Corporate Australia histories
When companies write their own history, honesty is usually optional.
From Westpac to Wesfarmers, Rip Curl to Rio Tinto: few Australian companies worth naming haven't at some time posed for their own corporate portrait. You know the sort of thing. They have titles like The House of Were (JB Were) and Men and Machines (Brambles). They can be huge: King & Wood Mallesons' new history runs to more than a thousand pages across two volumes. Yet for all you know at first sight, they might be blank pages, tastefully wrapped, useful for propping open a door or correcting an uneven table leg.
If you've the impression that they're routinely sanitised and bowdlerised, you're probably not wrong. Sometimes they don't even bother hiding it. "The book deals only briefly with asbestos," wrote chairman John Reid in the foreword to Brian Carroll's history of James Hardie Industries, the wildly misnamed A Very Good Business (1988). "The company made products that contained asbestos, and as a result is involved in legal proceedings. We therefore believe it would not have been proper to discuss these matters, however seemingly unrelated."
So who could possibly be interested in such a discreditable sub-genre? I am, actually. For years, in fact, I've been collecting them. Some fine writers have been drawn to the fray: Alan Marshall wrote The Gay Provider (1961) for the Myer Emporium, Gavin Souter A Company of Heralds (1981) for John Fairfax, Michael Cannon That Disreputable Firm (1998) for Slater & Gordon. The dean of Australian corporate histories also happens to be its most successful historian, Geoffrey Blainey, who cut his teeth as a graduate student on The Peaks of Lyell (1954), a commissioned history of the Mount Lyell Mining and Railway Company, and well before The Tyranny of Distance (1966) had also written Gold and Paper (1958) for the National Bank (component part of what in 1982 became NAB) and Mines in the Spinifex for MIM (1960). Jaqui Lane, with 25 titles probably the most prolific contributor to the genre, touts for business on her website with the admonition: "If you don't tell your story, someone else will".
