Fox family matriarch Paula on why it’s important to make every day count
Paula Fox, the matriarch of the billionaire Fox family, has always spoken her mind – and in the first wide-ranging media interview of her life shows few nerves.
Paula Fox was at Sydney Airport about to board a commercial flight to America with five of her children in tow many years ago when she spotted a solitary male figure not far from her across the terminal.
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For a few moments she stared. Then something inside willed her to walk towards the man, who was waving off a departing flight. She then took a deep breath and steeled herself for a conversation that had been decades in the making.
“I just looked at him and thought, ‘God, I know that face.’ So I went up to him and said ‘Are you Raymond Peele? He said yes and asked me who I was. I replied, ‘I’m your daughter, Paula!’,” she recalls. For a moment there was a poignant silence.
“He just got tears in his eyes and didn’t say anything.”
Paula Fox, the matriarch of the billionaire Fox family and wife of trucking magnate Lindsay Fox, has always spoken her mind.
She did just that this day to her long-absent father. Raymond Peele was a former navy officer who had walked out on Paula and her six siblings when she was just eight years old and living in Mackay on the Central Queensland Coast.
Her mother Edith was left to raise the family on her own.
“Then I said to him, ‘But I can’t talk to you because my children are all boarding the plane,” she adds of the fateful airport exchange.
“So we just left it at that. I never saw him again. It was an amazing coincidence that he was there that day.”
Sitting in the front room of her $50m arts and crafts heritage-listed Melbourne mansion known as “Eulinya” on Toorak’s Irving Road and surrounded by stunning gardens, Paula shows few nerves in the first wide-ranging media interview of her life.
Before we sit down she has hobbled to greet me at the front door, a legacy of complications from knee surgery late last year. But she is in fine spirits. And sharp as a tack.
She and Lindsay, who has long spoken of his wife as his “one and only” and a “marvellous lady”, bought Eulinya in 1978 for $570,000 from the lady mayoress, Lady Lilian Coles, wife of Sir Arthur Coles of the supermarket family.
The home is littered with photographs of Paula, Lindsay and her children with Prime Ministers, princes, popes, celebrities and sports stars. Photos of her grandchildren and great grandkids adorn the refrigerator in the homely-looking kitchen.
To Paula Grace Fox, family is everything.
Her mother Edith, one of 12 children herself who was born in America and came to Australia on a steamship, moved her family from Mackay to Melbourne to be closer to her sister. Paula later became skilled at making her own dresses.
Edith worked three jobs just to keep the family together before she met a single father named Frank Gillies, who lived in a boarding house in St Kilda nearby.
They became friends and he often told Edith of his sadness of missing his two boys, who he wasn’t allowed to see by decree of their mother. One of them was named Max, now better known as one of Australia’s most famed comedians.
“I’ve since met Max and told him quite a bit about his father, this most wonderful man. He was so gentle and handsome,” Paula says.
“Frank and my mother weren’t in a relationship. But they became really good friends. Frank and I were very close, I used to call him Figgy. He was really like a father figure to me. He actually gave me away when I got married to Lindsay. So I was very fortunate that I met him.”
Edith Peele lived a long life and spent her final years in an apartment Lindsay bought for her on St Kilda Road.
“My mother died 10 years ago. She was an amazing lady. She was the most generous person and everything she had she gave away,” Paula says.
“So I really instil into my children that the most important thing in life is to give.”
The Fox family, owners of the Linfox trucking empire, have long been one of Melbourne’s most generous philanthropists.
Their multimillion-dollar donation last year to The Alfred Hospital for the Paula Fox Melanoma and Cancer Centre followed a $100m gift a few months earlier to the National Gallery of Victoria for the construction of the NGV Contemporary as part of the new $1.7 billion Melbourne Arts Precinct.
Paula owes her life to doctors at the Alfred after they removed a cancerous growth on her back seven years ago requiring two operations and 45 stitches. She also underwent emergency heart surgery there in 2020, where she had a coronary stent put in place. Her husband now has six.
“The doctor said one more day and I would have been dead. So how lucky was I? So here I am still here and I’m a very positive person,” she says.
Paula now gets her greatest satisfaction in life from giving, and is glad her children are following in her footsteps.
“Our children are going to be very wealthy one day. They are now but they will be very wealthy. The Linfox business has just grown and it’s worth so much money,” she says.
“But we are now giving away as much as we can, because I think that’s important. You get so much pleasure out of giving to other people.”
Love story
Lindsay and Paula Fox have been married for nearly 64 years.
They first met when they were teenagers – Lindsay was aged 16 and Paula 15 – at the old St Moritz ice skating rink in St Kilda.
It was 12 months before the former acquired his first truck when he bought trucking company E.V. Timms in Collingwood. Today, Linfox Logistics has more than 8000 trucks, employs 30,000 people in 12 countries and is run by Lindsay and Paula’s eldest son Peter.
His younger brothers Andrew and David also run arms of the family business, which owns Avalon Airport and the giant Essendon Fields development at Essendon Airport in Melbourne.
The Fox Family Foundation, which manages the family’s charitable donations and activities, is the responsibility of Lindsay and Paula’s daughters, Melbourne-based Katrina Fox and Lisa Fox, who lives in New York.
But tragedy has also rocked the family. Six months after David Fox celebrated his 21st birthday, the big brother he nicknamed “Skinny” killed himself.
David and his younger sister Katrina found the body of their 23-year-old brother Michael on the floor of his Kooyong home in Melbourne in January 1991. He is buried in the same cemetery as his father’s parents in Melbourne.
“I think it is good to talk about Michael because he was part of our life. I’ve got friends that have lost children and they won’t talk about it. But he was part of our life and he will never go away,” Paula says without flinching.
“The truth is he was too young to get married. He was only 21 and his wife was only 20 … They separated after only about 18 months and he was devastated. So he just made a decision and took his life. It is very sad.”
Michael Fox was tasked by his parents each December to buy the family Christmas tree that would take pride of place in the front room at Eulinya.
“That was his job,” his mother adds solemnly.
“So every year I buy a little Christmas tree and put it on his grave, with a Christmas card.”
Following his son’s passing Lindsay Fox advised the Federal and Victorian governments on youth suicide and joined the board of the National Advisory Council on Suicide Prevention.
He once said he thought he was invincible until one of his beloved sons took his own life.
“I think it made him a lot more protective of his children,” he wife now says of the impact of the tragedy on her husband.
“If one of them is down, the others all rally around, which is pretty good. Lindsay just loves his children. They are his whole life.”
She reveals the family fortune will remain intact and be shared equally among the children under a succession plan she and Lindsay have finalised with their advisers.
They include former ACTU Secretary Bill Kelty and Peter Yates, a former CEO of the Packer family’s Publishing and Broadcasting. Both are Linfox board members.
The Fox family also has a close relationship with Sayers Group founder, Carlton Football Club President and former PwC Australia CEO Luke Sayers.
Given alleged tensions over the years between some of the Fox siblings, sharing the fortune equally could be a recipe for disaster. But Paula and her husband believe it is the only fair way.
“We’ve done it (the succession) that everything is equal. It’s got to be equal, because we don’t want any of the children arguing about finance. But I have to say, my kids don’t care about the money, really. They do care a little but they don’t care about who gets what. Like this house. I said to Lindsay the other day, ‘If I sell this house, I’ll give all the money away’. My children don’t need it. What could they do with all that money?
We have looked after the grandchildren by paying for their education but now our children can afford to do that themselves too … They’ve all got their own homes, they’ve got good lifestyles and are comfortable.”
The Fox family last year took delivery of a new Global Express 6500 private jet. But even that is shared equally.
“We’ve got a plane and we let them have X amount of hours on it. But we don’t say ‘Take the plane whenever you want’. They haven’t got their own planes,” Paula says.
“I’ve seen so many of our friends with the arguments. I’ve got some that are still in court arguing about the finances and it’s tragic. So that’s really important that we sorted that out.”
Lindsay Fox has previously described “dividing up the pie” for his children as “just a natural process of life”.
“There is only one way to do it. Cover the thing on the basis of there is no such thing as entitlement, there should be nothing in the form of expectation,” he told me in 2019.
“What comes out of it — whether it is $10, $100 or $1000 — the only difference is noughts.”
Lucky life
The close relationship between Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews and the Fox family has long been the subject of media speculation and opinion.
Paula proudly declares she is fond of the Premier and his wife Catherine.
“Dan I think is amazing. I’m also very fond of Catherine. We are very supportive of everything she does. She does a lot of things behind the scenes and she is so involved with different charities. But people don’t know about her. I like Dan, I like her and we’ve become friends, which is nice. He’s very relaxed when he’s here (at the Fox mansions in Toorak or Portsea). He and Andrew (Fox) are good friends,” she says.
In January it was revealed in the media that the Premier attended a five-hour barbecue at the Fox Portsea mansion.
In response to the story Andrews declared that he had not discussed the Fox family’s business interests during the visit and claimed nothing inappropriate had occurred at the private event, which Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also attended.
“Dan is a bit nervous because with the media, as soon as they know he is with the Fox’s, they write about it. That’s sad that he can’t just come here, have a drink or have lunch. I hate it, its awful,” Paula says.
The Fox family was also the subject of media speculation relating to its alleged involvement in the holiday home accident that left Mr Andrews with a broken back and off work for more than three months in 2020.
“He never ever fell down our stairs, I can assure you,” Paula declares.
“I knew where he was in the house down at Portsea which he rented … People hate Dan so I’m always protecting him. A lot of my friends don’t like him. But they are all loving Anthony Albanese, they can’t believe it. They are all Liberal supporters, but they’re loving him.”
She defends the family’s relationship with the Prime Minster, who she describes as “incredible” and who she believes is “doing a great job”.
“In January when Anthony came down to Portsea, he was in Melbourne and he rang Lindsay and said, ‘Look, I’d love to come down to see you’. Lindsay has known Anthony for 25 years, because he was the Minister for Transport. So Lindsay had quite a bit to do with him. But the fact that he went down on the beach and had a swim, they write all about that. It’s really sad. I feel sorry for Anthony and Dan. They’ve got no privacy.”
Paula will turn 85 on July 12 this year but unlike her husband – who last year celebrated the same milestone with a cruise on their 650-foot yacht to Montreal with the entire Fox family and a number of leading business people in tow – the Fox family matriarch will be sailing in Greece with just her immediate family.
“Lindsay’s parents both died in their early 60s. So he keeps thinking, ‘Well, I’ll have another party,” she says.
“I don’t have parties. I had one year when I turned 80, which was in Italy. But I’m not into big parties. That’s not me.”
Paula says the secret of her and Lindsay staying together for more than six decades has been the age-old art of compromise.
“We always say ‘compromise, compromise’. We’re very fortunate that we’ve never really had a major problem and we’ve got wonderful children that are all there for us. So we’ve just been very fortunate,” she says.
So does Lindsay have a temper? The Fox family has long been known as tough negotiators and Lindsay has intimidated many a unionist or politician over the decades.
“He did but now he forgets very quickly,” Paula replies instantly.
“He gets angry and then he forgets. He’s mellowed so much over the years.”
His greatest passion remains his trucks. For decades his business card has simply read: Lindsay E. Fox – truck driver.
“And his trucks have to be immaculate,” his wife adds.
“The moment he sees a dirty truck on the road, he gets its number, rings up and reports it. That’s why his trucks stand out so much.”
Last month the family patriarch took all of his blood relative males on a once-in-a-lifetime experience, a two week expedition to Antarctica.
He even fulfilled a lifelong dream to jump in the freezing waters near the South Pole and reportedly turned blue before being pulled out by his sons.
He was there on Valentines Day, so called his wife on a satellite phone to sing her a love song.
She continues to worry about him, especially his health. But Lindsay Fox never thought he would reach 80 years of age, let alone 85.
He and his wife now make every day count.
“He forgets a lot. When they left for Antarctica, I told the boys and the grandchildren to make sure he takes his medicines. But they all really look after each other and he’s very loved by his family,” she says.
“I am very fortunate I married such a wonderful man. He is a great father, a great husband and he is always there for us.”