T & G Mutual Life Assurance Society

The T & G Mutual Life Assurance Society was an insurance company that operated in Australia and New Zealand. The 'T & G' stood for 'Temperance & General'. The company was founded in Victoria in 1876, emerging from the Assurance branch of the Independent Order of Rechabites with 132 policies. The branch was severed from the I.O.R Rechabite Lodge after six years of operations.

By 1920, the Society had 385,000 policies and by 1930 had grown to become the largest ordinary-industrial life society operating solely within Australia and New Zealand, with 737,000 policies, with an income of nearly 4 million pounds, and assets totaling over 16 million pounds. By 1952 the income had increased to 16 million pounds and funds to 86 million pounds.

In 1983 the T&G Society amalgamated with the National Mutual Life Association. which was itself purchased by AXA, a French multinational, in the 1990s.

The T & G Mutual Life Assurance Society was notable amongst Australian insurance companies for constructing a series of landmark buildings in cities and town across Australia and New Zealand in the interwar period.

In the boom years of the 1880s they built prominent headquarters in Melbourne and Sydney, the Melbourne one on Swanston Street on the north side of the town hall, and another even larger one in Sydney on Elizabeth Street on the corner of Park Street, overlooking Hyde Park. In 1908 they purchased the large, ornate Edwardian Moirs Chambers in St Georges Terrace in Perth for their branch there, and had a presence in other cities and towns.

Beginning in the mid 1920s, the company took the unusual step of expanding its reach and visibility with a building program that was the most extensive of any company in Australasia. T&G buildings appeared in all the capital cities and numerous regional centres across Australia and New Zealand, and those from the late 1920s all featured a landmark tower with a distinctive stepped top and the company's name in a kind of corporate advertising. All but one were designed by the Melbourne firm of A & K Henderson, those of the 1920s designed in a matching classical style, which evolved into a vertical Art Deco style in the 1930s. They were often the most prominent buildings in the smaller towns, and the Melbourne and Sydney T&G buildings were amongst the largest, most prominent, interwar commercial buildings in both cities.

In the postwar years, the T&G continued this program, but in the form of more typical modernist office towers, branded mainly by the prominent signage.

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