Salta founders Sam and Christine Tarascio’s philanthropic passion
Property magnates Sam and Christine Tarascio’s alliance with a Melbourne rabbi stirred their philanthropic passions at the same time as their son survived a life-threatening episode.
Sam and Christine Tarascio made their first-ever visit to Israel on a trade mission in the northern Spring of 2019.
The Italian billionaire property magnate who 47 years earlier founded Salta Properties, now one of Australia’s largest privately-owned developers, had long admired the Israeli people and their entrepreneurial spirit.
He saw it first hand in the 1960s when he was recruited as a rising star goalkeeper by the Melbourne Jewish soccer team Hakoah while studying at Williamstown Technical School in the city’s west.
There Sam was taken under the wing of legendary Jewish businessman Les Erdi, the founder of the Mercure Hotel group.
“At Hakoah, every person I met - including Les Erdie - had a business. You’d be playing a game and a supporter would come in at half time and say ‘Its a tough game, if you pull this off I’ll give X amount of money to each of you’,” Sam now recalls.
“I used to multiply it by the number of players and think ‘Wow, this is amazing’. They install this sort of feeling in you that everything is possible. I used to think that if they all have a business, I can have a business too.”
In September 2019, the conveners of the Israel mission attended by Sam and Christine - investment house Wingate and wealth advisory group Evans & Partners - organised a re-union at the Kimberley Gardens Hotel in St Kilda.
Joining the delegates that night was Englishman Rabbi Moshe Kahn, who in the past 25 years has become one of the faces of engagement of society with the young Jewish community in Australia.
Specifically he is a director of Chabad Youth, the largest Jewish youth organisation in the Southern Hemisphere, based in Melbourne.
“Sam came up to me that night and said ‘I make olive oil, would you like some,” Moshe says, in reference to Tarascio’s Taralinga Estate, which produces award winning olive oil at his property on the Mornington Peninsula.
But they talked about more than olives. Chabad Youth has been running youth camps and young adult initiatives for over 50 years.
That night Moshe planted the seed of an idea of how Sam, Christine and their family might bring to life their philanthropic passions to support young people in literally their own backyard.
The genesis of the Taralinga Estate olive farm was Sam and Christine’s acquisition from the Catholic Sisters of Mercy of 80 hectares of densely covered bush land on the Mornington Peninsula at Shoreham in 2010.
Sam will never forget bush-bashing with a old Pajero four-wheel-drive - which he still has today - through the scrub during his first visit to the site when he caught a glimpse of Western Port Bay in the distance.
When he stood on the Pajero’s roof to gaze upon the stunning water view, he realised the scale of the development opportunity.
Over the next two years, with the blessing of the local council, Sam painstakingly cleared the land of hundreds of towering pine trees to build the family’s dream holiday home, his olive plantation and a processing plant.
PASSION PROJECT
He took leave from Salta for most of his 69th year to build the property and wanted it finished for his 70th birthday.
It was, but not before he experienced the only workplace accident of his life: falling from the roof of the half-built home, injuring his head, bruising his ribs and snapping the tendon in his arm.
He and Christine had their early robust debates on where the house would be on the site, but today the Hamptons-style property with stunning towering timber ceilings and sweeping bay views - with its own guest wing - is one of the finest on the Mornington Peninsula.
On an adjacent hill their eldest son - also named Sam, who became managing director of Salta aged just 30 in 2005 - has built his own dream holiday home with even better views towards Philip Island.
Their youngest son, David - who runs the venture capital and funds management arm of Salta - is also developing land further up the hill to build his dream home overlooking his father’s olive farm.
But it is a 10 acre tract of land at the bottom of Sam and Christine’s property that has become the focus of their philanthropic passions in partnership with Moshe Kahn and Chabad.
For 30 years until 2015 it had housed a community campsite. In 2017, Sam and Christine bought the land with the initial thought of starting a commercial enterprise there.
“I thought I could make a produce store. The idea I had was to lease out spaces for people who had produce on the Peninsula. Then we thought about turning it into a hotel, then a restaurant,” Sam recalls, sitting in the lounge room of the Shoreham property, adorned with a grand wood fire place and a chimney made of local stone.
“But at the end of the day I thought to myself, ‘Look, do I need the motel? Do I need a restaurant down here? I don’t need any of that stuff’.”
Christine has been a Foundation Board member of the St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research since 2004 and Chair of its Discovery Fund since 2006, whose members make a tax-deductible gift of $10,000 pledged annually for five years to assist medical research projects.
It has since raised $8 million.
Last year she was awarded a Member of the Order of Australia for her service to medical research and charitable organisations.
“Chris is very strong about philanthropy and helping disadvantaged people. She has been a major contributor to the St Vincent’s Institute. So the influence has been with us all the time.
I have been more business minded so my understanding of philanthropy comes through what Chris has been doing,” Sam says.
Since building their dream holiday home at Shoreham, Chris had also been working with the Mornington Peninsula Foundation, where she discovered the extent of poverty in some of the major towns of the area such as Rosebud West and Hastings.
“Astounding poverty, the worst in the state. Children not going to school because their parents were drug addicted, going on and on through generations,” she says.
“So I said to Sam ‘Let’s keep the camp as a camp.’ And Moshe came along at just the right time.”
At the time Moshe was telling Sam about the Chabad camps, including its Feathertop Chalet established in 2017 which is an integral part of Victoria’s youth campsite network.
“So I thought that what Moshe was doing was an absolutely great sort of thing to do and he did mention at one stage that they had been looking on the Peninsula for a camp,” Sam says.
Last year Salta supported Chabad Youth in the establishing the Point Leo Camp at the base of their property.
Sam and Christine agreed to provide a rental underwrite to Chabad Youth for the full term of the lease, while Chabad Youth now manages and operates the day-to-day activities of the camp.
“There could be so many kids using it every single day, kids from the local area,” Moshe says.
“Kids need more than ever to go out there, especially after Covid.
“To connect with nature, plus they get resilience, team building skills and learn about themselves. We take thousands of kids on camp each year. We are very clearly a Jewish organisation but we take kids from every background and every ethnicity.”
The support for the Point Leo camp has come as the Tarascio family has formed its inaugural philanthropic foundation, which is still in its infancy. Salta is providing regular funds to build up the corpus.
“All our children have philanthropic tendencies. They are all interested for different reasons, including my daughter and son in law,” she says of her only daughter Lisa and her husband.
“It is about being kind and other people have modelled this giving model. We are now bringing all of the grandchildren into it. It is going to be exciting.”
David Tarascio is a key supporter of the new philanthropic foundation and of his mother’s support for medical research after last year suffering a life threatening episode in his Melbourne apartment one evening.
It was 930pm when Christine received a call from her youngest son followed by a garbled message. He had collapsed after suffering a stroke, but had been close enough to his phone to reach out and call her.
“We tried to get a doctor online and he was useless. All the ambulances were busy. When we got to his apartment, we couldn’t lift him. The concierge helped with a wheelchair to get him into the car and we drove him over to the Epworth,” his father recalls.
“They initially thought it was vertigo and the doctor didn’t come to examine him until 2am. They initially said they would do an MRI at 8am the next morning but he didn’t have it until 2pm that afternoon. Then all of a sudden, it was all systems go. They realised he’d had a stroke and the specialists and nurses came from everywhere. Yet he had gone around the clock with this clot lying around. It is a miracle he is still alive.”
David is now in Queensland on long service leave from Salta. He has long been a keen tennis player and in recent years played tournaments on the international ITF tour in the 40-45 age bracket and other events run by Tennis Australia in the all age category.
He is back on court playing after a lay-off.
“He has gone through a fairly rough patch. But he has come back very well,” his father says.
FUTURE PLANS
David now says he wants to spend more time pursuing opportunities to support health related technology.
“There are amazing things beings done in stroke detection and many other areas of med tech, but not nearly enough,” he says.
While Christine says she would happily spend the rest of her days at Shoreham, describing it as the “most beautiful place”, her husband is not so sure.
After building their dream holiday home, plus the dam and water piping on the property, Sam is frustrated he can no longer keep up the pace on the tools.
“I find it difficult to work as I used to. I would love to work out there on the property with the guys. But I have a bit of calcification of the spine which makes it difficult to bend over. So when I come down here now, I just sit here,” he says.
“I can’t work on (Microsoft) Teams.”
What keeps him returning is spending time with his beloved grandchildren and his 2500-strong olive grove plantation.
His Italian family hails from olive oil processors in the Sicilian town of Vizzini in the 1930s.
Taralinga Estate has now won four gold medals at the New York International Olive Oil Competition, known as the olive oil Olympics. It means Taralinga is on the official index of the world’s best olive oils.
He says a big selling point of the product is its high level of anti-oxidants, which make it not only a delicacy, but a health alternative.
“The olive oil thing I am very passionate about. It is not a money making thing. I can guarantee the level of anti-oxidants in our oil has the absolute maximum level,” he says proudly.
“We give it to all our customers and they love it. And the medals we have won prove its quality.”