The real housewives of Australia: How ‘Red' Bond led the way

The Age

24-07-2025

On July 2, the news rippled eastwards across the Nullarbor. An extraordinary chapter in social history had ended. Eileen 'Red' Bond, the first wife of Alan Bond, had died in Perth from a stroke at the age of 87.
Long before today's mawkish Real Housewives shows, Australia claimed a unique species of social fauna: the Socialitis Animalis Australis, a generation of larger-than-life, socially connected, cashed-up and indomitable women. Primrose 'Pitty Pat' Dunlop, Lady Mary Fairfax, Pixie Skase, Lillian Frank, Diana 'Bubbles' Fisher, Rose Hancock, Lady Sonia McMahon and Susan Renouf became celebrities as they epitomised an era of unmatched excess.
Some of them married wealth and power; others worked, accruing their own. They were the apex predators of the society pages at a time when Australia produced audacious billionaires, such as Alan Bond. He and Eileen built their own university, hotels and even launched a fleet of airships. Despite a deluge of noise complaints, 'Red' was all smiles in 1987 as she launched her blimps over Sydney; powered by two roaring Porsche engines, they were bedecked in advertising for her Swan Premium beer and ciggies.
Privately, she endured the loss of her daughter, Susanne, of coeliac disease in 2000, but carried on despite the ignominy of her husband's billion-dollar bankruptcy, fraud conviction, infidelity (she famously cut up his expensive suits in revenge) and their ultimate divorce.
A devout Catholic and devoted matriarch and philanthropist, she hosted lavish dinner parties as enthusiastically as she once did her infamous sausage sizzles right up to her death.
'[These women] handled things with grace,' says Ann Peacock, daughter of the late Andrew Peacock and his first wife, socialite Susan; a political power couple, the Peacocks were once known as Australia's Kennedys. 'Some scandals were ridiculously overblown … In 1970, Dad offered his resignation [as army minister] after Mum's Sheridan sheets ad furore!' (She had appeared in print ads for the brand.)
A photo of Flemington's 'Holy Trinity', taken at the Melbourne Cup in 2003, perhaps sums them up best. Red looks like a dazzling toadstool in an enormous hat and sunglasses. At left is Lady Sonia McMahon, who died in 2010. In 1971, she caused a sensation at the White House, which she was visiting with her husband, the then-PM, Billy McMahon, by wearing a cream dress by Victoria Cascajo slit to her thighs. Peacock's mother, Susan Renouf, is on the right. She died in 2016 after living a life of headlines, including the tumultuous end, in 1988, of her marriage to billionaire Sir Frank Renouf. She refused – in front of a salivating media pack – to leave their ironically named Point Piper mansion, Paradis Sur Mer.