Through marriage and business connections, the Baillieu name spread everywhere. William married the daughter of businessman Edward Latham, who had financed the purchase of the Baillieu (later) Ozone Hotel in Queenscliff for the Baillieu family to manage. When Latham’s wife died, he married William’s sister, making him at the same time both Baillieu’s father-in-law and brother-in-law. Another brother was Sidney Myer’s father-in-law, establishing a close personal and continuing connection with the Myer family. Sunday Baillieu, the daughter of another brother, married John Reed and nurtured the notable modernist art circle at Heide. Yet another brother, unmarried, left £100,000 in his will in honour of his late brother William, with the stipulation that it be used for educational purposes. The bequest led to the building of the Baillieu Library at the University of Melbourne. The thousands of students who have gone through its doors include William Baillieu’s grand-nephew, the current premier of Victoria.

The list goes on. William Baillieu himself had seven children. The eldest, Clive, who settled in England, became a prominent businessman, government adviser, and the third Australian to be made an hereditary baronet. The Baillieus were also close to the Robinson brothers. Arthur founded the law firm that still bears his name (as Allens Arthur Robinson). Another brother, William, was actively involved with the Collins House group, running its activities in London for many years and being a close confidant of William Baillieu (they were known respectively as ‘W.S.’ and ‘W.L.’). They also became in-laws when one of Baillieu’s sons married Robinson’s daughter.

This close interlocking network allowed William Baillieu to run the Collins House group and his other business interests much like an extended family, with him as the paterfamilias. He could do this through his strong personality and physical presence (he was well over six feet tall), coupled with his remarkable capacity for hard work. Yule gives a good description of this phenomenal work ethic when summarising one year of Baillieu’s life: ‘during 1905 he acquired a dominant interest in the mines of Broken Hill and transformed the Australian base metal industry while carrying out the negotiations to form Carlton & United breweries, masterminding the rapid growth of Australia’s largest rubber company, subdividing large estates in northern Victoria, serving as a member of Parliament, actively managing many smaller enterprises and being mentor and guide for his large family circle.’

The 1890s Depression and the Great Depression span William Baillieu’s career like bookends. At the time of the first, he was a partner in Munro & Baillieu and Melbourne’s most successful property auctioneer. During the peak of the land boom of the 1880s the firm’s commission on land sales was more than £85,000; in 1892 it was only £2357. The house of cards that was the land boom had come crashing down. Speculators had borrowed heavily and invested in property development companies whose shares were now worthless. Business leaders and leading politicians were up to their necks in debt. They were allowed to escape by a government act that enabled them to make special compositions, which their creditors had no real option but to accept. Conflict of interest was an unknown term then, and the story of these effective secret bankruptcies is told in Michael Cannon’s The Land Boomers (1966).

William Baillieu was one who took advantage of the scheme, declaring to a meeting of his creditors that he had debts of £22,400 and was only able to pay six pence in the pound, a total of £560. But these declared debts did not include substantial overdrafts that he, his family, and his business partner James Munro had with the Federal Bank. These came to over £450,000, with William Baillieu having a personal one of £44,000. The Federal Bank itself went under in 1893, paying its creditors nine shillings six pence in the pound.

Yule says that the lack of full records makes it impossible to fully understand Baillieu’s business dealings during the early 1890s, and that this lack of proper documentation is not prima facie evidence of malpractice. But it is likely that Baillieu disguised or hid some of his assets. His daughter recalled that the extended family still lived comfortably at the time. In 1891–92 Baillieu paid more than £3000 for the building of two houses for family members in Broadway, East Camberwell. He also continued to buy property in the early 1890s. Whatever the case, his integrity and standing were certainly sullied by the land boom bust. As Yule says, ‘to this day the echoes of it haunt his reputation’.

By the time of the Great Depression, William Baillieu was entering his seventies. He was a wealthy man, having rebuilt his fortune in the second half of the 1890s and extended it greatly in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The Baillieu families now lived in Toorak rather than Camberwell. But the pressure of years of hard work finally caught up with Baillieu, and he had a complete physical and mental breakdown late in 1930. He kept complaining to his family that his estate had been ‘knocked to smithereens’, despite constant reassurances that all was well and that the Collins House group had more than enough reserves to weather the storm. Though never the same man again, he remained shrewd enough to transfer many of his assets to various family members so that when he died in England in 1936, aged seventy-six, his estate was valued at ‘only’ £60,000.

Peter Yule has an impressive list of historical works to his name. In writing this biography, he states in his Introduction that he began the project knowing little about William Baillieu other than his name and reputation. But as he worked away he grew to admire and respect him, and, by the end, he ‘came to like him enormously as a person’.

Yule has managed to convey this admiration and liking in his readable and thoroughly researched (if a touch long) text. Despite the stigma of the land boom fracas, William Baillieu comes across as a public-spirited and likeable man. Although he built up two fortunes, there is no sense of greed or of making money for money’s sake in his multifarious business dealings. And he had advanced attitudes on the importance of providing good working conditions for his employees. Yule ends the biography with an Epilogue entitled ‘The Big Australian’. It is an apt title for his subject. William Baillieu did much to develop Australia’s mining, smelting, hydroelectricity, brewing, and paper-making industries.

This book, commissioned by the family, was recently launched, appropriately, at the Baillieu Library. During proceedings, another of William Baillieu’s grand-nephews made a widely reported rude gesture to striking nurses who were demonstrating outside the library. Such a gesture would never have been made by his great-uncle. And nor would he, when he was minister for health more than a hundred years ago, have let the nurses’ strike go on for so long. His strategy would have been to get everyone together around the table to talk and come to a compromise suitable to all parties. Politicians and businessmen today could learn from his example.