Australian philanthropy has lost a champion with the death of Neil Balnaves, one of the nation's leading arts, science and education philanthropists, in a boating accident near Tahiti. He was 77.
The fatal accident is believed to have occurred while Mr Balnaves was on luxury ship The World holidaying with his wife Diane. A statement from the family confirmed the passing of Mr Balnaves, and sent "heartfelt thanks for people's kind words and wishes".
Hundreds of tributes have flowed from recipients of his philanthropic gifts, with Mr Balnaves being described as "one of the good guys" and "a bloody generous benefactor" who gave away millions.
A former successful TV and film entrepreneur, he ploughed his wealth into the Balnaves Foundation, which he founded in 2006 to support the arts, education, and both medical and social justice research across Australia.
In 2010, Mr Balnaves was appointed an Officer of the Order of Australia (AO) for his services to business and philanthropy.
In a strange twist of fate, it was an earlier boating accident, in 2002, that spurred his career as a private philanthropist.
"I ended up having a pretty shocking accident in my late 50s," he told ABC RN's Michael Cathcart in 2013. "It was a boating accident that really flattened me and I took a year to recover."
Still in constant pain and unable to travel, he sold his TV production business and amassed a fortune: "What was I going to do with it? There was that quite weird stage where you think a bigger boat would be nice, or a plane would be lovely, or a bigger house.
"[But] that was pretty false, and then that brought into existence the Foundation. I really came to the conclusion ... that it was good to give something back to the country that have been good to me."
His charity — which he ran with his wife Diane and children Hamish and Victoria — has since dispersed $3 million annually in grants, to a total of more than $40 million over its 15-year history.
Mr Balnaves became a prominent and generous backer of the arts in Australia, distributing funding to a wide range of recipients including Sydney Dance Company, Adelaide Festival, Bangarra Dance Theatre, Sydney's Ensemble Theatre, the National Gallery of Australia and TarraWarra Museum of Art.
The Foundation also supports the Biennale of Sydney and an Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander fellowship at Sydney's Belvoir.
Creative Partnerships Australia CEO Fiona Menzies says arts philanthropy was a personal passion and major focus for Mr Balnaves.
"He was committed, effective and wanted to really understand the organisations he was involved with. He provided long-term stability, looking at what was needed for an organisation to achieve its goals."
NGA director Nick Mitzevich told the Sydney Morning Herald: "The beauty of his philanthropy was to leverage and do more with the support he gave to make it bigger and better. He was never a passive philanthropist."
The Balnaves Contemporary Series has facilitated major annual commissions of contemporary artists by the NGA since 2018.
The Art Gallery of New South Wales also issued a statement saying Mr Balnaves was "a significant benefactor of the Art Gallery and a generous supporter across many cultural spheres".
"At a time when it was difficult to secure sponsorship for contemporary art exhibitions, Neil and Diane through the Foundation supported a series of five sculpture exhibitions over five years beginning in 2003."
The gallery noted the Balnaves Foundation Australian Sculpture Archive was established in 2010 "to acquire the archives of major Australian sculptors and to extend research in three-dimensional practice".
Mr Balnaves's love of public sculpture also led to several years of support for Sculpture by the Sea at Bondi, and major funding for Australia's presentations at the Venice Biennale, in a partnership with the Australia Council.
Describing his own childhood in Adelaide, in which art was "a distant concept", he told ABC that he readily agreed to fund the Art Gallery of South Australia's START program because it gave hundreds of parents and children access each week to gallery events.
He said it was essential to him that the Foundation's activity had "an emphasis on Indigenous Australia, young people and the disadvantaged, with the aim to create a better Australia".
It led to a wide portfolio of funding, from the Indigenous Law Centre based at the University of New South Wales, to medical research and programs at Sydney's St Vincent's Hospital and the Black Dog Institute.
Long-term partnerships have sustained smaller bodies like the Story Factory, a not-for-profit writing centre for young people based in Sydney's Redfern and Parramatta.
In September last year, the Balnaves Foundation pledged over half a million dollars to NIDA's First Nations Program, providing scholarships for new students to travel to and study at NIDA, and creating the institution's first Indigenous Elder in Residence position.
A former film and TV executive, Balnaves ran Southern Star Group (later Endemol Shine Australia) and was a former chair of the Ardent Leisure Group. He was proud to have been involved in bringing many popular shows to Australian screens, including Water Rats, Blue Heelers, Big Brother, The Secret Life of Us and Bananas in Pyjamas.
"We rode that lucky wave for 10-15 years doing long series of Blue Heelers and Water Rats," he said in the 2013 interview.
"Neil had imagination and entrepreneurial flair in the film and TV industry, as well as being a good manager," says former ABC TV producer Helen Grasswill, who worked with him in the 70s.
"He was always very affable and it stood him in good stead in the industry.
"He said once that he didn't want his children to grow up with wrong ideas about money, so he ploughed his money into the Foundation and his children worked with him," she says.
Mr Balnaves told ABC that he strongly believed that private philanthropists should be proud of making a difference in a world where governments and big corporations were cutting back.
He urged them to be more public about their giving, "although I copped flack for spruiking my philanthropy".
"We're talking about the soul of the country…and we've got to keep that [the arts] growing.
"I still wonder, at the end of the day, why we pay our taxes on an ever increasing scale, whilst politicians' salaries go up, [but] the funding to the arts goes backwards," he said. "It's sad."
