PYRAMID COLLAPSE
HOW IT HAPPENED: 30 YEARS ON
IT took 30 years to build Geelong’s pyramid, and only a few months for the building society to collapse to the ground.
After it fell there was nothing left.
Less than nothing. Administrators, liquidators, accountants and lawyers picked over the wreckage for 15 years, and, in the end, the poor saps who had their life savings buried in the pyramid only received a fraction of it back.
Today marks 30 years since the Pyramid Building Society — and its stablemates the Geelong and Countrywide building societies — were shut down.
It was a big news story across Victoria and Australia, and a body blow for the Geelong region.
The Pyramid group’s asset value at the time was pushing towards $3 billion. It had 200,000 investors, 54 branches and more than 700 staff.
But the numbers only tell a small part of the story.
The human cost will never be measured.
How do you put a price on heartache, on broken dreams or marriages, or on lives lost to suicide?
In researching for this week’s feature series on the Pyramid anniversary — and its accompanying three-part podcast series — the Geelong Advertiser was trusted with a box of dusty archives from the Pyramid collapse.
Within it, there was a collection of letters from distraught investors in the
Pyramid group.
The letters were written in the immediate weeks after Pyramid’s doors closed, when deposits were frozen, loans were being called in, and uncertainty and anger were raw.
They speak to the anxiety and helplessness many felt.
One woman apologises for her belated contribution to the Pyramid Fighting Fund.
“I am sorry that I am late sending the money and information but as a direct result of the Pyramid crash my husband took his own life and I am having a very hard time coming to terms with that,” she writes.
Another woman’s tragic circumstance is revealed through GP notes and testimonials.
It becomes apparent that within little more than a month of the building society’s closure she has suffered domestic violence at the hands of a husband who then fled overseas.
He left her stranded in Australia, penniless with mounting debts and pregnant with twins.
“Maybe I can still survive … but if it goes on like this nobody can,” she says.
“People with savings in Pyramid are losing their heads I am sure. Desperate people do desperate things.”
At the time the investors did not know if they would see a cent of money they had invested in the building societies.
In the end, they did get money back, but not all of it.
The cheques came at a trickle over the following years, eventually accounting for between 50 and 70 per cent of what was put in.
The last payments did not arrive in the mail until 2005.
It was a new millennium and 15 years after the door had closed.