Obituary: Once Australia’s richest woman, Millie Phillips always did it her way

Millie Phillips’s life was extraordinary right up until the final scenes that played out in court while she was incapacitated in a nursing home.

Millie Phillips in London in 1980.

As unsparing fate thinned the ranks of her Polish family, Millie Stern set about life as if there were no tomorrow. The tomorrows of so many she knew were already gone. She had been lucky. Her parents fled Europe’s blackening clouds in 1938, arriving in Australia where, eight years later and aged just 17, she would marry.

Children would follow as she set on a unique course taking her from poverty to being Australia’s richest woman. She became a millionaire on February 14, 1966. Decimal currency arrived that morning and Millie – Millie Phillips by then – realised she had enough pounds that, at a rate of one pound for every crisp, new green $2 note, put seven figures into her bank book.

By then her marriage was over, but she willed herself to success with an unbending determination in an era when single mothers were often seen as fodder for ­social welfare.

Phillips died on Monday aged 92, having spent more than three years in a nursing home following a stroke. But while there, a final drama would play out in court in 2019 as her family sensationally went to war over her unsigned will – a case that set an extraordinary legal precedent.

Some, her one-time husband Harold included, would be intimidated by the force field of intensity that surrounded Phillips. Without it, and given the challenges to come, she may not have survived. But in her long run of victories, tragedy was not off the agenda.

Soon to be separated, Phillips, with three children in tow, took out a bank loan in 1960 for £3000 and purchased a boarding house in Sydney’s west. Later she built a chain of nursing homes (under the banner Milstern Health Care), bought some motels and hotels (including the famous Canberra Rex) and then a tin mine in northern NSW. That was 1968. She bought three more, launched Mt Hope Minerals and chaired International Mining Corporation, riding the nickel boom ­famously sparked by Poseidon’s Western Australian finds.

Family-anchored

A 1971 movie, The Nickel Queen, starring Googie Withers and John Laws, was said to be based on Phillips, although the ­champagne-sipping Withers’s character was in contrast to Phillips’s life: “I’m not great at socialising and I don’t like the social set,’’ she said back then of her modest, family-anchored life.

Her real life story would have made a better film. She was born Milka in the town of Kazimierz Dolny, about 150km south of Warsaw. With a brother two years older, she arrived in Sydney in March 1938 with her father, then a hawker, while her mother, who would soon bear another daughter, ran a drapery in Sydney’s ­inner-city Paddington.

For years, Phillips felt guilty about leaving family and friends behind. “I came here and missed it all,” she told 2GB’s Steve Price in 2016 of the dread that followed. “Everybody I loved and left behind didn’t survive. My entire family.”

She clearly recalled the early days. “For the first time in my life, people smiled at me. They didn’t see a Jewish girl, they saw a little girl. And I fell in love with Australia immediately.”

Phillips left school at 15 and taught herself English by watching Laurence Olivier movies; she spoke in seamlessly correct sentences with what might have passed for an English accent.

It wasn’t long before she met Harold, who was in the Royal Navy and soon after was UK-bound “on the last war brides’ ship”.

The couple lived with Harold’s parents in Manchester, which then, as now, can be grim. “It was a marriage made in heaven and lived in hell,” she said. Her husband didn’t want children but she did “desperately”. Of the unhappy union, she said: “I didn’t know there was any other kind.”

Phillips with grandson Anthony Small in 2015 receiving an honorary PhD in Israel.

While building her business empire, Phillips also made a name for herself as a generous philanthropist with a focus on education and combating anti-Semitism.

In 1974, she became the first woman in the country to be charged with insider trading, although the case was dropped the following year.

Unquestionably feisty, even her favourite grandson, Anthony Small, agreed in court that she could be “quarrelsome”.

Strong personality

In 2006, a patient at Phillips’s Yagoona Nursing Home southwest of Sydney died, reportedly after being injected by a nurse with insulin. At an inquiry into his death, his daughter claimed Phillips intimidated her at the courthouse demanding to know who she was.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported Phillips had said: “This is your fault we’re having this inquest. He was old and going to die … He was old and sick anyway.”

The court was reportedly told Phillips said to the woman that if she returned to Yagoona, where she sometimes sang for the residents, she would be escorted from the premises.

Small said she could be a difficult person and “did argue with people, she had a strong personality … I could imagine her doing that. She had such a rough life that she didn’t make excuses for other people. She’d pulled herself up by the bootstraps when literally everything was stacked against her.”

A true leader

Phillips’s greatest setback was the death of her eldest daughter, Lynette, in October 1978. Aged 24, she doused her clothes with petrol and set fire to herself outside the UN’s Geneva office. She had earlier planned to do this in London’s Parliament Square and left a note appealing for greater fairness in the world: “This action is taken to raise the consciousness amongst all good wishing people.”

Phillips accumulated a notable collection of Australian paintings. “She had a couple (of painters) she was obsessed with,” said Small. “She’s got a really great collection of the Boyds, David and Arthur and one of the sisters as well. Streeton, Dobell, Perceval – she knew some of them personally.”

That collection formed a significant part of her estate, reportedly worth perhaps $110m, but for which there was no signed will. She had prepared the paperwork, but as she sought to polish the details, she was incapacitated by a stroke.

This controversial document – ruling her son Robert out – was the source of a court case and an exceptional judgment. It is not clear why Phillips fell out with Robert, but Small said: “Rob’s story would be that he saved the businesses by going against what Millie wanted to do, and on Millie’s side it was (another story) and I don’t know who was right.”

Nonetheless, it was originally determined that in the event of Phillips’s death, Robert and his surviving sister Sharonne would be beneficiaries, standard practice in the case of anyone dying intestate. In 2019, Small appealed to the court seeking to have the draft will accepted as properly fulfilling Phillips’s final wishes. That November, the NSW Court of Appeal ruled in Small’s favour, effectively creating a will based on earlier versions.

At probate, Robert will receive nothing. His five children will get $1m each. A former housekeeper and Phillips’s sister are up for lower but significant amounts, while Sharonne will receive $5m and her son will benefit from a $25m Bathurst property and mother and son will share a substantial property at Kurrajong in which reside the paintings.

The rest will be split between Tel Aviv University, Sydney’s Jewish Museum and the Millie Phillips Jewish Fund.

Long-time friend Harry Triguboff said on Wednesday he would miss Phillips. “I admired her as she was the most successful person in nursing homes. She started from nothing, with no help … and she was the best.”

He described her as “a strong woman, entrepreneur, a true leader, a very generous donor for so many great causes … I always enjoyed meeting Millie; we always had a few good laughs because we were both very different from the rest of the community.”

Phillips will be buried in Jerusalem alongside her daughter.

Millie Phillips (nee Stern). Born February 7, 1929, Kazimierz Dolny, Poland; died July 19, 2021, Sydney.