Penn family usher in new era for Sydney’s exclusive Gold fundraiser
To secure its $15m fundraising target, the millionaire Penn family has taken Sydney’s exclusive Gold charity event into even more rarefied air.
Linda Penn remembers the scene vividly. She was lying on an operating table, receiving stitches after undergoing an emergency caesarean section, when doctors told her that her newborn daughter was going to die.
Hours earlier on that Monday in 1995, the six months’ pregnant marketing director of retailer Lowes Manhattan had been waiting at Sydney Airport for a flight to Melbourne – a work trip – when her waters broke. “I’d had Josh and Mel; two very healthy children seven years earlier, but this pregnancy wasn’t as smooth as my other pregnancies and I felt quite ill for a lot of the time,” Linda, now 63, recalls. “I had been to the doctor previously on the Friday. I told him, ‘I’m really not well; I put on six kilos in a week.’ I could feel that something was wrong and he said, ‘No you’re fine, fine.’”
At the airport she began bleeding heavily and was taken by ambulance to Paddington’s Royal Women’s Hospital. The situation was critical. “The anaesthetic didn’t take,” Linda recalls. She could feel the scalpel slice across her stomach as doctors raced to save her and her unborn child. “They just said, ‘We don’t have time to wait, just hang on.’”
Moments later, Alexandra was delivered. Ten weeks premature, with a perforated and malformed bowel, she was unlikely to survive. Linda has never forgotten the alarming blue shade of her daughter’s distended stomach as doctors whisked her away for emergency surgery. “It was such a shock. The paediatrician said basically, ‘We’ve got to perform microsurgery on her … the reason that you felt so sick was all her rubbish was going into you.’ It leaked into me. They took out 22cm of her bowel.”
That anxious young mother could never have imagined that 28 years later she would recount that story with Alexandra by her side, on the stage at Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation’s 2022 Gold Dinner, the annual fundraising event dedicated to supporting the health system and medical community which saved their lives. “I think for everybody – if they’re going to be pushed into philanthropy – it’s a certain event that does it for them. And I think obviously that was the event that did it for us,” Linda says.
There are only days to go now before the red carpet is rolled out on May 4 for this year’s 500 guests at the city’s most successful private fundraiser, which Linda and her son Josh are co-chairing for the second year. Today we’re sitting at the kitchen table of the Penn home, Villa Veneto, an ornate waterfront mansion Linda shares with her husband David in Sydney’s prestigious Point Piper amid some of the most expensive property in the country. Josh, his husband Ben and their two children Brooklyn, five, and Blake, two, are neighbours. “He wouldn’t move far,” Linda says. “And he’s still here every night at 9.30 telling me we have nothing in our fridge.”
This might be one of Australia’s most expensive kitchens, but like any other kitchen in the country, it is used as a hub for catching up, weeknight dinners and, of course, arguments. “What starts out as a friendly, nice dinner turns into an all-in brawl,” Linda says, laughing. “None of us are shrinking violets; everybody has an opinion, whereas in my day you weren’t that forward with your opinions with your parents.” The arguments today focus on the logistics surrounding this year’s Gold Dinner. “It’s like organising a wedding,” Linda sighs. “I think that’s the thing we argue the most over, the seating arrangements … everyone wants to sit at the best table.”
It’s almost impossible to separate Gold the society evening from Gold the fundraiser. This year marks the 26th anniversary of the event founded by Lucy Turnbull, wife of former prime minister Malcolm, while chairing the board of the Sydney Children’s Hospital Foundation. The story goes that Turnbull approached her fellow board member Lyndi Adler (wife of ex-HIH boss Rodney Adler) with the idea to raise money for the hospital that treated the sickest kids in their community. The pair recruited Skye Leckie, wife of the powerful late TV executive David Leckie and PR powerhouse in her own right, to the committee. The first dinner, held at Judith Joye’s home Barford in Bellevue Hill, raised $315,000, and a Sydney high society calendar fixture was born.
If the dinner had a very Sydney-eastern-suburbs origin story, it now exists to serve a far more diverse demographic. Last year’s event – the first chaired by the Penns after they took over from committee chair Monica Saunders-Weinberg – raised $9m for the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation’s critical care services which covers Randwick and Westmead childrens’ hospitals. It broke the record for the most money ever donated at a single Australian charity gala.
This year, the bar is set higher still, with a goal to raise $15m for building two new floors at The Children’s Hospital at Westmead. If reached, the Gold Dinner will have raised more than $50m since inception. The soaring target has been set by Josh, who has inherited a zeal for philanthropy and an ambitious streak that belies his privileged upbringing.
Linda’s husband David founded Southern Cross Dental laboratories in the 1980s and in 2012 sold his majority stake in the business for a reported $96m. Josh co-owns luxury fashion retailer Belinda International with Jackie Yencken, and also runs Double Bay homewares boutique and café Palmer & Penn with his husband Ben Palmer, which Linda and David founded under the name Vintage Luggage Company in 2009. “All of our businesses intertwine,” Linda says. “The only one I try to keep a little separate is the Lowes business, because they’ve all got an opinion.”
Linda’s family story began far away from the glittering harbour playground that lies beyond the balcony at Villa Veneto. Her father Hans Mueller, Josh’s grandfather, purchased Australian men’s apparel retail brand Lowes, which Linda now runs and co-owns with her brother, Jeffrey Muller, in 1981. Fashion retail is stitched firmly into Linda’s DNA on both sides, and both families survived the Holocaust. Her grandparents Rosa and Otto (on her mother Gertie’s side) owned retail stores in Vienna until 1938 when, with Austria in the grip of the Third Reich and the Nazis rounding up Jews, Otto was deported to Dachau death camp in southern Germany. Linda’s paternal grandfather, Victor, was also sent to the concentration camp. Discovering that a valid passport and proof that no warrants were out for their arrest could enable some Jews to be released, Hans’ mother sold the family’s furniture to obtain the documentation and a ticket on a trading steamer to one of the few ports offering Jews a safe haven: Shanghai. “We saw him off at the railway station,” Hans wrote in his 2017 memoir Highs & Lowes. “He was dressed in an overcoat, hat, and carried a simple suitcase, containing only a few clothes. That was all he was allowed to take from Austria … that and four American dollars for the journey.” After arriving in Shanghai, Hans and his mother were reunited with Victor, and the family settled in the city’s Jewish ghetto, officially known as the Restricted Sector for Stateless Refugees. It was there that Linda’s parents Gertie and Hans first met, while waiting to be granted asylum in Australia.
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“I feel it’s a privilege to work with your children”
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Hans secured a job in a paper factory and chemist, while Gertie worked in the general store her father had established. “We couldn’t leave the ghetto without written approval; we had to be careful where we walked and to whom we spoke,” Hans explained in his book. His entrepreneurial nous was evident from his early teens when, passing a department store each day which sold nail polish and soap, Linda says, he “had the idea that he would get orders from all the people in the ghetto for these nail polish or lipsticks or whatever; that’s how he started making his money. For him, as a youngster, the whole thing was an adventure,” she adds. “It wasn’t an adventure for his parents, but for him it was; he never begrudged the wartime or held on to any bad memories.”
By the time Hans made it to Australia after the war, Gertie, who was by then his fiancé, was already here, living in Maroubra with her father and working at his clothing store in Petersham. Hans was, in his own words, “a war bride”, and in 1948, three months after his arrival, he wed Gertie. The same year he opened his own retail store, Jonny’s menswear.
By the mid-1960s he had 14 stores under the name Manhattan Menswear, and in 1981, when Hans acquired rival chain Lowes from David Cooks, his company became one of Australia’s biggest clothing retailers. His charitable work ran parallel to his success in retail. In the late ’70s he was appointed international vice president of Jewish human rights organisation B’nai B’rith, a grassroots welfare non-profit. Linda says her father took immense pride in the role. “I guess that was his way of giving back to the Australian and international community,” she says. Linda graduated in law before joining her father’s business. “I started as a solicitor and he used to say to me, ‘You know, stop working so hard for somebody else and come work for me. I’mgoing to retire when I’m 70.’” He was still working at 90. Linda has inherited her father’s commitment to philanthropy. A longstanding relationship with the Jeans for Genes initiative was born in 1998. “Lowes celebrated their 100-year anniversary, so I had the idea that we should have a big ball, get our suppliers to buy tables and donate the proceeds to the CMRI (Children’s Medical Research Institute) charity Jeans for Genes. “We raised $350,000 that night, a big sum in those days … that gave me a wonderful taste for it and such a great feeling.”
Organising a gala while managing a business with more than 2000 employees is a daunting task even for someone with means, so it took some convincing by Josh before Linda agreed to take on the role of Gold Dinner co-chair. “I was on the committee in 2021 and we raised $5.2m,” says Josh. Shortly afterwards, Saunders-Weinberg stepped down as chair. Her departure prompted a committee exodus, with Josh and Alina Barlow remaining on as members. “Alina didn’t want to chair the event and when I was in conversation with the Sydney Children’s Hospitals Foundation CEO (Nicola Stokes), she asked if I would consider taking on the role and bring on my mum. I called Mum and she said, ‘You’re not serious – Josh, you know I’ve got a pretty big job,’ and I was like ‘Do you?!’, but I went home and we discussed it and were open and honest, and I said I really want to do this with you.” Eventually, Josh got her over the line.
“I think that I was brought along to add some grey hair to the committee and to the chair,” Linda quips. “I feel it’s a privilege to work with your children. I think I’ve really had the best of both worlds working with my dad and working with my kids. So I feel very blessed.”
A seat at the Gold Dinner confirms status at the top of Sydney’s social and financial pile. But that, and a willingness to part with $3000 for a ticket isn’t enough to guarantee a place at this year’s soiree. Only those with both deep pockets with a willingness to dig deeply into them made the list. In return, they can expect a night to remember. “I think for $3000 guests need to experience something pretty phenomenal and amazing, and so I think that this year it’s going to be maybe more glamorous, maybe a little bit more exclusive [than last year],” Josh says.
This year’s major sponsors – Scape Australia, Shaw and Partners, Pallion Group and Bulgari – have already made generous contributions. “It’s a lot more focused on getting the right people in the room, but also on the glamour of the evening and keeping it the premiere event.”
Few are better placed to recount the drama and decadence in the history of the Gold Dinner than Leckie, who has attended every year. The former publicist explains the event’s initial – and continued – success came down to exclusivity and psychology. “We charged $1500 a head or something (in the first year), which for that time was an exorbitant amount of money … but the thing we did which gave it its success was we went to 50 captains of industry and said, ‘Right, you buy a table for x and invite eight people,’ and when you invite people they feel obliged to pay the host back, so they might buy an auction item or whatever, and that formula grew and grew to a point that just before the GFC we were charging $25,000 a table,” she says.
“During the GFC we had a bit of a dip, but since then it’s only gotten bigger and bigger, and the Gold Dinner brand today stands on its own.”
Guest always include a smattering of A-listers – Chris Hemsworth, Rose Byrne, Simon Baker are recent attendees – to add star power to the event. Even the catering has been handled by the county’s top talents over the years, with chefs Guillaume Brahimi, Nobu Matsuhisa and Neil Perry all lending their skills to the event’s dinner menu.
But it’s Sydney’s wealthiest dynasties – the Packers, Stokes and Inghams – who regularly attend, who really make the dinner such a powerful charity affair. When you’re plying Australia’s wealthiest people with alcohol and encouraging them to part with eye-watering amounts of (tax-deductible) cash, discretion is important. It’s why few journalists are invited, and the event’s location each year is a closely guarded secret (this fact also adds to the overall mystique). Consistent with tradition, Josh won’t disclose this year’s location publicly but hints at what guests can expect. “The theme will be around building and bricks, and the idea of building something,” he says. Will a third generation of the family - Josh’s children Brooklyn and Blake - continue the Penn family’s philanthropic legacy? “I don’t think they’re going to have much of a choice!” he laughs. “I think it’s just sort of going to be ingrained in them.
“I want to show them that you can still have a great life, but giving back is so important.”
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