Retail Heiress

When she was a girl, Pamela Myer Warrender might have been the model for Eloise, the mischievous little girl who had the run of New York’s Plaza Hotel in Kaye Thompson’s books. In Pamela’s case, however, she had an even more enticing doll’s house, the entire Myer Emporium in Melbourne, where her father, Norman Myer (later Sir Norman) was Chairman and Managing Director from 1938 until his death in 1956.

“I was passionate about the store,” she recalls on the occasion of the publication of her autobiography, Pamela: In Her Own Right (Hardie Grant, $29.95). “I’d follow my father around at night when it was being closed while he did his rounds checking on things. Quite often I used to sneak up to the kitchens where I got the best milkshakes and chicken sandwiches. My father used to say, ‘The people who work in this store are your friends. Smile.’ So I would smile at everybody. And of course that worked sometimes and it didn’t work other times!”

“Miss Myer,” as she was known then, worked during her school holidays in the store, as did her two younger brothers, Rodney and Beresford, and all their Myer cousins. Her first job was in the haberdashery department when she was thirteen. “On Fridays the store opened until 9 pm,” she writes “and my father told Mr Mathews [the manager] that I wasn’t to leave until I had the figures required for the day. To ensure this happened, I arranged a group of girls from school to bring their friends to buy handkerchiefs and hair clips. They couldn’t come all at once and they had to appear nonchalant – there was an art to the operation – but it always worked. As a reward we went off to Hillier’s Milk Bar in Collins Street for a chocolate marshmallow nut sundae.”

The spirited young Pamela would make this sense of enterprise a hallmark of her adult life, which has been both privileged and tumultuous and marked by great adventures, terrible betrayals and wrenching tragedy. Now 83, Pamela remains the tall, striking-looking, optimistic woman of her youth but her life is very much a simple one these days, the mansions, the country houses, the valuable works of art all gone. She lives in a chic but cramped Toorak apartment, the primary carer of ex-husband Simon Warrender, who is confined to a wheelchair and whom she remains devoted to even though they were divorced in 1985. Her autobiography, she says, is not “a Myer book” (she has already written a biography of her father) but a chance to set the record straight, to help her children know the trajectory of her life and understand “the bigger picture” of how her branch of the Myer family, Norman’s descendents, became estranged from the family business and its vast fortune.

Read more of my feature on Pamela Myer Warrender in the September issue of The Australian Women's Weekly.