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Book Review
| William D. Rubinstein, The All-Time Australian 200 Rich List, Allen and Unwin in association with BRW, Crows Nest, NSW, 2004. pp. xxii + 202. $29.95 paper.
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| Some readers of Labour History may know about Rubinstein — for many years he taught at Deakin University — but few of us will know the people in this book, even the living ones, other than by reputation. At the end, how much the wiser will we be about author or subject? |
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Rubinstein is a widely published scholar, now a professor at the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, who has undertaken extensive research into wealth in Britain. As The All Time Australian 200 Rich List testifies, he also enjoys work beyond the standard fare of the academic historian. He has written about Jack the Ripper and has recently sparked an online debate with his challenge to evolutionary theory. In the last few years his 'controversialism' has sprung from his other major research interest, Jewish history. His 1997 book, The Myth of Rescue: Why the Democracies Could Not Have Saved More Jews from the Nazis and his work on genocide have been contentious. |
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In the Rich List, Rubinstein seems to be having a bit of fun. Indeed, he says that this is his purpose, although it is just part of it. He writes of his hope
that factoring the wealth of the rich into the evolution of Australian history will lead to a better, more realistic understanding of how this country actually developed, and also that reading it will be great fun (p. ix).
The book is what it says it is: it is, for the most part, a list. The 200 (over 200 actually) richest men and women are listed, divided into four periods, 1788-1849, 1850-99, 1900-80 and 1980 to the present. The list for each period is prefaced by a short contextual essay. |
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Two serious issues underpinning the book are set out in the opening pages. The first is the method, which is explained and defended at some length. The second is the purpose and implications of the book. |
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Rubinstein's method is to rank individual wealth (usually in terms of probate) relative to gross domestic product at the time, rather than allowing for changes in real wealth or comparing wealth distribution within the one time period. This yields some interesting results, as we will see. He also offers tantalising comparisons with the wealth in Britain and the United States — about which I'd have liked more. |
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As to the second point, there is not much beyond the words I have quoted to tell us why the book matters, or what others have made of the nature of wealth. Rubinstein argues that there has not been much attention to the topic in Australia. Business Review Weekly, co-publisher of the book, only began to publish its 'rich list' in 1983, perhaps nice timing as the 'greed is good' decade kicked into overdrive. |
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Rubinstein is only half right to say there has been little work such as this done until recently. He refers to 'Marxist exposés of dubious accuracy' (p. ix) such as Campbell's Australia's Sixty Rich Families but that text did have a clear purpose — and it was not alone. I recall other booklets and pamphlets which, while not comprehensive, were rather more than lists. These were publications which aimed to get at the underlying patterns of ownership and control in and of the Australian economy. |
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To me, the book is quite fun but how much it really adds to a 'more realistic understanding of how this country actually developed' is questionable. The key claim is that the further back in time we go, the richer were the rich. The emancipist Samuel Terry emerges as the country's richest ever man. On Rubinstein's calculation, his wealth was more than four times Kerry Packer's fortune today. Real estate was his kick-starter, so some things never change. Dinner conversations must have been as monomaniacal then as now in polite Sydney society. |
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There are many things which are mentioned in passing in the book which I would like to have been drawn together as organising themes — about how well other ex-convicts did, religion, family wealth (and by implications social mobility), how women got rich, and about the industries that spawned real wealth. On this last point, it is no surprise that the great land grab that was Australia's pastoralism was the key to wealth in the nineteenth century. However, to ask for more analysis and less listing is really to ask for a different kind of book. |
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| Today, media and retail are the keys to individual Australian wealth. Looked at alongside corporate wealth, which reveals that the country's largest companies are in banking, mining or telecommunications, I come over all old-fashioned and ask if anyone makes anything in Australia anymore (apart from money itself). And so they do. Third on the current list and 35th overall is Richard Pratt, the 'cardboard box king'. What does it all mean? That's the bit you get to work out. |
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| University of Sydney |
BRADON ELLEM | |
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