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14 Works 92 Members 5 Reviews

About the Author

Dr Quentin Beresford teaches politics and public policy at Edith Cowan University in Perth, Western Australia. Prior to this position, He was a senior policy officer in the Western Australian office of the Department of Premier and Cabinet. He is a former editor of Youth Studies, which focuses on show more youth policy and juvenile crime. He has written numerous books which discuss Australian public policy and Aboriginal affairs. These include Rites of Passage: Aboriginal Youth Crime and Justice (1996); Our State of Mind: Racial Planning and the Stolen Generations (1998), Rob Riley: An Aboriginal Leader's Quest for Justice (2006) and The Rise and Fall of Gunns Ltd which won the Tasmanian Premier's Literary Prizes 2015 in the category of best book with Tasmanian content in any genre. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Courtesy of Allen and Unwin

Works by Quentin Beresford

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male
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lecturer
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Edith Cowan University

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I recall a friend of mine writing an article about the potential impact of odours from a pulp mill on wine grape flavour in the Tamar Valley. I vaguely recall that it was related to some local political debate about a pulp mill and I can't recall whether he was pro or anti the pulp mill. I have a feeling he was claiming that there would be no impact on the grapes. Though having seen a lot of grapes written-off, in the year of our bushfires, due to "taint" I find it hard to believe that the wine grapes would not be also tainted by the pulp mill emissions. (I've passed Fuji city in Japan many times and sampled the air near their pulp mills.....it's really bad.).
Anyway, this book is not specifically about the proposed pulp mill...though it features very strongly in the story about the rise and fall of Gunns Ltd in Tasmania.
In many ways this is a story about corruption in government and the corrupting influence of big business in Tasmania. But it actually ranges wider than this.
Beresford digs deep to explain the driving paradigms in Tasmania; the idea that Tasmania needed to industrialise; it needed to harness its natural resources; Government needed to support business to get things done and to provide jobs. It probably even goes back to the very early days when "the only good tree was a dead tree"; the settler's battle against nature when survival was at stake. Beresford paints a picture of various State Premiers as strong men; riding rough-shod over opposition; goal driven...where the goal was industrialisation. A corollary of this was an unholy alliance between the State Electricity Commission initially with the flooding of Lake Pedder and then plans to flood the Franklin River (The latter were frustrated by the environmental movement essentially). But as the power of the State Electricity Commission waned, so grew the power of Forestry Tasmania and hand in glove with it grew the power of Gunns Ltd...and its driven CEO, John Gay.
It's a tale of people who only listened to like-minded people and who surrounded themselves with like-minded people. A total inability to see a contrary view. Not only that but positive steps were taken to denigrate and "take-down" decent people who happened to have opposing views. Greenies were the enemy and were dangerous. It was ok to use thuggish tactics against them plus law suits to shut them up etc.
It's also very much the story of John Gay; a man with incredible self belief, charismatic but ruthless at the same time.....willing to "do what it takes" to see his vision fulfilled. A risk taker who managed to build Gunns Ltd from a small timber business into a behemoth.....but whose lack of perspective and inability to see the world changing around him and adapt ultimately led to the demise of Gunns.
There was also a fundamental economic/ecological issue which would bring Gunns unstuck. That was that Gunns was exporting wood chips from native "old-growth" forests in Tasmania but also from their own plantations. They were getting access to the old growth forests at cheap or subsidised prices (courtesy of Forestry Tasmania) and their own forests were insufficient for them to sustain their business on their own.
governments in Australia (federal and state) could see that exporting chips was a fool's mission; they really needed to go downstream and make paper....that's where the real value add lay. Hence the pulp mill proposals. First Wesley Vale (which fell over) then the second proposal for a mill in the Tamar Valley. It was promoted as using Gunn's plantation timbers but the reality was that it would not be economic without continuing access (at subsidised prices) to native, old-growth forests. It just didn't add up economically...let alone deal with the objections of the environmental movements, the greens under Bob Brown, and local residents.
The way that the various opposing forces interacted, their strength in diversity, the power that Geoffrey Cousins brought to the campaigns is an interesting story on its own. And Beresford wryly comments about the irony of the Forestry workers who loved their rural life style and the beauty of the bush and their access to clear rivers and clean air.....at the same time being violently anti "greenie" and being used as shock troops by the bosses at Gunns.
As one who has worked with the service industries I understand the community's disbelief in suggestions that Tasmania's future lay with tourism and high value-added products like art and craft. (And the pure environment and old growth forests were going to be the mainstay of these sort of industries). The person in the street, generally has totally warped ideas about the contribution that mining, agriculture, and manufacturing make to both employment and to GDP (It's 6%, 3% and 5% respectively for GDP......and 3%, 1% and 6% respectively for employment in Australia). Over 80% of GDP and employment comes from the services sectors. Certainly this message did not reach the forestry workers, or, indeed, the ordinary voter in Tasmania....let alone people like Paul Lennon (premier) and John Gay.
I think Beresford has done a fair and workman-like job of forensic sleuthing what was happening in Tasmania and why it was happening. In the light of what we've seen in the USA under Donald Trump, it's sobering to think about the dangers to the community of a paradigm that drives the players and which is used to justify undemocratic, corrupt, thuggish, behaviour....secrecy, poor governance, lack of transparency, lack of diversity in thinking and management. Especially so, when the underlying paradigm is later shown to be false.
A good book. I give it four stars.
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booktsunami | 1 other review | Oct 28, 2022 |
Revealing and confronting. Informative.
 
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DannyKeep | 1 other review | Dec 1, 2020 |
Salinity: a multidimensional crisis; The spread of salinity and responses to it, 1900-1990s; Contemporary issues posed by salinity; Towards a sustainable future.
 
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GreeningAustralia | Sep 20, 2018 |
There are few biographies published of Aboriginal political leaders; Rob Riley was a prominent Aboriginal campaigner; he was articulate in confronting political leaders and he was very shrewd with the media. Riley was at the forefront of many highly charged political debates across a range of issues; then in 1996 he committed suicide at the age of forty one. This volume is very reader friendly in that it also describes the historical context and political environment in which Riley was working.

Given access to three generations of Riley’s family’s native welfare files, the author outlines how a boy, his mother and his grandmother were removed from their families and placed in institutions. Riley was taken from his mother at five months of age and was placed in Sister Kate’s; a home for “fair-skinned” Aboriginal children.

He was told his family was dead until a chance meeting with an Uncle led to him eventually being reunited with his family when he was twelve. The author outlines how this period was a struggle for Riley and how he found it very difficult to adjust to family life. The author argues cogently that his removal and institutionalisation deeply scarred Riley’s emotional wellbeing and also laid the foundations for his highly developed understanding of racism that was to emerge in his later work. In a 1984 media interview he was asked the inevitable question about his Aboriginality. When asked what percentage of Aboriginal blood he had, Riley replied that he was “as Aboriginal as an Aborigine can be.”

After time in the army, Riley joined the Aboriginal Legal Service (WA) as its Executive Officer. When the battle over mining at Noonkanbah occurred he was among the leadership; developing his views and forging strong friendships. Riley was elected to the National Aboriginal conference at 27 years of age and became its Chair within two years; this itself demonstrates his political acumen. While there he led the fight on two key issues: land rights and for an inquiry into Aboriginal deaths in custody.

Riley lobbied the Hawke government to introduce land rights legislation federally and was disgusted when Bob Hawke caved in to pressure from Western Australia’s Burke government. However, somewhat strangely, he later became a key adviser to Gerry Hand, the Federal Minister for Aboriginal Affairs.

After the Royal Commission Into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody was established Riley worked on it with Pat Dodson, after which he returned to the Aboriginal Legal Service as Executive Officer. Riley then campaigned for implementation of the recommendations from the Royal Commission and for an inquiry into Aboriginal child removal.

After the 1993 federal election the prime minister, Paul Keating, said he wanted progress on land rights, Rob Riley joined a delegation of Aboriginal leaders to Canberra, where they met with Keating. Amongst contributions from other leaders Riley offered his essential philosophy: "You don’t stop fighting for justice simply because those around you don’t like it. We will not stop fighting."

Subsequently there was significant tension within the Aboriginal leadership about what the Native Title legislation would actually look like. The author suggests that Riley was caught in the middle of this and deeply distressed about it.

In 1993 while launching an ALS report on the Stolen Generatiions in WA at Sister Kate’s, Riley stunned those present when he revealed that he been raped by three boys when he was only nine. From then onwards his mental illness escalated, at times in a very public way.

At 41 years of age Riley took his own life. In a note he wrote: "Understand, white Australia, that you have so much to answer for. Your greed, your massacres, your sanitised history in the name of might and right." And he pleaded that the inquiry into the removal of Aboriginal children from their families, at which he was to give evidence, not be swept under the carpet.

The twin issues of his removal as a child and racism were at the centre of Riley’s life work and his demise. This biography is an important book for all Australians, particularly those with an interest in the history of Aboriginal affairs, from no matter what perspective.
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PKXFXNINJA | 1 other review | May 13, 2010 |

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Works
14
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92
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Rating
4.1
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ISBNs
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