One tiny country town produced the world’s richest woman more than a century ago. And they barely want to acknowledge it. I told a version of this story on West Bremer Radio.

Coleraine is in the western districts of Victoria, about four hours drive west of Melbourne. The population there is only around eight hundred people and yet the local footy team currently sits equal-first in the South West District Football League.

But that’s not their only claim-to-fame because around one hundred and thirty years ago the little town produced the world’s richest woman.

Chaja Rubinstein – or better known as Helena Rubinstein (pictured above) – founded a global cosmetics empire. She was born in Poland in around 1872. As a young woman, Helena escaped an arranged marriage to an old, rich, distant-cousin, widower, and came to live in Australia with her two uncles Louis and Bernhard in Coleraine.

The uncles had a house and shop in the main street, and it’s still there today. It’s an old wooden place built in 1866. There are original horse hitching hooks on the front posts, but it’s unoccupied, and driving past you wouldn’t know it was anything special.

Helena arrived in town with a few tubs of moisturiser. She later humbly said that her own skin was radiant and well hydrated, but the faces of the local ladies were prematurely destroyed and withered by the Australian sun and wind. She realised there was an opportunity.

She was living in Coleraine which is in the heart of the best wool producing region in the world. That meant she had ready access to a virtually endless supply of lanolin with which she could make more moisturiser. But Helena couldn’t stand the smell of lanolin and so she began experimenting by adding fragrances like lavender, pine bark, and water lilies.

Helena may have disliked the smell of sheep, but she disliked the place of Coleraine even more, and so after five or six years when she had a fight with her uncle, she headed north to Queensland.

Her history is a little sketchy, but it appears that she worked as a governess for Captain Charles Pyne who was the aide-de-camp to the governor of Queensland, Lord Lamington. It was under his watch that the lamington was invented. And it’s quite possible that Helena travelled to towns beyond Brisbane, including Ipswich and Toowoomba, with a number of vice-regal visits there during her tenure.

Helena then moved to Melbourne where she opened her first store and ultimately became the richest woman in the world.

Now here’s a strange twist in the story – because of Helena’s dislike of the town of Coleraine, in the charter of her Helena Rubinstein company, it was reportedly decreed that no store in Coleraine could ever stock her products, and no store ever has.

In fact, this week I checked with the owner of the local pharmacy and his shop definitely does not stock Rubinstein products at all.

Helena Rubinstein died almost sixty years ago. Even with the passage of time, I suspect that the ill feelings of Helena towards her original Australian hometown are mutual.

Billionaires do sometimes surprise, such as Kerry Packer’s connection to Ipswich (his mother’s Bullmore family is from there). But who would have guessed that someone like Helena Rubinstein came from a tiny town like Coleraine, and if not for the smell of sheep then her world-wide empire may never have existed.

CLICK HERE TO LISTEN TO A VERSION OF THIS STORY TOLD LIVE ON RADIO.

Photo credits:
Helena Rubinstein – beautymarket es 2012.
Helena Rubinstein house, Coleraine, Victoria, 2023 – Harold Peacock.
Captain Pyne, Brisbane, May 1896 – State Library of Queensland.
Helena Rubinstein advertisement – Queensland Times, Ipswich, 14th October 1946, page 2.