Neighbours

Paul is the eldest son of the Robinson dynasty who shocked his family when he dropped out of university to become and airline steward.  After a whirlwind romance, Paul married for the first time. However, it transpired that his new wife Terri had been married before and had murdered her first husband. When Paul confronted her about her past, she shot him and went on the run. She was later arrested and committed suicide in prison.

The whole experience left him cynical, bitter and the perfect candidate to take over the running of the Daniels Corporation from his ruthless Aunt Rosemary.

As a high flying businessman he had a penchant for sleeping with his assistants. However, the only woman to really get the better of him was Gail Lewis. A former colleague from his airline days, Gail was the assistant manager at Lassiters. She married Paul to help secure a business deal, but the relationship developed into genuine affection. They split up when Gail was pregnant with the triplets.

Paul then married Christina Alessi and they had a son, Andrew. However, lothario Paul couldn’t help himself and cheated on her with her twin sister Caroline. He left Ramsay Street suffering from a nervous breakdown when his business faced financial ruin. He came back a year later to see his beloved grandmother Helen but left speedily when he got his brother-in-law Philip Martin involved in fraud scandal. He asked Chrissie to meet him in Brazil, signed a letter of confession and fled. 

After returning to Australia and serving time in prison, Paul emerged through the smoke as Lassiters burned to the ground. It was later revealed that he had started the fire and was back to his bad old ways, stealing Lil Bishop from her husband David and doing dodgy deals with rival firm Affirmacon that would lead to the levelling of Ramsay Street.

It was only the love of Lil and the adoration of protégé Dylan Timmins that stopped him going through with the plan. However, his new bosses were not amused by his change of heart and sent heavies after him. Paul was pushed off a cliff. Seriously injured, he was ready to die but Dylan forged his signature on the surgical forms consenting to the amputation of his leg.

Despising pity, the only person Paul could bear to be around was the equally damaged Izzy Hoyland. Their relationship thrived on mutual blackmail and the thrill of annoying their smug neighbours. When daughter Elle moved in the fact that she tried to drug Izzy to get her out of the way merely confirmed that all three twisted individuals made a surprisingly good family unit.

The arrival of son Cameron was not as smooth. Ironically Paul was the only one to spot that the twin that arrived was actually Robert, but everyone assumed that he just couldn’t tell his own sons apart. However, he had no idea that Robert had been behind the bomb on the Lassiters joy flight, the poisoned letter, the blackmailing of Izzy and assorted other misdemeanours that had caused mild-mannered Harold Bishop to attack him and driven Paul to paranoia.

When Robert kidnapped Paul and left him bound and gagged in abandoned mineshaft, Paul resorted to staging a fake remarriage to Rob’s mother Gail in order to draw his criminal son out of hiding. Indeed marriage and Paul do not go together very well. He left his most recent wife Lyn Scully just hours after the ceremony, informing her that he would never be faithful.

Since then Paul has been back to his bad old ways, manipulating Ned Parker into doing his evil bidding and attempting to marry daughter Elle off to local tycoon Oliver Barnes. Paul had not counted on the fact that former friends Elle and Ned would compare notes and that all of his plans would come tumbling down. Elle turned on her fraudulent father and concocted a grand plan that saw her take over his entire empire and leave him with nothing.

Elle hoped that being penniless would teach him some important lessons about love and family. Unfortunately, Paul was diagnosed with a brain tumour that made his behaviour even more erratic, he began imagining a young man named Fox who encouraged him to cause all kinds of mischief before Elle realised how ill her father really was.

Paul survived the dangerous operation to remove the tumour and woke up a whole new man. Missing a large portion of his memory, Paul had no recollection of the evil things he had done in his past. Elle was thrilled to finally have the loving, compassionate and sympathetic father she had always wanted but was devastated that he didn’t seem to recognise her at all. Painstakingly helping him to put the pieces of his life back together, Elle tried to hide the negative parts of his former personality for fear of reawakening the old Paul.

Despite Elle’s best attempts, memories began to surface anyway. Paul began to have flashbacks to the fire he started at Lassiter’s and to the man he left for dead, Gus Cleary. When he met Gus’s sister Laura, Paul’s desperate desire to atone for his sins eventually led to Declan being kidnapped and Oliver being held to ransom.

Paul has a close relationship to Oliver and Declan thanks to his relationship with their mother Rebecca. Indeed when Rebecca arrived in Ramsay Street, she initially feared that Paul was Oliver’s father. As the memories came flooding back Paul fell in love with Rebecca all over again. Thanks to his new lease on life it looked as though Paul Robinson might finally settle down with one woman for the rest of his life.

However, as more and more of the old Paul floats the surface of his consciousness, can it be long before Erinsborough’s ultimate villain gets back to being bad?