The Australian Financial Review Magazine
by Dianna Bagnall

The February 2008 issue of The Australian Financial Review Magazine featured a front-cover story about the Sherman family. The in-depth article, titled 'Family Values' catalogues the endeavours of each member of the family and explores the establishment of Voiceless by Brian and Ondine Sherman.

With grateful thanks to The Australian Financial Review Magazine, and the writer Dianna Bagnall, for allowing us to reproduce the entire text here. 

There was a Sunday afternoon last winter when, had he still been alive, Eric Tannenbaum might have recalled asking his studious 19-year-old daughter Gene to think carefully before marrying so hastily. The year was 1968. Her fiancé, a good-looking boy from Brakpan, a small town on Johannesburg’s gold reef, named – literally – for the dullness of its ditchwater, was studying accounting.

But Tannenbaum worried that the intended lacked focus. A year earlier he’d flitted away from accountancy lectures to fight for Israel, as much to escape their dreariness as to further the Zionist cause. The older man, who put great store in intellectual rigour, warned the girl: “He’s very creative and very intelligent, but he’ll amount to nothing and I hope you can live with that.” Though she worshipped her father and was academically ambitious on her own account, Gene Tannenbaum decided she could. And on June 11, 1968, after a whirlwind 12-week courtship, she put on a short, white Mary Quant-style dress and a lacy veil, and married Brian Sherman.

Granted, in the intervening decades, Brian Sherman has gone on to build a multibillion-dollar funds management company in his adopted country Australia, and to back his wife’s career to the hilt. But still, for those of rational persuasion, his attendance at the Second Annual Vegan Expo at Petersham Town Hall in Sydney’s inner west in late July could have been unsettling. There he was, dressed in a forest-green shirt, black jeans and his distinctive rubber footwear, with his PR man and in-house lawyer on hand for support, trying to make himself heard over a babbling bunch of belly-dancers, ferals and crystal sellers.

First, he set up an argument against meat-eating on environmental grounds (“cut out beef from your diet and you’ll save 1.45 tonnes of greenhouse gas a year”) and then, the numbers sloshing over his audience’s heads, segued into a passionate denunciation of the “ungodly” practice of animal factory farming. A thin lad wearing a black hoodie stamped with the word ‘Herbivore’ drummed his fingers on the soles of his shoes and whispered to his yawning girlfriend.

Not only was Sherman preaching to the converted, this was not a crowd to whom, traditionally, money talks. The fact that the man at the mike, worth an estimated $200 million, was spending huge sums creating an organisation to get the animal rights agenda into schools and university faculties, legal and legislative chambers went right through to the keeper of the nut-burger stall, by far the busiest man on the floor.

A few days later, Sherman, 64, is in Paddington, in Sydney’s eastern suburbs, at the offices of the Sherman Group, his investment vehicle. He runs an extensive share portfolio. It still includes a substantial stake in the Ten Network (he was part of the original syndicate that bought Channel Ten from Westpac and turned it around), though he resigned from the board last October when Canadian media company CanWest became the majority owner.

His corporate responsibilities these days include chairing Aberdeen Leaders, an Australian-listed investment company in which he has a 22 per cent stake (he also has independent directorships on two of Aberdeen’s Asian bond funds), and Sonic Communications and Pulse International, an unlisted technology company in the banking sector that he has backed heavily since its inception. He counts among his close business associates Aberdeen Asset Management chief executive Charlie Macrae, the South African investment bank Investec’s Australian CEO Brian Schwartz and its local chairman, David Gonski (also chairman of Coca-Cola Amatil).

Schwartz is his deputy on the board of the Australian Museum. Sherman was appointed president of Australia’s oldest and largest natural history museum in 2001 and has whipped it into better operational shape. But it is Voiceless, the animal rights organisation, which he and his daughter, Ondine, 33, co-founded in 2004, to which he now devotes most of his time. Voiceless is housed in the same Paddington building (a converted bakery) as Sherman Pictures, the film production company run by his son Emile, 35. Brian’s wife Gene, 61, has her art gallery just down the road in Goodhope Street. Their home is a short walk from both the office and the gallery. Paddington is Sherman family home turf.

In such comfortable surroundings, he is philosophical about the lukewarm reception he received from the daytrippers to Petersham, fellow travellers though they were. It reminded him, he says, of his early years on the road in the United States with his EquitiLink partner Laurence Freedman, when they’d have 10 minutes to pitch their story of Australia as the next big place to invest to a roomful of brokers who thought they’d heard it all before. Statistics were never enough. “You needed to capture their attention, and you could capture it emotionally as well as numerically,” he says. 

With hindsight, he says, the EquitiLink years prepared him for what he’s doing now. “It was the hunt; I enjoyed the mass psychology of the marketplace, of turning people around, of reading psychological moods.” He was never in the game for the money, per se. “I’m using all the experience and street knowledge and wiles I’ve learned [in the financial markets] to build a social justice movement,” he explains. That movement has one primary goal – the recognition of animals as sentient beings with rights. He sees it as akin to ending slavery.

“Slaves were chattels, objects in law. Animals today are objects in law, the same as this table,” he says, placing his hand on the table in front of him. Like hard-nut American brokers, the Australian public he seeks to convince is unlikely to be won over by statistics alone, though documenting and exposing the suffering of animals, especially those in factory farms, is core business for Voiceless. “I always come back to the fact that this is a matter of the heart,” he says. He’s not the least bit diffident about saying so, though his late father-in-law may have had difficulty with that notion. But then again, Gene threw in her lot with the boy from Brakpan. 

SHERMAN BURST into view with Freedman (who is Gene’s first cousin) in the mid 1980s when their company began attracting serious money from US and Canadian investors into Australian markets. They started EquitiLink from scratch in 1981 around the Shermans’ kitchen table, as the story goes, and built it up to become one of the country’s largest independent funds management groups.

Their Australian funds, which were overexposed in equities relative to other funds, were hit badly by the 1987 stock- market crash, and their image damaged. But much of the $4 billion they raised from North America was invested in fixed-income markets. So, in December 2000, when the UK-listed investment company Aberdeen bought the EquitiLink group for about $152 million, most of its value was in big overseas funds (EquitiLink’s only listed Australian fund, MaxiLink, survives as Aberdeen Leaders).

For her part, Gene Sherman is known as the dynamo with an all-black wardrobe of Japanese collectables who came out of nowhere in the early nineties (again, as the story goes) to establish Sherman Galleries, whizzed around with her husband’s chequebook buying up top artists, including Michael Johnson, Mike Parr, Tim Storrier and Imants Tillers, and shookup the Australian art scene in the process. By the mid 1990s, the Shermans were said to have some of the best political, cultural and corporate networks in town.

“This is art and business Sydney-style and Sherman Galleries has arrived at the apex of this incestuous world,” the AFR’s Pamela Williams wrote in this magazine in October 1995, shortly after then prime minister Paul Keating opened painter Colin Lanceley’s show, with ALP heavyweight Graham Richardson and then NSW Labor premier Bob Carr in attendance. In 1996, Carr appointed Brian Sherman to the board of the Sydney Organising Committee for the Olympic Games, where he was in charge of the finance committee, with former Liberal premier Nick Greiner as his deputy.

Not that he consciously set out to benefit from his influential contacts, then or now. “I’ve never used a network in that way,” he says. “I know there’s an availability, but I’ve never tapped it. Maybe I should have, [but] I’ve always built up [something] so it stands on its own feet, rather than as a favour from someone.”

The 2000 Olympics gave Sherman a taste for a role in public life; something beyond the deal. It was never going to be in front-line politics though. “Maybe if I’d lived in America, it would have been a natural step, but it didn’t come onto the agenda here,” he says. “On the Labor Party side, you needed to be an assistant train driver coming through the ranks.”

While her husband was juggling an Olympic-sized budget and billions of dollars of private investment, Gene Sherman was forging a brave but ultimately frustrating path into Asia, organising two touring exhibitions aimed at building bridges, and opening markets. By late 1999, however, that flurry of activity was winding back, thwarted by the stalled Japanese economy. If the sale of EquitiLink and the completion of the Olympics project left Brian all dressed up with nowhere to go, she too was asking ‘what next?’.

Sherman Galleries was now a well-oiled machine, but selling pictures was never Gene’s reason for getting up in the morning. It went without question that whatever they did next, they would do as a family. To them, their interconnectedness was obvious, and if it puzzled or astounded those who did not know them, then so be it.

Perhaps it would have been different if the Shermans had not arrived as a fait accompli, if they had been born and had grown up here, with their lineage open for inspection. But like hundreds of thousands of other migrants who have arrived in this country seeing an opportunity for a better life than the one they’d left behind, they never saw a need to explain either their past or themselves, unless it served a purpose. It was building a future that mattered. And making a contribution. That went without saying where they come from. 

Separately and together, they’re beginning a new chapter, and it’s one that needs some explanatory notes for those who live outside the Jewish heartland. It’s not that this next phase of their life is overtly Jewish, in the religious sense. Far from it. However, it is grounded in intellectual and cultural mores and values, which stem in large part from their Jewish heritage.

That background is not something the Shermans, like many other Jewish Australians, necessarily want to have dominate their lives or their identities to the exclusion of all else. They did not, for example, choose to send their children to Jewish schools; rather they chose their neighbourhood because it had good local schools. “Jews are a strange group,” muses Gene, “because whether you intend to [bring children up] in the Jewish culture, or you don’t, you do. For some reason, there is such a strong racial memory, and such a focus on education … I know people who’ve set out to separate themselves, and they don’t succeed fully because there’s too much ingrained.” 

The critical word here is philanthropy. Of course, giving away money is not an exclusively Jewish activity but, within that  community, it is much encouraged, admired and emulated. Sounds innocuous enough, and most people, rightly enough, would guess there’s some kind of tax benefit involved. But it’s often more than that. In the Shermans’ case, philanthropy is a channel through which family members are gradually shifting their energies towards things they find meaningful.

It has three main arms – the Sherman Foundation (a prescribed private fund through which they donate money to other tax-deductible entities), the not-for-profit organisation Voiceless, and their newest baby, the Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (registered as a charity). The Shermans’ main causes are animal protection, contemporary art and culture, the environment, the Jewish state and education.

As a family, they are not only aware of each other’s priorities, and where they overlap; they actively look for ways to work with each other. It’s an interesting concept for those of us whose families don’t have a corporate dimension, or for whom families are entities from which to make a speedy exit, or at least to keep safely at an arm’s length. “There’s a very strong connection between all of us in our family; a strong sense of love, of unconditional love,” says Emile.

When Voiceless hosted its fourth awards event in December under the sails of the Sydney Opera House, at Guillaume at Bennelong, it was very much a family affair. Emile’s wife Caroline and Gene kept a protective eye on Ondine’s three-year-old daughter Jasmine, while Brian and Ondine shared the limelight with actor and Voiceless ambassador Hugo Weaving (and the knockout view). Media star Mia Freedman (Laurence’s daughter) hovered nearby, as did her uncle, documentary filmmaker Rod Freedman.

The connections that spin off and around this family are like the silken threads a spider weaves, a good many largely invisible until you walk into them. Neither Emile nor Gene, for example, is directly involved with Brian and Ondine’s Voiceless, but both support its aims (not least by abstaining from eating meat). In February 2007, Sherman Galleries unveiled an exhibition of selected artists’ works around the theme of human treatment of animals.

Sherman Pictures has co-produced an adaptation of fellow South African J.M. Coetzee’s book Disgrace (starring John Malkovich, and scheduled for release this year). Disgrace, while not exactly an animal rights manifesto, has a protagonist who seeks redemption by working in an animal clinic. Coetzee is a patron of Voiceless.

Actress Abbie Cornish, who is the Voiceless ambassador to its school-based animal clubs, starred in Candy, which Emile co-produced with Margaret Fink. One of Emile’s earliest productions (with Brian as executive producer), was the acclaimed 1999 documentary Uncle Chatzkel, written and directed by Rod Freedman, which tells the story of Gene’s maternal great-uncle Chatzkel Lemchen, who had stayed behind in Lithuania when the rest of his family emigrated to South Africa in the early 20th century. He survived the Holocaust, but did not see any family members again until Emile and Ondine tracked him down in Vilnius in 1996. “This set up a huge chain of events which excited my father and Rod,” says Emile with a smile.

When Gene announced that Sherman Galleries was closing shop at the end of 2007, and that from April 2008 a not-for-profit gallery would take over the Paddington space, she did so in the name of the Sherman family. Family money, through the newly established Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation (SCAF), is funding the new public gallery, which will host and curate several shows a year from top contemporary artists from Australia and the Asia-Pacific region. (The inaugural show will be work by Chinese artist Ai Weiwei.)

Behind the official explanation for the shift from commerce to philanthropy (“a way of continuing to make a substantial and ongoing contribution to the visual arts in this country”) is the simple fact that Gene wants to do it, and that the family supports her choice. “She’s always run the gallery as an intellectual endeavour,” says Ondine. “She loves all the talks, the publications, the cultural exchanges. I think she will have a lot more free rein with the foundation to indulge what brought her to the whole thing to begin with.”  Emile agrees: “In some ways, mum is going into a new philanthropic area but … a commercial gallery is not a way to make money. She was able to be in the gallery because we had money.”

Gene stumbled (most unlike her) into the gallery business in 1987 during a sabbatical from the Sydney girls’ school Ascham where she was head of languages. She was left holding the reins of the Irving Winter Sculpture gallery when its proprietor moved to Africa. “I didn’t intend to run the gallery. All I wanted was to clear up the disorganisation,” she says. Her preference for order and clarity defines her personal relationships too, say her children. “She never cuts corners, she never undermines people,” says Ondine.

That said, she hasn’t always seen trouble coming. She didn’t anticipate, for example, the resentment when she opened her first Paddington gallery in 1989 (“it took us a while to understand these people who almost feel ownership – and still do – of the suburb”) nor the criticism meted out when her Asian touring exhibitions were supported by government subsidies. (“I’m quite sensitive but I’m also stubborn … If I felt my motives were clean and my energies were going in the right direction, I would never let [criticism] stop me, and I didn’t.”)

Those experiences perhaps explain how thoroughly she has prepared the ground for her shift into philanthropy. She wants her intentions well signalled. SCAF’s first publication is a series of papers exploring how private foundations can best help contemporary art in Australia. One person she never has to explain anything to, however, is Brian, whose talent for making money has made so much possible. He shares her values. He has from the beginning.

“We always talked,” says Gene. “We do view the world in the same way, strangely enough, though we came from very different families.” She grew up in a cultured Johannesburg household in which writers, artists and political fringe dwellers were regular guests. Her father worked as a journalist and translator before going on to prosper in business. He was ambitious for his children’s education. Dinner-table conversations were steered away from domestic trivia and towards books, art, world affairs.

Brian, on the other hand, grew up in a town with two defunct mines (gold and coal), and parents with good intentions but few ambitions beyond making ends meet. His father Hymie had left school at 14 to work to support his extended family, migrants from Lithuania. He ran a small shop selling mainly menswear. “He gave me a solid base, but he wasn’t a risk taker … I had to drive it myself.”

When they met at the University of Witwatersrand, Gene was studying French literature, and fixed on having the academic career her father hoped for. Brian had chosen accounting instead of his first preference, law, in which he would have to requalify if he emigrated. He had a sense that his future would not be in South Africa, just as when he met Gene he knew they should marry. He’s always taken decisions quickly, he explains. She says, “Both of us are deeply intuitive people, Brian much more so than me … and there was a deep intuition that this was right.”

On some points they differ. She’s happiest in her books, while he is athletic and outdoorsy. (He, Emile, NSW Art Gallery director Edmund Capon and NSW chief justice Jim Spigelman have a regular tennis doubles date on Saturday afternoons.) She doesn’t like the outdoors, except to look at. Nor does she have the stomach for the work he does with Voiceless. “There’s a squeamishness in me. I can’t bear coming face to face with suffering; it resonates with me and makes me at least temporarily dysfunctional. I become hopeless and that’s not what I want.” But on important matters, such as politics and art, they are of like mind.

They brought strong left-wing sympathies from South Africa, which they left in 1976 in the wake of the Soweto riots, and their sympathies remain with the Left. On art, they find they always agree, she says. “It’s eerie the way we can be shown 100 things and the two we select are the two we would have selected if we’d been separated. It’s never failed us. We sometimes laugh and play a game with it. We go into a museum and I say I’ll choose and you choose, theoretically, what we’d like, and we come up with the same two or three out of hundreds of works.”

One might also imagine that they also share an interest in good food. The Shermans are renowned for their hospitality, most particularly for the sumptuous at-home dinners to which, for many years, upwards of 60 people would be invited after each Sherman Galleries opening. But Emile says emphatically that his parents have no interest at all in food: “I grew up with a family that was less interested in food than any other family I’ve come across, which I’m trying to reverse myself because I think that food is an amazing source of enjoyment and nourishment.”

As is so often the case, the Shermans’ migration to Australia in 1976 was all about making a better life for their children. Emile was four and Ondine two when they left South Africa’s apartheid regime looking for clearer moral air. Gene initially had no interest in going to Australia. “I said, ‘never again, I don’t know how anyone lives there’.” Her family had made an earlier disastrous migration to Melbourne in 1964. Her father’s business ventures failed, and her mother, Miriam, devastated by the uprooting, suffered a nervous breakdown. After nine months, the family returned to South Africa. Her mother never regained her balance, and died tragically at 47.

Gene had made a second migration with Brian, to England, in 1969. They would have stayed – Brian ended up with a City of London stockbroking firm, and she got a job teaching at a prestigious boys’ grammar school – but, after 18 months, her father rang to say he wasn’t coping with her younger brother Peter who, though it wasn’t clear at the time, was schizophrenic. Gene packed up that night and went home. Brian followed, and over the next five years they dealt with one catastrophe after another. Peter was in and out of hospital. Their first child was stillborn.

It was Gene’s father who eventually urged them to leave, sensing looming disaster in South Africa. Brian made an exploratory trip to Sydney, staying with Laurence Freedman whose mother Sylvia, an artist, was the sister to whom Gene’s mother had felt closest. As children, the Freedman cousins had spent a lot of time in the Tannenbaum house before they (and Gene’s other sisters and their families) emigrated to Australia. Brian lined up a job for himself at Westpac and a tutoring position at University of Sydney for Gene, sight unseen.

The truth was, he needed every inducement for Gene, who was partway through a PhD under supervision from the Sorbonne, to give Australia another go. Gene’s brother was still in serious trouble when their emigration papers came through but there was nothing more they could do to help. “I felt so guilty [leaving], it nearly killed me. It was a terrible business from start to finish [Peter died, again tragically, after they emigrated]. We didn’t have an easy beginning but we did cement a lot of things between us. This kind of bonding that comes out of adversity is stronger, if you get through it.”

When they arrived in Sydney, they made a pact not to discuss the whys and wherefores of their move for two years. As it turned out, there was nothing to discuss. They found they had landed on firm ground. “Migrating takes a toll on certain marriages, but it didn’t with us,” says Brian. Reading between the lines, it was the arrival of his mother, Minnie, within their first year in Australia that saved the day. Minnie was in many ways Gene’s polar opposite – “a very pragmatic woman”, her daughter-in-law says. She lived with them for 10 years, cooking and getting the children to and from school, thereby freeing up Gene to keep her academic ambitions on track, and for Brian to lay the foundations of the Sherman fortune.

Ondine remembers, “When I was young; they were driven. They never talked about South Africa or the past. It was always the future, moving ahead, opportunities.” Emile comments: “Mum had a very traumatic number of years and, as I’ve grown older, I realise how justifiable her reaction is, which is to block out and move forward.”

Emile and wife Caroline have two young sons, newborn Zachary and two-year-old Milo. Ondine and her husband Dror, who moved to Israel two years ago, have 14-month-old twin sons Lev and Dov, and Jasmine. Gene and Brian bought an apartment in the same Tel Aviv building as Ondine so they could visit freely and help with the grandchildren. “The funny thing about Mum,” says Emile, “is that she’s amazing with kids. I had no idea … In some ways it’s helped me reassess my childhood with her, and makes me much more appreciative of the relationship we have, because I think she was very focused on me when I was little.”

When they all lived together as a family, it was always Emile and Gene, and Ondine and Brian. “I feel comfortable and easy around my father. We like doing the same things,” says Ondine. “When he did have time, we would go for long walks together, collect acorns and pine cones (on the farm they have owned at Windsor, north-west of Sydney, for 20 years). We had a slower pace than Mum, who was Speedy Gonzales, and Emile. They are much faster. He was always very patient with me.” 

Gene, who named her son after the protagonist in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous treatise on education, remembers how instinctively she connected to Emile. “His responses and reactions were so much like my own … He has a logical mind and way of understanding.” But her daughter, named for a water sprite in Jean Giraudoux’s play Ondine, was a different being. “I always felt as though I was never able to interpret her responses correctly or even adequately.” Ondine, like her father, is a person of powerful convictions. Her mother describes her as “determined and highly focused”. Her older brother says she can see through to “the essence of things”. She always knew she wanted to work for a cause, though she says she thought about becoming a film director for five minutes.

She did her first degree in communications at the University of Technology Sydney, specialising in film, video and philosophy. “But I got quite disillusioned with the egos I came into contact with in the creative world. What shifted me towards the environment [and a second degree in environmental studies] was going on an environmental/peace/saving-the-world course in Israel [where she met Dror, now a wildlife biologist] … The difference between the people I met in the desert and those I met in the creative world was the difference between day and night. I wanted to be around the kind of people who cared about these kinds of issues.”

When she was seven, Ondine became a vegetarian and the youngest member of her local animal rights’ chapter. No one tried to talk her out of her decision, something that she finds surprising now that she’s older. Her parents treated her and Emile as adults. “They explained everything to us, and allowed us to make our own decisions.” When she was about 15, and wanted to go down to Victoria to protest against duck shooting in the wetlands, Brian sent a note to her private girls’ school saying she was ill. He remembers, “The school wouldn’t have allowed her to go off standing in lakes, and she always had a strong will.” These days, he says he feels that she is the parent and he is the child.

It was through Ondine that Brian Sherman came to the animal rights cause. He became a vegetarian a few years after her conversion. He’d always felt a strong kinship to animals. But it wasn’t until 2003 when they went together to an animal rights conference in the United States that he truly understood the nature of animal suffering that had kept her awake at night as a child. He and Ondine had gone to the conference thinking that they would like to do something together, post-EquitiLink. She’d been working for environmental organisations, but wanted to get back on track with animal rights, and couldn’t see herself working with any existing groups.

“It’s great to have ferals and activists and I love them, but you can’t have just them,” Ondine says. “If you want to have change, you need the whole spectrum, from the corporates to the political activists … to attack it from every angle.” She didn’t know what Brian’s level of involvement would be, but wanted him to hear what she’d been talking about for years from other, more authoritative voices. He came back from the conference in a state of shock, having heard about and seen images of animals suffering in ways he had never imagined.

“I call it traumatic knowledge,” he says. “Suddenly you have something horrific happening around the corner, and you can’t live in the same block and ignore what you know.” It was his turn to lie awake at night in distress. He went into a downward spiral, becoming gaunt and pale. He wore his sadness heavily. Even before Ondine and the animals, Gene says, he had “that slightly brooding, quiet vein to him … it’s a mystical presence where he is able to move something along which is not quite tangible and so deeply engage, but it’s not a bright celebratory thing.” Tim Storrier once told her that Brian was an old spirit (and that his business partner, Laurence Freedman was a new one).

Ondine was surprised by her father’s extreme reaction. “I thought he must have known all this stuff, and he really didn’t … I think he had been so busy building his career, getting out of Brakpan, that he had probably never taken a moment to think about the bigger issues.” Knowing her father as she does, she thought the best thing to bring him back to himself was for him to get involved. “For a while he’d thrown himself into the whole Jewish/Holocaust world. He did start with that, but I guess the Holocaust had happened already and the animals are right there, in cages, being tortured … Obviously you can’t compare the two, but he is an action person, and the animal stuff was all there. They needed people to take action.”

The action began with bankrolling a new organisation focused on better conditions for farm animals with softer rhetoric and more strategic aims than existing animal rights groups. The aim was not to compete with but to add to the movement’s momentum. It targeted two main ways of doing so – first, by building on the natural sympathy that young people have for animals, and second, by boosting the capacity of other animal rights groups, primarily through a grants program. About $750,000 in grants has been awarded since 2004 (mainly funded by the Sherman family). In 2007, the awards leaned heavily towards strengthening the law’s engagement with animal rights ($15,000 went towards establishing Australia’s first animal law journal, for example). 

“There has been a lot of focus on things that are meaningful in our family,” Emile says, wryly. He’s watched his father transform himself from globe-trotting financier to hairshirt-wearing ‘zealot’ (a term Brian uses of himself), and his mother withdraw from commerce and reposition herself in the realm of scholarship. He has been on his own trajectory, building up his credentials as a film producer.

But he too had an epiphany of sorts, after the end of his collaboration with Jonathan Shteinman (which resulted, most notably, in the films Rabbit Proof Fence and Oyster Farmer). Around 2003, he decided he could produce only films to which he felt connected, films such as Candy and Disgrace, and $9.99, an animation film based on Israeli writer Etgar Keret’s short stories (also due for release in 2008).

His relationship with his father has been changing too. They’ve become closer in their interests again. There was a time, when he was in his mid-teens and EquitiLink had just cracked the American investment market, that he got caught up in his father’s excitement for the marketplace. “Dad was always very open with me about what was happening at work, or it felt like he was, and so I felt very connected with the funds when he started them, the way they were being structured, the roadshows.” But then he lost interest, and moved towards his mother’s world of ideas, studying law and literature at the University of New South Wales.

After university, he went around the block a few times before finding his niche in film production, which marries his creative and financial sides. He’s not driven to make a lot of money, he says. His father has been there, done that. Besides, he says, he lacks the killer focus to make a fortune. He’s too easily distracted. In the past few years, however, he’s become more involved in managing the investment portfolio of the Sherman Group, of which he’s a director.

“I see my role in terms of dad’s wealth as trying to preserve as much [as possible] for the next generation,” he says.  “I don’t think I’m going to be interested in gambling the money on a huge business venture, or focusing on property development deals or making money through complex financial instruments and venture capital opportunities. I’m enjoying the movie side, and it’s a blessing for us as a family to have these resources so that we can contribute philanthropically to the community and be free to be able to do what we want in life.”

Having the freedom to do what you want is something most of us have no trouble relating to (even if few of us experience that luxury), but giving away large amounts of money to strangers still somehow seems to belong to another place, to other people. Maybe it’s the word itself, with its overtones of an eccentric hobby, but maybe it’s also that, in this unforgiving country, we’re suspicious of those who appear to take the fortunes they’ve made for granted.

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