Honours on the menu for Olympian benefactor Donald Trescowthick

Sir Donald Trescowthick will be honoured this weekend after a fundraiser masterstroke 40 years ago in the form of the Prime Minister’s Olympic Dinner.

Sir Donald Trescowthick with his wife Lady Norma, who died in March this year.

Sir Donald Trescowthick first met Bob Hawke in the spring of 1983 at Flemington Racecourse as the Victorian Racing Carnival was in full swing.

The businessman, thoroughbred racing lover and champion of the Olympic sports movement had a polite favour to ask the then new prime minister: would he headline a special dinner to help raise funds for the Australian Olympic team ahead of the 1984 Los Angeles games.

Without hesitation, Hawke agreed to attend.

“‘Oh, that is very kind of you’, I told him,” Trescowthick recalls of their conversation that day.

“So then I asked him ‘Would you visit a table or two too?’ So he asked, ‘How much are the guests paying?’ I said, ‘Well, this time it will be $5000 a table. But next time it will be $10,000. He said, ‘Well, if they go this time, I’ll do as many tables as they give you five grand each for’.”

That afternoon the Prime Minister’s Olympic Dinner was born. Five hundred tables were sold for the first event held at Melbourne’s suave Regent Hotel.

Now chaired by Linfox executive chairman Peter Fox, the dinner has been staged every four years since 1984 and is the pinnacle event for Australia’s top corporates to come together in Melbourne to raise funds to support the nation’s Olympians.

On Saturday evening at the Melbourne Convention Centre, the now 94-year-old Trescowthick will be honoured by Anthony Albanese, Australian Olympic Committee president John Coates, Victorian Governor Margaret Gardner and Premier Jacinta Allan – not only as the founder of the event, but for his enormous contribution to the Olympic movement.

Over the decades Trescowthick, the former long-serving deputy chairman of the National Olympic Fundraising committee, has been awarded the prestigious Olympic Order of Merit and Australian Olympic Committee Life Membership. He is also a member of the Australian Sporting Hall of Fame.

Donald Trescowthick outside Adelaide Festival Centre.

In an interview at his Melbourne retirement village, he describes the dinner as a “win win situation for everyone”, and applauds corporate Australia for its generous support of the event.

“I have created some of the best memories of my life during the 40 years this event has been running. I’ve made many best friends, had many fun nights and it’s just been very good for everyone,” he says.

“I’d just like to be able to do it all again.”

On Saturday evening, 700 attendees will be spread across 70 ­tables. Each table will pay $35,000 to support the nation’s Olympians and Paralympians ahead of the Paris Games next month.

Trescowthick believes the Olympic movement remains critical to world peace.

“As long as you are talking to people, you are less likely to be shooting each other. The Olympics is a forum where people can talk to each other,” he says.

“It could be well used for peace-making and I think it would be very unwise to dispose of it.”

Trescowthick is best known in the corporate world for starting Swann Insurance, which became Australia’s largest privately owned general insurer before it was sold to CGU.

He also built Harris Scarfe into one of the nation’s biggest department store groups after assuming control in the 1970s.

He focused Harris Scarfe’s core activities on retailing while building out its industrial products outlet in suburban Adelaide into a large hardware retailing chain known as Harry’s Hardware.

The success of Harry’s led Harris Scarfe’s parent company, Charles Davis, to acquire other hardware retailers, including Lloyd’s in South Australia, Campbell’s in Queensland, and ­McEwans in Victoria and NSW. In 1989, they were all sold in a management buyout, and acquired by Bunnings in 1993.

“People love old companies. There’s something about them that can give confidence to the public,” Trescowthick says.

By 1995, Harris Scarfe had become Australia’s third-largest department store retailer, with 28 stores across the country.

Donald Trescowthick, right, pictured with his son Adam in 1998.

In 1998 his then 32-year-old son Adam took over as executive chairman and added another 10 branches. His father recalls the board meeting the day his son was appointed to the role.

“The directors told me ‘We have given it a lot of thought and we’ve appointed your son Adam Trescowthick as chairman.’ Well, what could I say? He was 32 at the time. Adam then did a remarkable job to continue to build the company,” Trescowthick says.

“I had purposely put a chartered accountant onto that board from Adelaide. So he was there at all times to watch that the financials of the company were right.

“But he didn’t watch it very closely.”

It is now corporate folklore that Harris Scarfe’s former chief financial officer, Alan Hodgson, was sent to jail for six years for falsifying its accounts before the retailer’s collapse in 2001, marking the darkest period in the Trescowthick family’s history.

Adam Trescowthick initially faced 27 dishonesty charges arising from the corporate failure, which were subsequently dropped.

Today Harris Scarfe is owned by The Spotlight Group, which operates the Spotlight, Anaconda and Mountain Designs retail stores, after the business collapsed for the second time into administration in 2019 following periods of private equity ownership.

Asked for the greatest lesson of his storied business career, Trescowthick answers without hesitation: “If you always tell the truth, you can’t get into much trouble.

“Sometimes it is difficult to tell the truth. When I’ve been asked difficult questions about business on whatever, I’ve sometimes thought to myself ‘Well, I could tell them a nice story. But I better tell them the truth’.

“When I tell them the truth, that seems to go down very well. If you tell lies, you’ve got to have a very good memory. And mine is terrible.”

Donald Trescowthick, right, with horse racing trainer Bart Cummings.

Trescowthick still found time during his long corporate career to assist a range of cultural, sporting and community welfare organisations, including the Australian Ballet, the DOXA Youth Foundation, the Little Sisters of the Poor and AFL club Geelong. He also chaired the highly successful Victoria Minus Children’s Appeal and a committee charged with raising funds for the Peter MacCallum Cancer Centre in its original premises in East Melbourne.

He received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth in 1979 and was made a Companion of the Order of Australia a decade later.

He was always assisted in all his endeavours by his childhood sweetheart and wife, Lady Norma. They long proudly called themselves just “two little people from Ballarat”.

They first met on a blind date at a friend’s place in their home town, when they were just 17 years old.

“When she came into the room I thought, “Oh, I hope this is the one for me. She was dark-haired, the most beautiful girl I had ever seen. She wore a long red coat that was nearly touching the floor,” Trescowthick recalls.

They sat together playing records that night before sandwiches were served at 10pm and departures were half an hour later.

“As I was 17 I had no car. As I put Norma into her father’s car to take her home, I thought to myself, ‘That is the girl I shall marry.’ I got home and my mother asked me, ‘What was the girl like?’ I replied, ‘Well Mum, you will be surprised. It’s the girl I’m going to marry.’ She said, ‘You take so many girls out. You can’t tell that this is the one you will marry.’ I said ‘Yes, I can’,” he recalls, before adding with a wide smile: “When Norma was asked the same question by her mother, she replied: ‘Oh, he was all right. But you can’t pronounce his surname!’ ”

Donald Trescowthick and Lady Norma pictured with Shirley Costa, left, in 2009 at the Geelong vs Fremantle president’s lunch.

They were married at 21, had five children – one, Andrew, died when he was only six months old – and spent 72 years together until Norma died on March 16 this year.

Trescowthick is still struggling to cope with his loss.

Asked what she taught him above all else, he instantly replies: “To be myself”.

“She also cleverly knew when I was going off on the wrong track and would quietly tell me to get myself together,” he adds.

Asked what he would like his legacy to be for Australia, he ­simply looks blankly down at the table between us and shrugs his shoulders.

“I really don’t think I’ve done anything to deserve any sort of legacy. I’d like to think I have but I don’t see that I have,” he replies, before returning to the still raw memory of the love of his life.

“I would rather get Norma recognised for what she did. I got knighted twice and all she got was a courtesy title from me. No one gave her a title in her own right. Yet she worked with me on all the charity work, for which we raised at least $200m.”

Adam Trescowthick is now designing a memorial plaque to commemorate the life of his late mother. His father wants the plaque displayed in some of Melbourne’s main hospitals and aged-care facilities.

“So if I can do this for Norma and get this up around town, that would be as good as a knighthood for her,” the latter says.

“She would not want it, of course. On no. But she certainly should have it. She deserves it.”