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On Monday afternoon in November 2003 Frank Lowy, one of Australia's richest men was alone in his office enjoying the glow of having celebrated the bar mitzvah of his grandson Josh over the weekend. The festivities had ended with a party in a marquee at Farm Cove on Sydney Harbour and the Lowy men had danced, ties loosened, late into the night.
But then his youngest son, Steven walked into his office. "Dad, the results are bad," he said. "I may be losing my vision. I could be legally blind in five years, maybe 10."
Steven had been diagnosed with macular telangiectasia-mactel – a rare eye disorder, with no known cause or cure. He was 41 and the linchpin in the Australian operations of the shopping centre empire Lowy had created, Westfield.
With no known cause or cure, Frank Lowy turned his attention to setting up the Lowy Medical Research Institute and finding a cure. With initial funding of $5 million, Lowy gathered experts from around the world in a virtual research institute to solve the problem.
As author Jill Margo records in her new book A Second Life, it was to be one of several philanthropic projects that have become the hallmark of Lowy's later life.
Margo had already written a biography of one of Australia's richest men 15 years ago. At 70, she, like most in the business world, was expecting Frank Lowy to retire.
Instead, the indefatigable Lowy went on to have what Margo terms his "second life" .
"What happened in the 15 years is a period of late creativity, a new type of creativity," she says. "It's not commercially driven."
Margo's book spans three areas where Lowy has devoted his formidable business and entrepreneurial skills to what are essentially philanthropic projects.
"Lowy, is a passionate Australian. He believes that Australia should have a louder voice on the international stage," she says. A big reader of newspapers, Lowy was disconcerted as he travelled the world to find Australia only rated a mention if there was a shark attack or a cricket or swimming victory. Its position as a mid-sized power went unrecognised.
"To this end he set up the Lowy Institute," she says. It is now Australia's foremost foreign affairs policy think tank.
His second endeavour was rejuvenation of football (the round ball sort) in Australia.
"It takes him back to his link with his father, who engendered in him a passion for the game. Frank lost him when he was very young, so its been a very emotional endeavour for him," says Margo.
But while put the game back on the map in Australia and helped steer a successful Asian Games this year, the bid for the 2022 FIFA World Cup proved a major misstep and caused him to undertake a personal mea culpa.
"My normal practice over the last 50 years is that I plan often in great detail. I surround myself with high level people close to me and expert advisers who are brought in. They become my team and I encourage openness and advice," Lowy says in the book.
"Well in this case I didn't do that. I didn't follow my own procedures and my fault is that I thought I could do it without oversight," he admits.
The emotional cost to Lowy was high and he took weeks to recover from the physical and emotional exhaustion of the failure.
The third project has been the Lowy Medical Research Institute. In June 2012, doctors implanted a tiny device into Steven Lowy's good eye, which has slowed the degeneration. The LMRI has now been established in a permanent home near the Scripps Institute at La Jolla, California, and is working on retinal disease associated with diabetes.
- Frank Lowy: A Second Life by Jill Margo is published by Harper Collins on Monday.
