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Pamela Warrender, Prince of Merchants: The Story of Sir Norman Myer (1972)

The Myer Christmas Windows are one of Melbourne’s most beloved festive traditions, and they are equally a quintessentially Menzies-era legacy. While setting up elaborate shop window displays to encourage Christmas shoppers is a tradition that stretches back to at least the 19th century, it was a combination of the prosperity Menzies ushered in, and the excitement of the Melbourne Olympics, which prompted Myer’s uniquely talented window dresser Freddie Asmussen to take the medium to new heights. With the first iteration of the now annual tradition being themed around Santa at the Olympics, it also advertised the stunning innovation of television, which had begun permanent broadcasting in Australia just a few weeks prior.

As one might expect of a Melbourne business icon, Menzies was friends with the Myer family, who had originally come to Australia as Russian immigrants in the late 19th century. In a great display of our nation’s social mobility, Simcha Baevski (Sidney Myer) opened a small drapery shop in Bendigo, which ultimately grew into a nation-wide shopping behemoth. Indeed, Menzies argued that Myer was an embodiment of many of the best aspects of our national story:

‘the story of Sidney Myer’s life is one which must be read and understood if you are to appreciate how the Australian nation is being built up, and how, at the very antipodes of the British world, the race can absorb an apparently foreign element and derive from it new vigour and a strengthened patriotism… When Sidney Myer came to Australia, he came to a country which was a fertile soil for the seeds of his ambitions. He found to his hand that optimism which is the great gift of God to the Australian people, and that inherent individualism which not even a half-century of Government paternalism has been able to destroy. He showed in himself that optimism and that individualism carried to the highest power.

My own view of him is still vivid, and, I believe, true. It may seem an odd thing to say about a man who was regarded by so many people as an odd mixture, but Sidney Myer’s outstanding characteristic was simplicity. He rose from being an obscure alien peddler to being one of the great merchant princes of Australia. He created a vast business in more than one capital city, and gave employment to thousands; he almost entirely rebuilt a section of the City of Melbourne; his benefactions were striking and extensive; he found time to be a patron of art and music…

Right through the depression years of 1930-1934, when almost every other merchant was shortening sail in order to ride out the storm, Sidney Myer’s motto was “When in doubt, go forward”. When the depression looked blacker than usual, he would build a new wing to his great Melbourne Emporium. By doing so he gave employment in a key industry and did a lot to offset the current psychology of defeat, and he was right…

Looking back on Sidney Myer, my judgment is that, on balance, he was a great man. He was certainly, as I think of him talking eagerly with his faintly foreign English across his office table, or standing with a fire in his eye and a story in his moving hand before the great cases of jade at his home in Toorak, an unforgettable and a loveable one’.

Those words were written as a foreword to an Ambrose Pratt biography of Myer that never made it into the Menzies Collection, as it was published the same year Sir Robert died. Nevertheless, the Collection does contain another biography, The Gay Provider: The Myer Story, gifted to him by Myer’s widow Merlyn. It also contains Prince of Merchants, a biography of Myer’s nephew who likewise emigrated from Russia and took over the family business, which he took from strength to strength. He was an important advisor to Menzies on commercial matters during World War II, and he oversaw Asmussen’s highly expensive but more than worthwhile artistic endeavours.