Australia’s Richest 250 #85, #86: Shesh Gacey & Jumuna Gurung; #186 Paul & Charmaine Blackburn; #65 Paul Little & Jane Hansen
Shared vision, playing to their strengths and – sometimes – agreeing to disagree is what gives these wealthy couples the edge.
Shared vision, playing to their strengths and – sometimes – agreeing to disagree is what gives these wealthy couples the edge.
FULL LIST: Australia’s Richest 250
Shesh Gacey & Jumuna Gurung
There are few Australian billionaire success stories that begin with an arranged marriage. But then husband-and-wife team Shesh Ghale and Jumuna Gurung aren’t your average first-time billionaires.
The couple were introduced by their parents, who had preconceived their marriage, in Gurung’s village in Nepal’s Annapurna Ranges 40 years ago.
Today, Gurung and Ghale share ownership and management of a business empire spanning education, with the private Melbourne Institute of Technology education business they built from scratch after arriving in Australia in the early 1990s, and a string of commercial properties in Melbourne and Sydney that places them among Australia’s top 100 wealthiest people.
Ghale tells The List that he and his wife’s skill sets are complementary. Gurung manages the education side of the empire, while Ghale runs the couple’s property plays. Both are highly successful and they have become joint billionaires for the first time, with shared wealth of $1.1 billion.
“She is very much operations and marketing; she is very good at details,” Ghale says of his wife, adding that while he is calculated and considered, Gurung works on a hunch.
“It’s been nearly 24 years in the business and we never thought when we started this would be a business of this scale.
“From the outset we had distinct roles ... we had to find the line and draw it – here is what I do and this is what you do – otherwise we would be fighting, and that’s not healthy.”
From their Lansell Road, Toorak, mansion in Melbourne, the couple commute together to work in the CBD each day, before sharing breakfast at their office in the historic Argus Building they spent $60 million refurbishing.
“From there we need space,” Ghale reveals. “She does her thing, I do mine, then we meet during the lunch break.”
‘In managing people I am softer, more liberal, and she is very straightforward, very strict and uncompromising.’
Gurung, who was reluctant to talk to The Australian, says she prefers to keep their side-by-side office doors closed.
Ghale was born and raised in a Nepalese village 7000 feet above sea level in the Annapurna Range, about one-and-a-half days’ walk from Pokhara. Gurung’s village was five hours on foot from his.
The couple were matched through their ethnic group when she was in year 10 at high school and Ghale was a 20-year-old living in Kathmandu after studying there for his diploma of engineering, which was paid for via a scholarship.
“Before we were married I went to her house to get introduced,” Ghale recounts. “Everything was good, and they liked me because I was studying hard and that was one of their requirements.”
Today, when Gurung has trouble sleeping, her husband recounts to her their journey from her village to Pokhara soon after their marriage in 1978.
“We were walking, walking to Pokhara, a whole day,” his story goes. “We were crossing a river, I don’t want to tell you all these romantic things – I had to hold her because it was quite a big river, and that’s when we got closer…
“I keep telling her the story until she sleeps like a baby.”
As is the case with any successful and enduring relationship, theirs is one of tolerance, compromise and mutual understanding.
“Probably she wouldn’t accept this, but in managing people I am softer, more liberal, and she is very straightforward, very strict and uncompromising,” Ghale says of his wife.
“We have some people still working here from 1996 when we first set up and I am quietly saying, ‘How could they tolerate her? She is so tough and gives them a hard time’.”
“Sometimes she needs a mediator,” he says with a laugh.
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Paul & Charmaine Blackburne
The Blackburne family’s backyard nestled in the heart of Dalkeith, one of Perth’s ritziest riverside suburbs, boasts a stretch of perfectly manicured lawn.
In one corner is a swing set, trampoline and monkey bars. In the other, a plastic cubby house is encircled by a large sandpit.
On a bright late summer morning, Paul and Charmaine Blackburne’s two children, Aria and Ethan, are playing happily with their nanny before their parents embrace them for a photo.
Towering behind them is a six-bedroom concrete and timber veneer masterpiece that the Blackburnes fashioned from a 1980s brick home, complete with a guest quarters, gym, a playroom with a giant flatscreen television, swimming pool, sauna and even a garden pizza oven.
It is living proof of what money can buy when you are worth a cool $553 million.
But as the photographs finish and their children skip across the grass and cheerfully bound onto their trampoline, the Blackburnes reveal for the first time how aware they are of their wealth becoming a burden for their children.
“Having wealth and success can tend to bring out the negatives in people,” Paul says. “I have always been very conscious of that.”
“My intention later in life would be to give away the majority of what I have. So hopefully I don’t intend to leave them [the kids] much anyway.
“I am giving a lot of thought to this now because I think having a lot of money at a young age is a very dangerous thing. If anything, in a majority of cases, I think it is more of a burden than a gift for kids in their 20s and 30s to inherit a lot of money.”
Of course, the 42-year-old stresses that he wants his children to have a “stable life, a good home and a good education”.
“But anything beyond that, just like I had to earn everything myself, I think they should also. And if they do have access to money at some stage, I hope that they are using it for good rather than evil.”
His hope is to eventually establish a family charity or charitable entity that at least one of his children is deeply involved in, following in the footsteps of other wealthy individuals such as mining magnate Andrew Forrest or television production whiz Neil Balnaves, who sold his Southern Star in 2006 and resolved to use the proceeds to help others.
While he says it would be nice, Paul has no ambition for either of his children to follow in his footsteps at his property business, Blackburne Property Group.
He says he has worked hard to ensure that wealth has not changed him after he grew his company from a property management group of 10 staff in 2003 to the point where it is now one of Perth’s biggest apartment developers.
‘It all comes down to love, understanding and respect. And if you’ve got that, then you get through.’
Sixteen years ago, he borrowed $600,000 to buy part of the rent roll from his father’s firm, Blackburne and Joyce Real Estate, to start his own business.
Six years later, by chance, he met Charmaine. Eventually an office romance blossomed.
“I was with another project management firm and I was asked to interview for Blackburne,” Charmaine recalls. “I had my first interview with Paul and the manager at the time.
“I got the job on my own merits, being an investment consultant in property. It wasn’t until a year or more later that we started becoming friends.”
Paul recalls that he was working 15-hour days at the time as the global financial crisis was taking hold and Blackburne Group was forced to change strategy. He says he didn’t have time for a relationship, but things just evolved.
“I just had to be extremely sure it was serious before even entertaining starting a relationship,” he says. “I had to make it clear to the managers that Charmaine was no different from anyone else in terms of work capacity and performance.
“Fortunately she was the top-performing consultant we had. I had a very clear distinction between work and private life. We never went to lunch at work or talked about work after hours.
“I didn’t think it was an issue for anyone. She had built her reputation in the company before we started going out.”
Asked what each has taught the other, Paul responds with a smile: “I think I have taught Charmaine to be more down to earth, and to spend more time travelling and appreciating and understanding other cultures. We have travelled a lot together. Most of it has been in developing or Third-World countries.”
Charmaine doesn’t disagree. She describes her husband as her greatest mentor, on both a personal and professional level.
“He has not only physically shown me the world, he has taught me a lot about the world,” she says. “He is a very humble person, and he sees the world in many lights and appreciates on a human level how people live and the conditions they are born into and live in.”
Charmaine worked until she was eight months pregnant with Aria before leaving the Blackburne Property Group five years ago. Now that Ethan has turned two, she is launching her own brand of luxury body-care and anti-ageing products under the label Cocoon Luxury Australia.
She says the range is 100 per cent organic, “cruelty free” and Australian made, and has national and global aspirations for the business. Like Paul, she is deeply conscious of keeping the feet of her children firmly on the ground, even if they are still too young to really appreciate – or question – that approach.
“It is definitely something to think about, and in general it is a concern not to want to spoil them too much,’’ she says.
“We do a lot of outdoor activities, we travel a lot [and] we like to get them to see the world. We have travelled quite a bit through South East Asia, exposing them to different cultures and ways of life so that they get an understanding and appreciation for what they have.”
She says juggling a business and a family comes with its challenges. Wealth is still no guarantee of happiness or success.
“I am glad that we met each other within the same industry because I have contacts in the industry and have an understanding of the pressures of this business,’’ she says.
“It all comes down to love, understanding and respect. And if you’ve got that, then you get through.”
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Paul Little & Jane Hansen
Jane Hansen had never seen her husband in such a state. Paul Little, one of the warriors of corporate Australia, who took on Chris Corrigan in a bare-knuckle fight and turned the Toll Holdings logistics company from an 18-truck operation in Melbourne worth $1.5 million into a $4 billion global powerhouse, was under siege.
It was late 2013. A few months earlier, Little had taken over the chairmanship of his beloved Essendon Australian Football League club at the very height of the club’s devastating supplements scandal.
The almost two-decade marriage of Little and Hansen – they married in 1994, three years after Little’s first wife tragically passed away after a battle with cancer – was facing its toughest test.
“I have been with Paul for 24 years and seen him take on some big deals, like [taking over Chris Corrigan’s] Patrick and some contentious M&A deals,” Hansen says. “I have never seen anything like the stress he had with Essendon.
“None of the institutions knew what they were doing. It was such uncharted territory that everyone was feeling their way.”
Hansen remembers one adversary dressing up as a cleaner so he could confront Little in his office.
On another occasion, Little was photographed filling up the petrol tank of his wife’s car, whose registration plate carries her initials, “JH”. The media seized upon the picture to claim that it showed the chairman’s blind allegiance to Essendon’s controversial coach, James Hird.
Hansen was deeply worried.
“Yes, most definitely I was,” she says. “I just tried to maintain a sense of balance and be more distant from the emotion of it all, to step back and think about it rationally ... I do have the utmost respect for the way Paul handled it. He did do the best by the club.”
‘I like watching the way Paul’s mind works. He likes to pull problems apart. He has an analytical, flexible mind.’
Little describes Hansen as being “totally supportive” throughout the whole affair. “She didn’t question the reasons for doing things unless she violently disagreed with me, which she did on a couple of occasions,” he says. “I would like to have left it out of the home but when the press are camped on your front nature strip it is hard to do that.
“When it became personal, it affected my family, not just me. That was something we felt was below the belt. During that time, I couldn’t walk anywhere without someone giving me their point of view. That was OK at first, but after a while it became torturous.”
History now records that Little stepped down as Essendon chairman on December 14, 2015, shortly before the final guilty verdict was returned against Essendon in the supplements investigation. He knows he could not have survived the affair without Hansen by his side.
A month earlier they had launched the Hansen Little Foundation, a large-scale, active philanthropic enterprise that has since given significant donations to the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne. The aim of the Foundation is to leave a legacy of significant and positive change.
Hansen, who spent more than 25 years in stockbroking, finance and investment banking, says they went into philanthropy together because they are both self-made, and have similar values and a shared interest in wanting to make the world a better place.
“I like watching the way Paul’s mind works,” she replies when asked what she has learnt from her husband. “He likes to pull problems apart. He has an analytical, flexible mind.”
Little says he loves his wife’s “rigour – how she doesn’t avoid an issue. She brings a direct route to solving problems. Her willingness to confront things and deal with things is incredibly valuable.”
Which means they lock horns from time to time, but never in public. And the issue is always resolved, even if – as Hansen puts it – they “agree to disagree”.
“You get excited, upset, you argue, you thrash it out,” Little says. “We are both quite robust and we can work through issues.
“If it wasn’t for the fact I have so much respect for Jane, you might become less secure about what you are doing. But there is great underlying trust and belief between us.”
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