Insult to the men of steel
Sydney Morning Herald
Saturday August 15, 2009
The Big Fella: The Rise and Rise of BHP BillitonBy Peter Thompson and Robert MacklinRandom House, 528pp, $59.95This history of the Australian mining giant comes with too small a vision. FOR a company so famously conservative, BHP has been notoriously cavalier about its history. Fifty years ago, for instance, in a move of buildings, its records were apparently divided arbitrarily into two, with one half retained and the other half destroyed. The shredders of Enron pale by comparison.With BHP Billiton's colossal iron ore joint venture with Rio Tinto, the company's identity will blur further. Thus The Big Fella by Peter Thompson and Robert Macklin is an unusually timely book €“ and a disappointing one.The last decade or so of the company's development is covered adequately. The authors have made productive use of access to the dramatis personae of BHP's merger with Billiton, even if their tendency to cut-and-paste long slabs of direct quotation doesn't suggest deep reserves of comprehension. The first three-quarters of the book, however, is assembled so haphazardly that it might as well not be there.In particular, Macklin and Thompson grossly underestimate the central cultural significance of steel in the BHP story, the colossal ambition of the Newcastle mill and the audacity of the takeover of the rival Australian Iron and Steel.For decades it was said that BHP's staff training college was Newcastle Boys' High and that no executive could run the company without a background in steel.Then came the ignominy of the need for government assistance that called forth John Button's Steel Plan, on which the authors lavish one uncomprehending paragraph, seemingly unaware of Button's As It Happened (1998) and Julianne Schultz's pioneering study Steel City Blues (1985).In fact, even by Australian standards, The Big Fella is perfunctorily researched. The authors begin with a presumptuous claim that BHP's story has "never been told before" €“ ignoring conscientious prior histories by Alan Trengove and Roy Bridges €“ and never quite recover.They cite neither Paquita Mawson's 1958 life of BHP's first great boss, Guillaume Delprat, nor Patricia Edgar's 1999 life of Janet Holmes a Court, widow of BHP's great nemesis.A chapter on Ok Tedi makes no reference to the excellent account in Michael Cannon's That Disreputable Firm (1998). A chapter on Essington Lewis omits the founding role of Delprat's mighty successor in Australia's aviation and car industries, including his ownership of the first Holden and even the phrase by which he is chiefly known €“ "I am work" €“ the title of John O'Donoghue's fascinating 1981 play.That makes for huge omissions. North-West Shelf? ERG and Monsanto's oil assets? The investment in Harlin Holdings? Don't bother looking. Sir Arvi Parbo gets one paragraph.BHP House is airily referred to as "the company's new customised headquarters" in the mid-1980s, when it was completed in 1972, and its immense architectural significance in Australia as a collaboration of Yuncken Freeman with the American skyscraper specialists Skidmore Owings and Merrill is overlooked.Instead the authors bumble round their subject, indulging in such pointless sallies as playing up Lewis's 1926 appointment of Robert Menzies's father, James, as a BHP lobbyist, from which they suggest that Robert Menzies had an "obvious conflict of ministerial interest" that has "never previously been revealed". This is frivolous and mischievous. James Menzies's role was amply described in Geoffrey Blainey's Lewis biography, The Steel Master (1971). That it coincided for a few years from 1934 with Robert Menzies being a none-too-active industry minister while also a far-more-active attorney-general hardly constitutes a revelation.A more significant link between Menzies and Lewis is that the BHP boss was vice-chairman of the "Central Committee" backing Menzies's election to the Victorian Legislative Council seat of East Yarra in 1928 €“ which the authors overlook, having not consulted the first volume of Allan Martin's Robert Menzies: A Life (1993).This cloying tic of "we can reveal" and "is told here for the first time" also recurs far too often, especially when what it refers to is usually neither particularly interesting nor especially fresh, and when the authors have left so much out.Here, meanwhile, is yet another Australian book that could have done with more rigorous editing, allowing for sentences such as: "Standing atop the doppelganger, it takes no effort of the imagination to sweep away the hastily assembled impedimenta of the town and recreate the place in the mind's eye as a party of European explorers passes by the base of the jagged hill set in the endless flatlands of the outback."Then there are the regulation howlers, including "James Hardy Ltd", "Burma Oil" and "Burke Street", and such bizarre constructions as "BHP's Nietzschean strength through diversity motto".This, then, is an exceptionally bad book and also a crying shame, for BHP Billiton deserves a history of the international class it has achieved as a corporation. Random House's regard for history, alas, is on par with BHP's 50 years ago.
© 2009 Sydney Morning Herald
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