A year in the making: Inside Lindsay and Paula Fox’s $100 million NGV gift

National Gallery of Victoria director Tony Ellwood spent a year wooing one of the country’s wealthiest families with the offer of naming rights for a new home of contemporary arts in return for a donation of $100 million.

“Tony approached me about 12 months ago and asked would we be interested in having our name on the building,” Paula Fox, wife of trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, told this masthead on Tuesday.

Danny Pearson, minister for creative industries, with Lindsay and Paula Fox on Tuesday.Credit: Penny Stephens

“I waited a little while and then I said to Lindsay, ‘how do you feel about giving $100 million to the gallery?’ And he didn’t hesitate, he said, ‘That’s fine’.”

“Anything Paula asks for, Paula gets,” said Lindsay.

The Foxes are close to Daniel Andrews, with Lindsay previously being described as the Premier’s “go-to billionaire”, but a spokesperson for the Premier declined to reveal whether he had played any role in negotiations.

The gift, which is the single largest amount ever granted by a living donor to a cultural institution in Australia, was announced on Tuesday morning, on the occasion of Lindsay’s 85th birthday.

The $100 million will go towards the construction of the new 30,000 square metre, multi-level wing that will house the gallery’s contemporary art collection once it is completed in 2028.

The donation has earned the Fox family naming rights for the new NGV Contemporary.Credit: Render by Darcstudio

The new building, which will be called The Fox: NGV Contemporary, will be the centrepiece of the $1.7 billion transformation of the Melbourne Arts Precinct. Also included in that plan is a refurbishment of the State Theatre, creation of a new tiered garden and open-air performance space, and significant upgrades to infrastructure.

A precise cost for the Angelo Candalepas-designed building, which was unveiled as the winning design on March 15, has not yet been revealed.

“There isn’t a figure, we’re still working through all the intricacies of what exactly that will be,” Ellwood said on Tuesday. The more raised through philanthropy, Ellwood said, the more ambitious the final design can be.

The first $20 million was gifted by the Ian Potter Foundation in December 2020 at a time when the contemporary gallery was no more than “me basically just banging on about it,” said Ellwood. Paula Fox, who is a member of the NGV Foundation Board, said she believed “$30 million to $40 million” in total had been donated before Tuesday’s announcement.

NGV director Tony Ellwood.Credit: AFR

Ellwood is confident there is no risk such a big sum, and the fact the naming rights have been snaffled, might scare others away. “Once you get the endorsement early on of a respected philanthropic family, it kind of shakes everyone into realising that if they’re backing it to that level clearly this is the right horse to get on, so we need to all get on it.”

He was quietly confident, he added, “that we can achieve something quite substantial”.

Janet Whiting, president of the Council of Trustees, was in no doubt about how significant the Fox gift is.

“This is the 21st century version of Alfred Felton,” she said, referring to the 19th century businessman whose bequest laid the foundation stone of the NGV’s acquisitions program.

“We haven’t actually done the numbers,” she added, “but I would think this is a much bigger legacy today than Felton’s estate back in the 1900s.”

Felton’s estate was worth £378,033 when he died in 1904. Under the terms of his bequest, half the sum earned on the principal each year is to be granted to charity, and the other half used to fund the acquisition of works for the gallery.

According to the Reserve Bank of Australia’s inflation calculator, the sum left by Felton would have been worth $62,422,507 in 2021 (the most recent annual report for the bequest records its portfolio was valued at $58 million, with a little over $1.14 million being disbursed last year). The fund claims the works purchased under the bequest are now worth around $2.3 billion.

Having his name on the side of the new building will guarantee Lindsay Fox also lives on long after he’s gone. But, he insisted, it isn’t about that.

“I’ve got my name on 5000 trucks,” the Linfox founder said. “I think you’ve got to look at this in the light of my family. My family are supporting their mother, we are supporting the community of which we are members. The rest takes care of itself.”

The commitment to support the NGV, he added, will continue “long after Paula and I are gone”, through the involvement of his five children, each of whom has an interest in the arts.

“Each and every one of these kids is a gear in the machine,” he said. “They’ll be involved once they’re called upon – they’re going to be here, and their children are going to be here. The reason it’s ‘Fox’, not ‘Lindsay and Paula’, is that this is a family affair that these kids will carry on for generation after generation.

“We’re a family that enjoys giving,” he added. “You never go broke by giving.”

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