Edinburgh International Festival: Cultural hope springs from small act of philanthropy

The multi-millionaire Australian businessman Harold Mitchell emerged as a leading individual sponsor of the festival last year when he helped pay for St Petersburg’s Mariinsky opera company to visit Edinburgh. He was speaking at the first International Cultural Summit in Edinburgh.

Mr Mitchell heads Mitchell Communication Group Limited, the largest media agency in Australia, and has supported sporting teams, galleries, and classical music organisations in his home country.

This year he is sponsoring the Mariinsky Ballet’s visit to Edinburgh, with a production of Cinderella.

The two-day summit has drawn culture ministers and leaders from nearly 40 countries to the city. Mr Mitchell was speaking on a day devoted to exploring “cultural diplomacy”.

He recalled that, in 1975, Indonesian forces moved to quash a bid by the former Portuguese colony of East Timor for independence, leading to two decades of conflict in which an estimated 200,000 people died – about a third of its population. In 1999, Australian forces led an international peacekeeping operation in the country and it achieved independence three years later.

In 2000, Mr Mitchell said, he met Xanana Gusma, a poet and long-time political prisoner who became East Timor’s first president. When Mr Mitchell asked the president how he could help rebuild the country, “incredibly, he asked me to help him procure 300 of what I call tin whistles. You probably know them as recorders.”

Later he met a young Timorese pianist, Antonio Soares, which inspired another gift: the country’s first piano. The gifts, along with music books, gave hope to people living in one of the world’s poorest countries, with only a 50 per cent literacy rate.

Mr Mitchell said: “Looking back, I think it was one of greatest privileges of my life.”