THE POWER OF
ONE
Australian-born Peter Hall,
founder of Australia’s largest,
dedicated ethical investment
management fund Hunter
Hall, is a man on a mission.
His personal and business
endeavours are committed to
making the world a better place
through the financial support
they provide to conservation
and charitable causes.
WRITER
SHELLEY GARE PHOTOGRAPHY MAX DOYLE
M
ulti-millionaire investor and philanthropist Peter Hall might be hardpressed to say which of the following
possessions he prizes more.
His collection of 13 exquisite 16th century
portraits which includes paintings of Catherine of Aragon, Thomas Cromwell and
Shakespeare’s first boss, Henry Carey, Lord
Chamberlain to Elizabeth 1.
Or a pair of his ripped underIN EARLY 2010, pants, a casualty of the day that
Hall met Rosa, the four-yearHALL WAS MADE old wild rhino, in the Bukit BarA MEMBER OF isan Selatan National Park on the
THE ORDER southern tip of Sumatra.
Hall was awed to meet the
OF AUSTRALIA Sumatran rhino, a species so close
FOR BOTH HIS to extinction there are less than
200 left. Hall had gone into the
PHILANTHROPY remote jungle park with members
AND SERVICES TO of the Asian Rhino Project, a group
THE FINANCIAL dedicated to preserving the endangered – and elusive – animals.
MANAGEMENT
“They are gentle creatures, and
INDUSTRY. quite small,” says the 51-year-old
Hall, raising his hand to about a
metre off the ground. “We were sitting on a
hill, near some bamboo, and Rosa got within
touching distance. She was using her horn as
a sort of probe to find out what was going on
and then she put her nose up to me… I was
wearing shorts.”
The tattered underpants remain a cherished memento and Rosa now lives safely at
the Sumatran Rhino Sanctuary which Hall
helps support.
As for the Tudor period portraits, Hall
values them as historical artefacts. “This is
when people were developing the right to be
individuals and to be individually creative,”
he says of the English renaissance, as he shows
the paintings on the computer screen in his
Sydney office.
WE HAVE TO RESIST
THE TEMPTATION TO
BE SELF-ABSORBED,
TO BE DEFEATIST, SO
THE NOBLE PATH IS
TO BE OPTIMISTIC,
JOYFUL, GENEROUS.
EVERYONE HAS TO
FEEL EMPOWERED
TO MAKE THEIR
CONTRIBUTION.
Hall, tall, genial and
the owner of a loud cracking laugh that bursts
out of him regularly,
turns out to be something of a renaissance man himself – one for
the 21st century.
First, he is a very successful funds manager who, until now, has based himself in
London, as chair of Hunter Hall, the company
he founded in 1993 and the largest dedicated
ethical investment manager in Australia.
Making money, Hall says cheerfully, feels
fantastic. His firm however will not invest in
anything which harms people, is cruel to animals or destroys the environment.
He has written a passionate 15,000 word
essay about biodiversity which he hopes one day
to turn into a book. He is also responsible for
the donation of millions of dollars, either from
Hunter Hall – which, by charter, gives away five
per cent of its pre-tax profits to a set of conservation and charitable causes chosen by shareholders – or from his personal wealth where he
gives away up to a quarter of his income.
Meanwhile, he has set up a restaurant in
central London, and two cafés – because he
wanted to be able to get a decent flat white
coffee; backed two British magazines of the
moment, Prospect and Tyler Brûlé’s Monocle;
almost stood as a Conservative candidate for
the British seat of Colchester; and recently, to
his delight, helped compose a song with Brazilian Bossa nova legend Marcos Valle.
“Money,” says Hall “means that life can be
sweeter than it would otherwise be, and free
of one set of worries. But with money comes
responsibility … particularly when you’re in a
job like this and you’re steward of one-and-ahalf billion dollars of other people’s money.”
The link between his many activities, from
ethical investing to helping friends, colleagues
and even strangers, he says, is simple, “Making
the world a better place!”
“I’m a great believer in the power of the
individual person to do really important things.
The power of one.”
He describes a world that is now seriously out
of whack as humans and our economic activities
deplete the planet and threaten flora and fauna,
oceans and forests, jungles and lakes. “The
world is limited. But we act as if it isn’t,” he says
with fervour. The business world, he insists, has
to rethink its mantra of growth, growth, growth.
“We’re in the last great boom. But look at tuna;
90 per cent of them have disappeared.”
Hall started following the stockmarket when
he was 10, and living with his parents in the
stately suburb of Rockcliffe in Ottawa, Canada.
His father, a journalist turned press and cultural
attaché, was on yet another posting to an overseas mission with the Australian government. By
then, the family had lived in Thailand, Pakistan
and Australia and they would soon move on to
France and Britain – where Hall went to the progressive Bedales boarding school in Hampshire
along with Sir Laurence Olivier’s son, Richard –
before heading back home to Canberra.
In Ottawa though, the young Hall was
getting used to the idea of money and what it
could do. His mornings started at 4 am when
he and his brother, Andy, a year younger,
would get up to plough through the snow in
minus 30 degree Fahrenheit weather to deliv-
Swipe to
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other
image
er newspapers. “I thought it was great. I had
money in my pocket. I was diligently following an activity,” says Hall.
One day, at a school book sale, he discovered a second-hand guide to investing in the
stockmarket. He devoured it and still has the
book in his London office.
Soon he identified his first stock to watch:
a company, Bombardier, then making snowmobiles. Now, it’s a global transport equipment manufacturer.
The stock-pick proved an early omen.
Today, sitting at a large board table in his
Sydney offices in the BNP Paribas Building, at
the luxury boutique end of Castlereagh Street,
Hall displays a chart which shows the performance of Hunter Hall’s Value Growth Trust.
If a client had invested $10,000 when it started
in May 1994, it would have been worth $110,000
in 2007 – pre-global financial crisis – and
now is still worth almost $90,000. On the All
Ords, the same sum would have grown to
just over $40,000.
A few years ago, Hall himself was worth
over $200 million, on paper and before taxes
(although he says now, a little ruefully, that the
GFC has meant a drop, just as volatile world
markets have dented the investment market
including Hunter Hall).
“I’ve been interested in business since I was
10 years old,” he says now of his early start. “I
understood that my parents had a luxurious lifestyle [because of his father’s job] and I wanted to
get the money to be able to have that lifestyle.”
There was a series of setbacks along the
way though.
He remains disappointed he didn’t go to
Oxbridge – the result of unfortunate misunderstandings early on over his scholastic abilities –
and it left him determined to prove to certain
people he wasn’t a mediocrity.
“It puts steel in your spine,” he says now
with cool relish.
A first job in journalism in Canberra left
him dissatisfied and he dropped out of an Arts
degree at Sydney University before finishing it
part-time some years later. At 27, having fallen
on his feet in the financial investment world of
Sydney, with a talent for timing and picking
winning stocks for clients, he put all his own
money – a million dollars – into one investment
in a rush to get richer. He lost the lot. Then he
lost his hair because of the stress.
An early mentor, stockbroker David Constable, then a non-executive director of Hancock & Gore, thinks the lesson for Hall was
very cheap. The firm took him on as an investment manager and later, when Hall left to set
up Hunter Hall – in Double Bay in an office so
understated it had a desk but no photocopier –
Hancock & Gore handed over a million dollars
for him to invest.
Constable, now a premium wine producer
in the Hunter Valley who also runs two mutual
funds, explains, “It was a fair gamble. He’d done
very well for us in the previous three years; he
had been looking after three or four million and
got amazing results, about 20 to 30 per cent per
annum. That’s why we were happy to help
him. It was self-interest as well.”
In early 2010, Hall was made a member
of the Order of Australia for both his
philanthropy and services to the financial
management industry.
He cites Constable, who supports the arts and
is a devotee of chamber music, as a role model,
along with his own “decent and honorable”
parents. In turn, Constable says of Hall, “He is
a remarkable person … one in thousands.”
In an appendix to his essay which he
self-published in 2007 and called Lumberjacks
in Eden, Hall set out two lists of activities,
rated on environmental impact. The “bad” list
features: “Driving around in cars … flying,
skydiving … eating tuna, caviar and whale …”
On the “good” list he notes: “Gardening,
making and eating nice food and [drinking
nice] wine … talking, flirting, having sex (with
contraceptives) … Travelling by camel …”
“Peter is a real card!” says Kerry
Crosbie who founded the Asian Rhino Project in 2003. Hall came on board a year later
with a $10,000 donation after learning about the
animals’ plight through a conservationist friend.
He and Hunter Hall have since given almost
$2 million, says Crosbie, about 90 per cent of
the organisation’s funding.
“He’s very active among all his busy commitments and he’s a doer, not backward in
coming forward with ideas and a lot of them
are brilliant. He makes a real difference
in person, not just in money, and he’s not
afraid to come out with us in the jungle.”
Hall once had the team traipsing through
crocodile territory, says Crosbie, because
he wanted to glimpse where the even rarer
Javan rhino lives in the rainforests of Ujung
Kulon National Park.
For Hall, the endangered rhinos, like
whales, are an emblematic species. “If we
can’t save these species, well, this is the test …
Imagine if there were only 200 human beings
left, or only 40 human beings left.”
Much of his philanthropy revolves around
animals. As a child, he once watched a herd
of animals thronging the street outside the
consular compound in Karachi. He was
enchanted until a bystander told him they were
going to be sacrificed. He remembers with
pain, “The disparity between the happy,
joyful gait of the animals and the fact they
were being led to their deaths was quite
shocking to me.”
Plugged into the financial markets, Hall
works 10 am to 10 pm but three years ago, his life
changed when he and his then partner and now
much loved friend, Laura, had their son James.
It’s because of James that Hall has now
decided to spend most of the year with him
in Australia, with trips to London rather than
the other way around.
He also wants to be back in Sydney head
office. “I want to make sure we’re firing
and performing because this is the platform
that allows me to do all these other things,”
he says.
Without sounding priggish – not with that
laugh – he sets out the purpose of life: “We have
to resist the temptation to be self-absorbed,
to be defeatist, so the noble path is to be
optimistic, joyful, generous, but be aware of
this shadow and do our best to try and
overcome it … Everyone has to feel empowered
to make their contribution.”
He laughs loudly again and urges, “Rage,
rage, against the dying of the light.” – AU
Further reading
> Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park