Sir Frank Lowy AC

Readers note: This is an excerpt from the 200 Treasures exhibition catalogue, developed in 2017. This content was written as a brief biography on why this person was included in the exhibition.

Frank Lowy has had an extraordinary life journey, from desperate survival during the onslaught of Nazism in Europe to becoming Australia’s richest man and one of the country’s most generous philanthropists.

Lowy was born in 1930 in the Czechoslovakian town of Fil’akovo to devout Jews Hugo and Ilona Lowy. The rise of Nazism in Europe and the outbreak of World War II forced the family to move to Budapest, Hungary. Many of Lowy’s relatives perished in Nazi gas chambers and it was many years before he knew the fate of his own father, who disappeared in 1944 and died in Auschwitz concentration camp. Lowy, his mother and siblings survived the war, but found anti-semitism was still rife in Czechoslovakia upon their return. Lowy left for Palestine in 1945, expecting his family to follow, but instead they migrated to Australia. Lowy followed, arriving in Sydney as a ‘boat person’ with no English and one suitcase on Australia Day 1952. From this inauspicious start, over the next 30 years he built a business empire based on shopping centres.

With partner John Saunders, he opened the first Westfield shopping centre in Blacktown in 1959. By 2016, Westfield owned 35 malls across the world that were visited 400 million times annually, generating over 16 billion dollars in retail revenue.

Lowy has made it his mission to give back. In 2013, he estimated that the Lowy family had donated more than 350 million dollars to philanthropic causes over the previous decade. His motto ‘If you have a little, give a little; if you have a lot, give a lot’ is a philosophy he attributes to his mother, who remained generous even in times of acute hardship.

Lowy is also known for his patronage of soccer in Australia; he was president of the Football Federation of Australia (FFA) from 2003 to 2015. Lowy has received many awards and founded the Lowy Institute in Sydney to mark 50 years since his arrival in Australia.