Published: 24 August 2017
Last updated: 4 March 2024
If she’d been born a little later, Ilana Atlas would have been a professional AFL player. Born into an AFL-mad family, with a father who owned a Perth club, she grew up loving the game and wanting to pull on the boots.
Instead, the Sydney-based lawyer is enjoying the rewards of a stellar career that spanned law and banking, taking her to the upper echelons of the corporate world, and has now pivoted to board directorships and philanthropy.
Atlas’s father was born in Tel Aviv in 1927, migrating to Australia with his parents and his two brothers in 1935. His family were strong Zionists who had moved to Israel from Poland after the pogroms of the early 1900s. They then migrated to Australia because a family member contacted them from his home in Perth.
He needed help after losing the sight in one eye after an accident, so the family moved to Perth to join him. Atlas’ mother was born in Perth; her mother had come out from what was then called Palestine for economic reasons.
The whole Atlas family is very active in the Perth Jewish community; her parents were part of a group who started the Jewish school there. “I was also involved in Habonim and I was very involved in university politics, Jewish student politics,” she says.
After graduating with honours, she came to Sydney to work as a solicitor at Mallesons Stephen Jacques (now King and Wood Mallesons). Starting as a mergers and acquisitions lawyer, she quickly became a partner and then managing partner of the Sydney office. After 17 years in legal practice, Atlas jumped at an offer from Westpac Banking Corporation, becoming their Group Executive, People.
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In 2010, she retired from full-time corporate life and was quickly offered a suite of high-level board seats, including ANZ Banking Corporation, Westfield Corporation and Coca-Cola Amatil, where she is currently the chair.
This year, Atlas added care provider JewishCare to that list, saying that the time felt right. “It was important to me to be involved in a Jewish organisation, it’s how I’ve been brought up. I am very consciously Jewish; I affiliate very strongly.
“I was brought up in the Orthodox tradition and went to a Jewish day school, so my Judaism has always been very important to me. Having said that, I would not regard myself as a religious Jew and my husband is not Jewish - but my Jewishness and Jewish values are very important to me.”
The Atlas family raised their children to give back, she says. “I was brought up in that tradition, my family has always been philanthropic and I would say my brothers are as well. It’s always been part of life, whether it be financially but also participating.
“Not just in Jewish causes; it’s very much being part of the community and giving back to the community. And so I think I’ve always been involved in various causes ever since I was very young.”
“It was important to me to be involved in a Jewish organisation.
Her other not-for-profit roles include Bell Shakespeare (from which she has recently retired), the Human Rights Law Centre, the University of Sydney Senate and Adara Partners. This came about after meeting Adara founder Audette Exel AO, a lawyer and banker who founded a group of companies which support projects in Nepal and Uganda.
“I met Audette when we were both on the board of Suncorp and we got on extremely well. [Adara Partners is] a group of people in business who do deals with all the fees going to Adara; I’m on the development board as well. It’s the most inspirational organisation and what Audette has achieved is superhuman.”
Atlas is also on the board of Jawun (formerly Indigenous Enterprise Partnerships), an organisation which makes connections between corporates, government employees and the Indigenous community and sends in secondees to assist.
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“About 2,500 people have been on secondment into a community and that’s a pool of people who wouldn’t otherwise have worked with Indigenous people… It’s a very successful organisation. The secondees go to 12 regions, from inner-city Sydney to isolated communities in the NPY lands outside Alice Springs, and we match the needs of the community with the expertise of the secondees, which so far have come from 40 companies. They provide assistance with developing business plans, HR systems and IR systems.”
Atlas supports business leaders having public opinions on issues like marriage equality. “It’s legitimate, workforces are very touched by those issues. The line between their work lives and their personal lives are increasingly blurred, it’s important for corporations to be supportive.”
The 62-year-old is relishing her portfolio career. “Full-time executive life is quite challenging, it’s 24/7. Even when you are not supposedly working, you actually are working.” There inevitably comes a time when you look for alternatives to that, she explains. Her career mentors have included prominent business figures such as David Gonski, Helen Lynch, Carolyn Hewson and Ann Sherry.
Joining not-for-profit boards has been an eye-opener. “People assume that the not-for-profit organisations have so much to learn from the for-profit sector. From my perspective, it’s actually the opposite. There’s creativity, passion and the ability to do so much with so little. [They have] the ability to exist on the edge because financially they are always challenged, and the successful ones use that to their advantage.”
Atlas agrees that public service is a strong part of the Jewish community. “It’s definitely something that is fundamental; it's not something that I was taught, it’s something that you see…I don’t know if it’s connected to the history or the values, but it’s a fundamental part of the culture. If you have the capacity to, you do.”
Outside of work, she and her husband like to visit Oakridge, their winery in Victoria’s Yarra Valley, and their three grandchildren in Canberra. And of course, she is an avid follower of all AFL games, particularly the AFL Women’s league, which started this year with eight teams.
But is it too late to pull on a pair of boots and run on? She laughs. “I think so.”
Photos: Giselle Haber
This The Jewish Independent article may be republished with this acknowledgement: ‘Reprinted with permission from www.thejewishindependent.com.au ’
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