LUHRMANN
Vogue supremo Anna Wintour has taken Baz Luhrmann to her infamously stony heart, as demonstrated during the week when the celebrated fashionista and Dame held a
star-studded birthday party in honour of the Australian film director in New York.
Luhrmann celebrated his 60th birthday surrounded by family and friends, including wife and collaborator Catherine Martin, daughter Lilly, and some of New York’s brightest stars, among whom was The Great Gatsby and Romeo + Juliet star Leonardo DiCaprio (wearing a baseball cap) and singer Florence Welch.
Also at the party was New York-based Australia star Hugh Jackman and wife Deborra-lee Furness, Elvis actor Olivia DeJonge, and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who collaborated with Luhrmann and Wintour on the 2012 MET exhibition, Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations.
Martin, wearing red to the red-themed party that was very much in-keeping with Luhrmann’s “red curtain” trilogy, posted afterwards saying: “Who could have believed that at 60 and nearly 60, one could have had such a wonderful time celebrating the extraordinary @bazluhrmann that it would take days to upload some images of the stellar night.”
The party, held in a private townhouse and featuring performances from the Moulin Rouge Broadway show, was also attended by Joel Edgerton and Bezos’s partner Lauren Sanchez.
HAYDON NAILS THE LOOK
What an extraordinary few months it’s been for prime ministerial squeeze Jodie Haydon, whose friendly face was beamed around the world during the week when she attended the Queen’s funeral with PM Anthony Albanese.
As new British PM Liz Truss hobbled into Westminster Abbey in shoes perhaps too high – certainly too fabulous – and an ill-chosen hat she struggled to balance atop her glossy blow-dry, and Jill Biden, in her conscientiously refurbed Schiaparelli suit, struggled with curtain bangs that kept catching on her lashes, Haydon looked a picture of understated elegance.
At no point did Haydon look as though she’d mistaken the funeral of the Queen for a runway audition, as Truss and Biden’s stylists apparently did.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern’s ensemble — a Juliette Hogan tailored dress topped with a traditional feathered kakahu shawl — proved beyond distracting.
Financial services executive Haydon however, in a demure black dress with pillbox hat worn neatly to one side, astutely chose an outfit that knew its place and kept it respectfully.
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Originally published as Annette Sharp: Roxy Jacenko’s Fiji fuss dampens Smorgons’ holiday mood
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