Harry Triguboff — businessman with roots in the Russian Empire
Harry Oskar Triguboff was born in Dalian in March 1933, in the Kwantung Leased Territory on the Chinese coast, to Moshe and Frida Triguboff. His father had left the Russian Empire in 1916 to get away from antisemitism, and had made his way east rather than west, into the Russian-Jewish community that had formed along the Chinese Eastern Railway at Harbin and spread down to Dalian and Tianjin. It was one of the largest Russian communities outside Russia, and for a generation it functioned as a country of its own: Russian schools, Russian newspapers, Russian synagogues, in cities that were legally Chinese and administratively Japanese or European by turns.
The family grew up inside the Jewish community of Tianjin, in the British and American concessions, where his father ran a trading business in wool, silk and leather. It did well enough through the Second Sino-Japanese War that the family acquired four more stores, twenty apartments and a summer house at Beidaihe. After the war his father was accused of wartime collaboration and acquitted by China's Supreme Court.
The community had no future after 1945, and the family began looking for somewhere to go. Canada and the United States refused them. Australia granted landing permission in 1946, and Triguboff arrived in Sydney in 1948, aged fifteen. He was sent to Scots College, then to England for a textiles degree at Leeds, and worked in the textile trade in Israel and South Africa before settling in Australia for good. He became a citizen in 1961.
He bought his first piece of development land at Roseville and learned construction by doing it himself. His second project, eight units at Smith Street in Tempe in 1963, made money. A third, eighteen units on Meriton Street in Gladesville in 1968, gave the company its name. Meriton has since built more than fifty-five thousand apartments and townhouses, more than any other company in Australian history, and at its peak was completing over three thousand units a year in Sydney, Brisbane and on the Gold Coast. The Australian Financial Review Rich List put his net worth at about thirty billion Australian dollars in 2025, making him for several years the wealthiest person in the country.
He was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1990 and an Officer in 1999, and has funded projects at the Shorashim Center for immigrants to Israel through his foundation. He is known in Sydney as High-Rise Harry, a name given to him by opponents of the density he built and adopted by him without complaint.
He grew up speaking Russian in China and arrived in Australia with no English at all.
"Russian Empire to Manchuria, 1916; China to Australia, 1948"
Migration storyTracing the roots — Dalian (China)
He was raised in Russian in the concessions of Tianjin and arrived in Sydney in 1948 without English. The family had been refused by Canada and the United States before Australia admitted them in 1946.
Born in Dalian in 1933 to Moshe and Frida Triguboff, Russian Jews who had left the Russian Empire for Manchuria; his father emigrated in 1916. The family belonged to the Russian-Jewish community of Harbin, Dalian and Tianjin, formed along the Chinese Eastern Railway.
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Dalian (China). At the time, this region lay within the Russian Empire, which spanned from Poland to the Pacific.