Quentin Beresford

Crown Resorts, the Bond Group, James Hardie, HIH Insurance, Geoffrey Edelsten's Allied Medical Group, 7-Eleven, and Rio Tinto, the list goes on... Australia has suffered from the continual sting of business scandals since corporate cowboys like Alan Bond and Christopher Skase wrought so much damage during the 1980s. Since then, hundreds of thousands of Australians have been affected, with many...

Winner, Queensland Literary Awards 2022, Queensland Premier's Award for a Work of State Significance Like many Australians, I looked on with horror as images of a million dead fish swamped the media and consumed the news cycle. I resolved to dig deeper. The Murray-Darling Basin is under threat. This vast and spectacular geographical region, covering one million square kilometres from...

At its peak, Gunns Ltd had a market value of $1 billion, was listed on the ASX 200, was the largest employer in the state of Tasmania and its largest private landowner. Most of its profits came from woodchipping, mainly from clear-felled old-growth forests. A pulp mill was central to its expansion plans. Its collapse in 2012 was a major...

Widely regarded as one of the great Aboriginal leaders of the modern era, Rob Riley was at the centre of debates that have polarised views on race relations in Australia: national land rights, the treaty, deaths in custody, self-determination, the justice system, native title, and the Stolen Generations. He tragically took his own life in 1996, weighed down by the...

How did Big Gambling become too big to fail and too powerful to adequately regulate? Australians lose around $32 billion on legal forms of gambling each year, the most of any country in the world, while the industry rakes in $244 billion through poker machines, lotteries, casinos, and the exponential rise in sports betting. In Hooked, Quentin Beresford explores how...