Stuart Kells

It is a sign of the times that A Better Australia: Politics, public policy and how to achieve lasting reform begins with a discussion of climate and energy policy. No policy field better illustrates the deficiencies in Australia’s politics over the past generation. It is a tale, as one of the book’s authors, John Brumby, reminds us, of avoidable failure and lost opportunities, as the issue was subjected to the narrower, more immediate incentives offered by partisanship and opportunism.

Journalist Royce Kurmelovs has written several business-focused books, including a well-received account of the end of Australia’s iconic Holden cars (The Death of Holden, 2016) and a partly personal analysis of the social costs of ubiquitous indebtedness (Just Money, 2020).

In the last decade, Stuart Kells has become one of Australia’s most versatile and fecund non-fiction writers, responsible for a variety of diverting histories, of enterprises, institutions, and ideas. His thoroughly readable The Library: A catalogue of wonders (2017) was shortlisted for a Prime Minister’s Award; his Shakespeare’s Library: Unlocking the greatest mystery in literature (2018) felt rather more padded, if not unenjoyably so. Books about Argyle Diamonds (2021) and Melbourne University Publishing (2023) have been welcome. I imagine him in a medieval artisanal workshop, a kind of booksmith studiously occupied in multiple, simultaneous pursuits.

Quentin Beresford, an adjunct professor in politics at Sunshine Coast University, has written and edited about a dozen books, including the excellent Wounded Country (2021), which dealt with the failure of water policy in the Murray-Darling Basin. His latest offering explores thirteen ‘business scandals’ in Australia. Beresford’s definition of a scandal is selective and eclectic. The scope of the book extends to corporate collapses but also to wage theft, climate-change denial, occupational health and safety failures, and the destruction of Indigenous heritage sites.

This week on the ABR Podcast we look at Qantas with business writer and historian Stuart Kells. In his review of Alan Joyce and Qantas: The trials and transformation of an Australian icon by Peter Harbison, Kells notes that the company’s declining reputation extends beyond the area of substandard customer service. Stuart Kells is Adjunct Professor at La Trobe Business School and has twice won the Ashurst Business Literature Prize. Listen to ‘Fasten your seatbelts: Turbulent times at Alan Joyce’s Qantas’, published in the January-February issue of ABR.

Nearly everyone in Australia has a story about bad airline service, and many of those stories involve Qantas, whose ‘mishandled bag rate’ recently doubled and flight cancellations tripled. The formerly smooth and efficient Sydney-Melbourne run is now a dispiriting ordeal.

What the authors of these three wildly different books share is a gift for creating through language a kind of intimacy of presence, as though they were in the room with you. Emily Wilson’s much-awaited translation of The Iliad (W.W. Norton & Company) is a gorgeous, hefty hardback with substantial authorial commentary that manages to be both scholarly and engaging. The poem is translated into effortless-looking blank verse that reads like music. The Running Grave (Sphere) by Robert Galbraith (aka J.K. Rowling), the seventh novel in the Cormoran Strike crime series and one of the best so far, features Rowling’s gift for the creation of memorable characters and a cracking plot about a toxic religious cult. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional (Allen & Unwin, reviewed in this issue of ABR) lingers in the reader’s mind, with the haunting grammar of its title, the restrained artistry of its structure, and the elusive way that it explores modes of memory, grief, and regret.

This fascinating and frustrating volume is really three books in one: a compilation of revelatory portraits of seven modern economic crises; a beautiful essay on language, literature, and finance; and an effort to draw lessons from the seven calamities. Of the three books, two are brilliant, one less so.

Publishers rarely become big news in Australia, university presses even less often. It was notable therefore that the departure in early 2019 of Melbourne University Publishing’s CEO, Louise Adler, and some members of the MUP board, became a matter on which so many of the nation’s political and cultural élite felt they needed to have an opinion. A strong coterie came out in her defence. This had much to do with Adler herself, who had courted their attention, published their books, and made MUP a story in its own right.

The search for Shakespeare’s library (the books ostensibly owned by Shakespeare but dispersed without a trace after his death) is driven largely by the hope that marginalia, notes, and drafts might provide unfettered access to authorial intention. Inevitably, the missing library turns out to be ...