Thomas Kane

Thomas Kane is an international award-winning Fine Art Photographer, Melbourne businessman and artist, impact investor, human rights activist and philanthropist, a modern example of a Renaissance man. Migrating from Ireland, at 21 he began his Australian working life, as a labourer, in the harsh world of mining in Western Australia and Bougainville. There he was confronted by two workplace deaths, and in the case of Bougainville, an environmental apocalypse.
From mining he was headhunted back to Australia to the Japanese car company, Nissan. At thirty years of age, he was the youngest senior executive. Driving change to a more caring workplace to ensure the health and safety of the workforce, he honed his skills implementing return to work and alcohol and drug dependency programmes and reduced workers compensation costs by millions of dollars. Taking over responsibility for industrial relations, he helped introduce modern employment conditions that fostered career growth for all employees.
Abandoning the security of corporate employment, he established an advisory business that became highly valued by governments and industry. 
Sweeping changes to the car industry saw Thomas acting for all the major car manufacturing firms as they adapted to the Australian market while negotiating the ever-swirling chasms and byways of sometimes hard-line unionists. Gaining a deep knowledge of the three-dimensional chess games of the construction industry, he parlayed this knowledge when asked to advise on some of the nation’s most immense projects, such as billion-dollar power stations and offshore oil platforms, as well as the multi-billion dollar Air Warfare Destroyer Project and the Snowy Hydro 2.0 Project for the Federal Government.
His commercial and governance expertise led to his appointment to a hospital board and then to boards of a major superannuation fund, a property development business and companies in the tourism, hospitality, FMCG and construction sectors. His expertise was recognised by being appointed as an expert witness in major construction litigation.
Having made such a success in these fields he was able to devote ten per cent of his time to pro bono work for charitable organisations subsequently serving on not-for-profit boards, including Plan International and the Human Rights Arts and Film Festival. He is a Vice President on the board of Liberty Victoria, Australia’s oldest human rights body.
A burglary at the family home meant the loss of his SLR camera. He replaced it with a digital one, and was delighted to benefit from the immediacy of results that allowed him to develop his unique style and skills. To him, photography is an art form that is deeply personal and yet universal. The first challenge is to find the right subject and then spend days or weeks turning a visualised image into black and white reality using sophisticated software. Pleasingly, the result has been national and international recognition, with his work taking out important prizes abroad, as well as selling keenly at home. In describing his art, he said, `It is hard to express the pleasure in finding something that “speaks” to me, meaning that I visualise an image and take a photograph that will lead to the creation of that image in my studio’.
Thomas’s life is now a happy amalgam of family, human rights advocacy, business and art, while maintaining close friendships from his working days, lunching regularly with old friends, and enjoying friendships forged over many years across the negotiating tables of commerce and labour relations. This, he says, provides a happy addition to his life with businesswoman Kathy Townsend, two stepdaughters and their families.
Category:Australian people
Category:Businesspeople
Category:Artists