Eileen Bond obituary: Australia will be a little less colourful without ‘Red’ in it

She was Perth’s “It” girl before the town knew what an “It” girl was.

Loud, rich, brash and conspicuously ginger, Eileen Bond will forever be synonymous with Perth’s coming of age in the 1980s.

When Red, as she was known, passed away on Wednesday night an effervescent chapter in Australian history came to a quiet close.

Everything in those pages was big.

Big homes by the river. Big lunches. Big hair. Big money. Big deals. Big risks.

And big collapses.

Not since the gold rushes a century prior had WA seen such excess.

Led by Eileen’s pugnacious husband Alan, a new generation of four-on-the-floor entrepreneurs revitalised what had become a staid, moribund city.

Flashy risk-takers were challenging the conservative agrarian money that had run the town for generations.

The insurrection was driven by the likes Brian Burke, Peter Briggs, Robert Holmes a Court, Laurie Connell, Dallas Dempster, Alastair Norwood, John Roberts and Tony Oates.

But Red was the public face of the revolution.

She was an unlikely cultural figurehead.

Eileen Hughes was born into a prominent and staunchly Catholic Fremantle family.

It would have been a scandal of the highest order in 1955 when she fell pregnant to a young signwriter.

As the care-free bodgies and widgies at Scarborough Beach’s Snakepit enjoyed Australia’s post-war heyday, Alan and Eileen were worried prospective parents planning a shotgun wedding.

They married aged 17. The matrimonial home was a shed in Melville.

A year later Alan was charged with burglary.

The teenage Eileen probably thought that, and having four children, would be the biggest tests of their marriage.

Little did she know.

Audacious property deals in the 1970s made the Bonds enough of a fortune to enjoy the ultimate rich man’s indulgence — yachting.

In typically preposterous style, Alan had no interest in provincial competitions like the Sydney to Hobart; he wanted the America’s Cup.

As Alan’s hopes sailed astride a winged keel in the Atlantic Ocean, his wife was sailing through the streets of New York on her scooter, dazzling the local press with her brazen love of life.

Unburdened by any cultural cringe, Eileen became a cult figure. Her unvarnished exuberance was all the more infectious when cast against the forlorn figure of Dennis Connor aboard the 12m deck of the Stars and Stripes.

The America’s Cup win in 1983 pushed her social profile into the stratosphere.

The girl from Freo was rubbing shoulders with US president Ronald Reagan, kissing the hand of Pope John Paul II and curtsying in front of Princess Anne.

The Bonds were writ large on the Australia cultural landscape and Eileen was the Wild West’s undisputed queen, as the late journalist Tony Barrass once reminisced.

“Every second beer we drank came from Bond’s Swan Brewery, the cars we drove boasted number plates that declared WA ‘Home of the America’s Cup’, a huge Bond sign dominated the Perth skyline atop the tallest building while Big Red dominated social pages that covered party after party.”

The Cup defence in Fremantle in 1987 was surely the zenith of Eileen’s influence.

With a decade of wealth under her belt and a catalogue of magazine covers that rivalled a supermodel’s, she was confident in her own skin in front of any camera and in any social situation.

She was as comfortable at a flashy party in Cottesloe with the slim-hipped Parisian crew of French Kiss as she was holding court with the Aga Khan, who had bankrolled the Italian yachting syndicate and had airfreighted in his own crystal chandeliers to liven up a shabby Fremantle building that was the venue for one of his many Cup soirees.

In February 1987 Kookaburra III failed to tame the Fremantle Doctor and the America’s Cup went back to the New York Yacht Club. Eight months later that city’s stock exchange crashed and Black Monday started exposing the House of Bond as a house of cards.

A marriage which had defied the enduring presence of Bond’s unnervingly close friend Di Bliss could not survive financial calamity.

“There were a lot of ups and a lot of downs,” Eileen would later say. “But I think the ups outweigh the downs.”

They divorced in 1992.

Alan went to jail. It was probably safer in there than on the streets, which were lined with investors who did their dough when Bond Corp went under.

Red retained a special place in the hearts of Australians.

Eileen went quiet. Perhaps she was worried that people might visit the sins of the husband upon the wife.

She need not have fretted; her humility and humour meant her star was largely undimmed.

We celebrated her charity wins and quietly felt for her when Alan married Bliss in 1995.

We mourned with her when her daughter Susanne died suddenly in 2000.

We laughed at her eccentricities (“You can only paint a house pink if you live by yourself because if you lived with a man he wouldn’t accept it,” she said a few years ago during a newspaper interview).

Her friends rallied around her when Channel Nine announced plans for a mini-series called House of Bond. Eileen said she believed actor Adrienne Pickering was “a good-looking choice” to play her but that didn’t stop her engaging defamation lawyers to fire a warning shot at the network her husband famously bought from Kerry Packer for $1 billion.

“They say ‘good on ya Red’,” was her answer in an interview last decade in which was asked how people reacted to her in the street.

“I like it,” she added. “I think it’s really nice.”

Red retained a special place in the hearts of Australians.

And her husband’s.

When Alan died in 2015, son John described the pair as “great soul mates who never broke their connection”.

“We’ve been in constant contact, but it’s a very sad time,” Eileen told reporters at the funeral.

John, his brother Craig and sister Jody Fewster on Thursday said they were humbled by the messages of support.

“She suffered a serious stroke on Sunday morning and, heartbreakingly, was unable to recover,” the siblings said in a statement. “We are devastated as she was the matriarch, the glue, of the Bond family.

“We have so many wonderful, funny and caring memories to treasure and we have been overwhelmed by the messages of support and the frankly hilarious stories that have surfaced over many decades — a testament to the vibrant and unforgettable woman she was.

“Red only knew one speed — flat out — and she brought everyone along for the ride. She touched countless lives with her generosity, humour, and unmistakable energy. She brought joy wherever she went.

“She will be deeply missed by her immediate family and by the many others she welcomed into her world as though they were her own.”

Family was Eileen’s life. Her home of Peppermint Grove’s Leake Street was a fortress of love for children and grandchildren.

The messages of condolence which were trickling into the media on Thursday were invariably sprinkled with the words “humour”, “smile” and “generous”.

“The room was always brighter once Red had entered, and her cheeky sense of humour entertained many a crowd,” was how the vice chancellor of Bond University, an institution which Eileen and Alan founded in 1989, described her life.

Australia will be a little less colourful without Red in it.