00:00:00
Speaker 1: Hi, everybody, Welcome to conversations. Now. My old teammate, Steve Highwood is a bit of a lad but very proud boy from Broken Hill. He said to me the other day, you must interview Rob McLean. I said, what is Rob McLean? He said, he's this boy from Broken Hill who's done great things. He's traveled the world. He's been a captain of industry. He heads up all sorts of different organizations. But he's written a book and the book is called The Town Like No Other, a Story of Broken Hill. And he joins us, Rob McLean, welcome to the program.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: How are you very well? Thank you, and I'm delighted to be with you.
00:00:35
Speaker 1: Graham. Steve Heigwood, I wonder if you're as good a friend as he makes out you are.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Steve's been a friend for a long long time, and in fact he was a schoolboy when he played with me and with South Broken Hill in the late sixties.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: And he said, Robie's just like he's done really well in industry and business, but he's just a boy that.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: Lived in Yeah, I lived in Bonanza Street, which most people know is the road to the street to the airport. That was only two blocks away from Almaroval, which was the home of the South Football Club and the primary school that I went to, so they're all familiar territory.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: So you played for South Broken Hill and.
00:01:20
Speaker 2: Played for South Broken Hill and never lost that love of the red and white, which continues to this day.
00:01:28
Speaker 1: There's been some other famous footballers come from that club, have they not?
00:01:32
Speaker 2: There have been a number, but in the time that I was growing up, our first VFL player, Ronnie Serich went to Richmond, and then George Lakes went to Melbourne. Steve himself went to Richmond and now of course we've had procession of players that have gone to the South Australian League, including our most celebrated player Taylor Walker, who had the pleasure to meet last year.
00:02:00
Speaker 1: He's very well, he's very faint and very popular down here. There's been very few more popular players than Taylor Walker.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: I just mentioned Graham the Taylor's grandfather was captain of South Broken.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: Hill and did his dad play as well?
00:02:16
Speaker 2: His dad pay dad played as well. It was a champion and also played for New South Wales. So there's a long sporting history there.
00:02:25
Speaker 1: Well, we may come to that if there's time. It makes all the other achievements that you've had. You've called the book the Town Like no Other. Most people would say a town like no other? Was that the important to you in the title?
00:02:39
Speaker 2: I think it was. I think we all think about expressions like a town like Alice. But as I'd lived my life and gone back to Broken Hill from time to time and reflected on this period from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy that I write about, I genuinely came to the conclusion that it was that the town like no other, because there were things that were quite exceptional about it, and that's what I try to write about in the in the book.
00:03:08
Speaker 1: What is interesting about the book is how you talk about the impact and the cooperation between management and unions in the development of the town. Whereas you do mention Broken Deals sometimes gets a bad rap by other people who talk about it or write about it, but you seem to want to put the record straight about the about the town or the city.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: I do, and I felt it was for me and for friends that I talk with. It was a fabulous place to grow up in. We had a good a good school system. We had a wonderful sense of freedom and independence and we had a whole sense that the future was ours for the for the taking, and at this time we didn't quite appreciate and this is in the early fifties, just how much prosperity that we had. And miners were working a five day week, thirty five hours this minded, this is over seventy five years ago. They were being paid four times the basic wage at a time when half Australians were on the basic wage, and a whole lot of things went with that prosperity. We had more cars than any other place in Australia registered in nineteen fifty three, and an incredibly strong sense of community, of joining and being part of that community.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: You're talking about the number of clubs and particularly from the music scene, a number of different bands there. What was it about Broken Hill that stimulated that interest in music and the different clubs.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: You're right, there was something like seven bands and in the town we also had repertory and of course raft sporting organizations. We also had seven gun clubs, and that of course was a detime when recreational shooting was very popular. But my point was that people in the town had time lived off one income and they were joiners of organizations, So you just came to accept that being part of the community and joining community organizations was part of life in Broken Hell.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: You made me. As I'm reading the book, you may think I wish I'd lived there. But then when you delve into a little bit deeper and you talk about the marginalization of married women, for instance, the marginalization of the indigenous population, Well, was that an issue? Did it ever create division in those days between the fifties and the seventies.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: To some extent yes, and to some extent no. I think the I talk about the fact that Indigenous people who had lived along the Darling River, the Barker. You know, for time immemorial, there wasn't an Indigenous kid in my primary school or high school. But if you went to the towns on the outskirts of Broken Hill, like Sword in India or Volcanya, you know, you would see Indigenous populations. So they weren't part of school, they weren't part of the workforce of the mines, and that was just accepted at that time, which of course comes as a surprise today.
00:06:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. What about in the footy teams? So they did they make marks Indigenous players?
00:06:38
Speaker 2: No, they didn't. We had no indigenous players at the time. What we did have in this South team I talked about in nineteen sixty Jack Walker was the Taylor's grandfather was the captain. We had nine out of nineteen in a photograph of the premiership team were European and five were Yugoslavs. So I have a chapter that I call multicultural before we knew the word existed. And captain coach albern Perak was of course Croatian, and Ronnie Sarachu I've mentioned who went to Richmond and others. But you know, so we had acceptance and integration into the culture of a Yugoslav and other European groups of people at that time.
00:07:30
Speaker 1: You must have been a bit of a star. I want you probably played down that you with your modesty, but you were flown back from Armadale in sixty six and sixty seven to play in the finals.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: It was Armadale is probably about fifteen hundred kilometers from New South Wales and I was talking about it the other day in Broken Hill and the person interviewing me is assumed that it was a sort of light jet or something, you know, be back, but no, it was a flight from Armadale to Sydney and then from Sydney to Broken Hill. But yes, I did get to come back and be part of winning winning football teams from that period from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy.
00:08:16
Speaker 1: The thing that strikes me about guys who played in premierships and you're talking sixty seven, sixty sixty six, sixty seven, sixty eight, and I guess some of them have passed on, But there's that's that unshakable bond between guys who played in premierships and all the great things you've done in business. I suppose that you would still pick up the phone from somebody who you played with.
00:08:39
Speaker 2: You would always pick up the phone with somebody you played with, and you know that better than most.
00:08:44
Speaker 1: I understand that. But this is country footy and you sort of have you spread your wings from Broken Hill? Is it hard to go back in terms of the logistics of it to get back and with all the activities that the other activities that you have.
00:08:59
Speaker 2: No we enjoy going back. We've had some ties to Broken Hill through a couple of other friends, Lee Clifford and who became the head of Real Tinto and Roger Masley Green who worked in Broken Hill and their families.
00:09:16
Speaker 1: We have.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: A water scholarship for university each year, and this year we'll have four young kids from Broken Hill going to going to university.
00:09:29
Speaker 1: That's your charity. Well, look we need to take you right. We'll talk about that and lots of other things when we come back. Rob MacLean is my guest. He's very proud of his heritage at Brokenhill and he's written a book about it, The town like no Other. For the Breakfakes, my guest on conversations today is a high achieving gentleman called Robert MacLean who has traveled the world in all sorts of different capacities in the corporate world and the world of benevolence and charity and philanthropy. He's from Broken Hill. We moved there when he was ten, and he's written a book about the town, The town like no other. Rob. The one thing that took my eye, and I don't think you explored it in the book was the prefix to your father's name the military medal tell us about that place.
00:10:15
Speaker 2: My dad was was with the second twenty seventh the South Australian Battalion and he was in the Middle East, and then in campaigns in New Guinea and Buna and Gona. Now when I see these pictures of the Latani River in the current war with Israel and Lebanon, I go back to my father's diaries of talking about crossing the Latani River and going into Syria in the campaign. And it was during that area, during that time that my father was awarded the military Medal for bravery. And I think he was the first in the second twenty seventh, or close to the first in the second twenty seve to achieve that honor.
00:11:02
Speaker 1: Have you read the citation?
00:11:04
Speaker 2: Yes?
00:11:04
Speaker 1: I have. Can you share it with us?
00:11:08
Speaker 2: I don't think I would do justice to it. But it related to the fact that you know, they signalers were trying to establish lines of communications and they had to go well ahead of the unit to establish those lines of communications, and my father was out on his own for something like twenty four hours and faced a number of quite dangerous situations in order to restore the line. I think that's that's the gist of what was behind the ord.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: Do you have his medallions?
00:11:45
Speaker 2: Yes? I did you.
00:11:47
Speaker 1: Did you get a chance to talk to him about his time in the army I did.
00:11:52
Speaker 2: What my dad did that was a wonderful legacy was that he wrote down a number of these stories and my sister Judith typed them up and we have them as memoirs within the within the family, so that legacy continues through his writing.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: Did you not contemplate putting a bit more detail in your book about your dad?
00:12:22
Speaker 2: I did. I made a bit of a journey in the course of the book, Graham, and that I started off thinking I would write a memoir that I loosely called growing Up in South Broken Hill. And my wife, who's an editor, she said, Rob, no one really wants to read about read about you growing up in South Broken Hill. What is it that you really want to tell people? And that took me down this path of saying, well, I lived in this exceptional town that had great wealth and prosperity, but it also had some things as you touched on earlier. Married women weren't able to work, Indigenous people were at the margins. You know, some of the elements of liberty weren't strong. There were known to be cases of domestic violence. So I didn't try to paint a picture, you know that isn't a true picture of what some people faced in that time. But I have tried to sketch out what it is that made this place that was three percent of Australia to have such extraordinary impact, both economically and socially and culturally.
00:13:47
Speaker 1: Do you think your appreciation or your knowledge has been enhanced by the nostalgia of looking back? I think because we all do that though, we all go back to the good old days and we've sort of filled out the tough times.
00:14:03
Speaker 2: Well, we do. But I've talked to quite a lot of my friends growing up. I think the experience I've had living in Sydney and Melbourne and New York and London. But when it came to this topic of where did you grow up, and I say Broken Hill, people looked at me as if to say, you poor barga. You know. I used the expression in the book that when I say I went to the Broken Hill High School, people are looking back to me as you said, you mean the Broken Hill Reform School. So what I was trying to do was paint a different picture, paint a picture that it wasn't this stereotype you know, of a dusty, union run town a long way away from anywhere, you know, that wouldn't have been much fun to grow up in it all.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: You do have a crack at people who have written critical stuff about the city, do you not.
00:15:03
Speaker 2: Well, I do talk about I do talk about in the period from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy where the Burr Industrial Council or peak body of the trade unions embarked on social engineering, and that was done with very good intent because inflation was a problem in Australia at the time as it is now, and they felt they wanted to reduce costs of the price of a haircut or going to the movie theater or the price of a beer to people in the town. But there were times when they stopped the girl guides from doing Bob a job week because they said that would interfere with local trade. And I give another example when they stopped pies and pasties and cakes coming from Adelaide. And by that time people have broken helm New Balfers and love Bealfers and prevailed on the unions to abandon that. So that there were some things where that you just wouldn't expect to see today that happened at that time.
00:16:11
Speaker 1: You do make a point of mentioning Donald Horn, the author who wrote scathing appraises of Broken Hill. Did you figlure you had to defend the city?
00:16:21
Speaker 2: I felt that what Donald Horn talked about is what I touched on. But it's so really so it failed to really grasp the picture. We had a world class mining metallurgy center, truly world class, with some of the best people in the world. We trained people who became the leaders of the mining industry around Australia and the world. We showed that mining could be done more safely without the terrible loss of life that had occurred in the first fifty years. We showed that we had a we were a community that worked for its people. So that well, well, Donald Horns, there was strength of his argument. What I've tried to paint is a richer picture, and I think a truer picture of what this town was all about at that time.
00:17:25
Speaker 1: How did your family get to Wiler when you were born in Wyler? So to tell us about the grandfather's.
00:17:32
Speaker 2: No, that was that was fairly easy because my dad joined He left school at fourteen and he joined b HP and then he organized a transfer to the to the whale of shipyard in just before the before the war, and then after the war he went back.
00:17:54
Speaker 1: Was why wasn't he designated essential service?
00:17:57
Speaker 2: In that regard he was one of those men who felt his obligation was to fight for his country.
00:18:05
Speaker 1: Must have been a great man.
00:18:06
Speaker 2: Actually he was, and you know, I think about him just about every day, and because I know that he was one of these people who with other opportunities, you know, and an the time would have I would have seased. But it was after the war. I was born in nineteen forty six in Whaler and my brother Ian was born shortly after. But by nineteen fifty my mother wanted to come home, come back to Broken Hill because her family was still there, and so the family moved back. And that's the period that I grew up, went to school, and that I'm writing about.
00:18:48
Speaker 1: Rob McLean is my guest, Folks. The book is called the Town Like Noah that they tell me it did mix it glenelgets selling really well. It's a story of Broken Hill. Is she ready? I think I would have liked to have lived there, like to have played footy there back after the break. Welcome back, everybody. Now, look you've just tuned in on chatting with a gentleman called Robert MacLean, who has done great things in the corporate world and the world of philanthropy and benevolence, and we'll get to that. He's very proud of his heritage and Broken Hill to the point that he's written a book, The Town like no Other. You talk about other companies in the book, like Rio Tinto and the like. There's not a lot about BHP, the Broken Hill Proprietory Limited, and I thought their presence was more than Wyala, maybe Newcastle. What's the connection to Broken Hill because it's in the name.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: BHP is terribly important in the history of Broken Hill because we'd had some small scale mining around Silverdin just out of Broken Hill in the early eighteen eighties. But it was the discovery of the literally the Broken Hill by Charles Raft, a boundary rid who then staked acclaim. He thought it was ten but it was silver, lead and zinc. He's boss, the station owner, George mccullott, put together what was called the Syndicate of Seven that included a bunch of other sort of farm workers, and they were the group that floated BHP as a company as the largest company on the line of load and BHP had a very strong presence in Broken Hill right through to the into the First World War. But there you have to think of the line of load. It was like a boomerang, and in the middle of the boomerang were BHPS leases, but they only went down about five hundred meters, whereas the other extreme of North Broken Hill and Zinc Corporation New Broken Hill consolidated at the other end and they went down over one thousand meters. And so BHP played a huge role in making Broken Hill the town it was, but it was on borrowed time once you got into the New century, and by nineteen eleven they in fact made the decision to go into steelmaking and that became the focus of their activities. But they held onto their leases and mined and left the town in nineteen thirty nine, which is a time when my father was and grandfather were hired work for BHP. But that was the end of their time.
00:21:47
Speaker 1: Did the Boundary Rider become wealthy?
00:21:50
Speaker 2: Charles Rasp did become very wealthy and had I think one of the finest homes in Adelaide. George McCulloch moved to London and became an extraordinary art collector, so great great fortunes were made at that time.
00:22:07
Speaker 1: But he was just a boundary writer, a boundary writer. I don't know whether you know the answer to this question. Did he develop the airs and graces of a wealthy person?
00:22:18
Speaker 2: I don't think he did, but his wife did, of course, that's another story.
00:22:24
Speaker 1: So you're going to Brokenhall High School? How do you then break out of Broken Hill into this grand adventure that you have that takes you globally. You get a full Bright scholarship to Columbia University in New York. I mean, tell us about your ambition as a young fellow.
00:22:44
Speaker 2: Well, during high school I did some economics and I was introduced to the law of supply and demand and how prices get set. And this was a revolution to revelation to me that, my goodness, the world worked, you know, in some ways that I never understood. And I wanted to understand this better. So I studied economic So then went on to do finance and at Columbia University.
00:23:13
Speaker 1: And you jump too quickly, then, So you graduated from Broken Hill.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I graduated from Broken Hill High School. I then did. I went to the University of New England in Armadale and Regional New South Wales.
00:23:26
Speaker 1: That's that's when you got flown back to playing the footy Grand final.
00:23:29
Speaker 2: I got flying back to playing in the football finals.
00:23:32
Speaker 1: So why would you pick that university? And where did the ambition come from?
00:23:36
Speaker 2: I wasn't a city kid, and I felt a bit terrified by going to Sydney University or even Adelaide University. So I was happy just going to a country university. But in that time I got to understand, you know, where the real talent and scholarship were, and that took me to Columbia, which is famous for finance.
00:23:58
Speaker 1: How did you how did you arrive on that decision? You had to apply for it, like airs.
00:24:04
Speaker 2: Yes, and you know through my economics program and economics degree. I thought, this is really what where my future lies? And I even missed out on a Grand final in order to start my classes in the United States. But you know, I was on a new mission and that was important to me. And and off I went.
00:24:29
Speaker 1: Look, I'm belaboring this point, I know, but a kid growing up in Broken Hill, you know, he gets through school, gets through high school, probably all of his mates going to apprenticeships or traineeships. Why did you have this ambition? Where did it did? What did mom and dad say? Would you explain?
00:24:48
Speaker 2: I think they were enormously supportive. But I always felt that my father grew up in a time when he didn't have these opportunities, and he was very bright and very talented. But there's there's You're right to press on it, because there was clearly something, you know, that led me to say, I've got to take this chance. I have this opportunity, and I've got to make the most of it that I can.
00:25:17
Speaker 1: Did your brother have the same ambition?
00:25:20
Speaker 2: Ian was a very successful lawyer in Adelaide, So yes, there was a plenty of ambition in the family.
00:25:31
Speaker 1: So you get to America to New York, what's the culture?
00:25:36
Speaker 2: Shot like, Well, it's absolutely huge, and you're in this this this place, You're not far from from Wall Street. New York truly felt like and still feels like the center of the universe for people in business and in finance. So I felt a degree of intimidation and you know, trying to find a way around. In that time, I joined the rugby club. I really hadn't played rugby, but I could kick a footy and you know, so I played fullback with Columbia and represented them for several years. So that was a great way to make friends and lifelong friends. And you come to Grips with a new place.
00:26:30
Speaker 1: Did you contemplate staying long in America?
00:26:34
Speaker 2: No, because under the terms of the Fulbright Scholarship there was I was able to work for a year or two, but then the expectation was that you returned to Australia. That caused me to speed up my decision to propose to my wife, Paula, who was a fiction editor in New York, and she joined me and we got married in the US and came back to Australia in nineteen seven. You won.
00:27:00
Speaker 1: So it's Paula.
00:27:01
Speaker 2: Is she American or as American? She grew up in a little town upstate New York called Sydney.
00:27:08
Speaker 1: It's called Sydney, called Sydney. What was the culture shot like for her coming to Australia from New York?
00:27:17
Speaker 2: It was pretty big and I think there wasn't a better example of it than Christmas in nineteen seventy one. We were going from Adelaide to Broken Hill and we stopped at the pub at Yanta and went into the bar and Paula ordered a lemon squash, and she was told to go next door to the ladies lumbe oh. She stormed out of the Yander pub and got into the car and said she wasn't going to have a drink at all. But twenty years later we were going from Broken Hill to Sorry, from Adelaide to Broken Hill and stopped at Yanda and she proudly siddled up to the bar and got a lemon squash.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: Which is kind of you. They're coming from New York to like Janter and even Brokenhill. But we need to take a break. My guest is Rob MacLean. Proudly grew up in Broken Hill, and think about it, the town like no other. The story of Broken Hill back shortly, folks. Welcome back, folks. Rob McLean very proud and native and broken even though he was born in Whaler Like that's the time a Whaler like some of us did. Talented young footballer growing up, but had ambition to advance his education. Went to America on a full Bright scholarship at Columbia University. He met his wife, Paula, married Paula, and then came back to Broken Hill. We can talk about that for endlessly, but the things that intrigued me about the book is not so much the social engineering, although you do touch on it in the book, is how Broken Hill is restored from a mining wasteland to some sort of resemblance of it, of its previous life before it was torn apart by mining. Can you talk about the revegetation of it. Yes.
00:29:08
Speaker 2: When you go to Broken Hill, you see around the town is a green belt called a regeneration area, and it's fenced off so that you can't have feral animals in there, and rabbits and goats and kangaroos. And that was originally designed in the nineteen thirties to reduce the impact of what were called sand drifts and dust storms. But it's something where I were mining, where the mining companies and conservationists, the field naturalists, and the council all came together in this scheme to try out which species thrived under the circumstances and how you built this green belt. And what I love about the story is how mining chiefs like Sir Marris Morby and A. J. Keast were very actively involved with the field naturalists working together. And it was at a time when Murray Morby, who came to head the Rio Tinto group in Australia. He then went on to become one of the original founders of the Australian Conservation Foundation. So you have this picture today of miners and conservations being at each other's throats, and here we were in Broken Hill, collaborating for the common good, to reduce the to make the town a better town.
00:30:45
Speaker 1: Is mining safe these days? And you do touch on the early days when there were terrible tragedies, and you talk about the periods where between the sixties and the eighties where it became safer. Is safe occupation these days?
00:31:02
Speaker 2: Well, it's one of the examples I've given the book is that a couple of years ago I was with the chairman of Rio Tinto and he made a comment that in the past year, operating in seven continents and with over fifty thousand employees, they hadn't had a fatality. So that was a wonderful example to illustrate that mining can be done safely. And I think what I've set out in the book is this notion of the expectation that when a miner goes to work that he will come home from work was very much alive in the period I'm writing about from the mid fifties to nineteen seventy and just a huge amount of effort went into mining safely and safe behavior in the mind.
00:32:02
Speaker 1: When I look at your CV and I have to do that now because we're run out of time, I mean, there's that You've You've made your way in the corporate world incredibly, I mean you, but that's your It's your ventures into the into the world of benevolence of philanthropy that are intriguing to me. What was it about your makeup that chose you to you know graduate, I guess to go hand in hand being success, in having success in the corporate world, but then being able to share the wealth. Can you tell us about that that that journey place.
00:32:40
Speaker 2: I got to a point where I'd had twenty five years with the consulting firm McKenzie, traveling around the world and leading the practice in Australia and being absolutely full on, you know, as a corporate executive. And then after that, I just that I would like to spend some time on boards, being an investor, but also doing some things of a community nature because I hadn't really been able to do that. And a couple of organizations like Benevolent Society sought me out, I sought out the Nature Conservancy. My wife and I decided to put together a family foundation. So this past twenty five years, so much of my time has been relating to things that perhaps aren't working well in our society and what you can do about it. You know, whether it's education of young people in Broken Hill, you know, whether it's protecting some of the important landscapes we have in this beautiful country.
00:33:53
Speaker 1: Do you have success stories that you can share somebody who from very humble origins benefited from your benevolence.
00:34:03
Speaker 2: Well, I think what we're now seeing with scholarships in Broken Hill, we're seeing lives changed, young people given opportunities that otherwise they wouldn't have had. We're seeing in places like Tamworth, where my wife has been leading an initiative about the children zero to five reading, we're now seeing that by the time kids come to go to school in Tamworth, they've actually had to increase the reading level because kids are so much are now so prepared for reading having their parents read to them from the ages of zero to five. And then in the in the environment, there's things like the Bird International Bird Sanctuary in Adelaide that my wife took a lead in providing private funding for that. We're seeing things that have happened that otherwise it wasn't clear that they were going to happen.
00:35:16
Speaker 1: You are the co author of another book called Bulletproof Problem Solving, The One Skill That Changes Everything, that was written in twenty eighteen. Yeah, you're holding it up to the zoom. So can you tell me what is the one skill that changes everything?
00:35:34
Speaker 2: It's learning to be a problem solver, and we're in the book we take you through the process of how you define a problem, how you de say cre create a problem, how you do the analysis, how you synthesize, and how you draw conclusions and recommendations. And we found that this wasn't something that was taught in high school, wasn't taught in university, and we're now finding that it is being taught in a number of universities around the world. And the fact that it's in ten languages tells us that we've got something that people are interested in. And we're about to launch an online course that you'll be able to do on you to me to improve your problem solving skills.
00:36:31
Speaker 1: Interesting you say that because I was asked last night. It was a simple thing, trying to find someone that we had to look after our dog at Easter and it was running and I was asked and it made me stop and think. He said, are you looking for a solution or are you trying to create a problem. And it was a really blunt question that makes you stop and think, are you looking for an answer or are you just looking for the problem? Is that what you touch on? It is?
00:37:00
Speaker 2: But I also touched on some quite practical things, like you know, should I have a nearthroscopy or where to serve in tennis? Because even things in your social domain lend themselves to the problem solving capability that I talk about in the book.
00:37:21
Speaker 1: I might have to get that one. So Broken Hill today is the is the city of your dreams.
00:37:30
Speaker 2: We were there two weeks ago for the launch of my book and you have to picture this extraordinarily beautiful art gallery in the main street of Broken Hill with some of the finest art of any regional gallery in Australia. And we had we had indigenous people like Badger Boats there, we had corporate leaders like Lee Clifford and put football friends like John did there with me, and we had the village drummers singing the Broken Hill Song and the Away Song, and then I talked with Andrew Smith from AYBC Radio about my book, and it was just truly a beautiful evening in which we felt great pride in this town that had nurtured and nurtured us and given us opportunities.
00:38:26
Speaker 1: You explained that word away in the book, and you dedicate the book for Paula or your wife, and you just say simply for Paula from away. Perhaps you can explain that to the listeners please.
00:38:37
Speaker 2: Well, it's an expression that whenever people come to Broken Hill, they're described as coming being from away. And for a lot of those people that doesn't matter. It matter whether they've been there twenty or thirty years, they're still viewed as being from away. But I think it's what, you know, an isolated, remote commit unity does to sort of look look after its own. But it's an expression that is almost, I think somewhat unique to Broken Hill, and one we treasure.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: Did you have kids, right?
00:39:17
Speaker 2: I do, Graham, And we have an order's daughter, Heather, a daughter of Virginia, who is the publisher of my book, and a son, Tim, who's got a real estate practice in the Southern Highlands. And I'm delighted to say that they all came to Broken Hill for the launch and you can see there their mother and father. You thrilled to be making a contribution to this community.
00:39:46
Speaker 1: Indeed, did they contemplate how they would have done growing up in the city.
00:39:52
Speaker 2: Well, we laugh about the times when they would come to Broken Hill and go to sheep stations and and our old just Heather would say to our friend Carl Scamp, Carl, you have a very big park here. This property will come to station was the size of Singapore. And you know, so there's lots of empty spaces in places that city kids just don't understand.
00:40:22
Speaker 1: Well, Roberts, it's a great chat. The book is terrificate that then, folks a bit of envy. I think I would have liked to have experienced that, and I'm sure anyone from Broken Hill would love to read it, and from without Broken Hill as well. So good luck with it. I deserves to do well. Thank you so much for your time.
00:40:39
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:40:40
Speaker 1: Indeed, Rob McLean is my guest. Folks. This book is called The Town Like No Other, a story of Broken Hill, and you will read it with a little bit of envy. So why wasn't I there? Then, thank you so much for joining us.
Speaker 1: Hi, everybody, Welcome to conversations. Now. My old teammate, Steve Highwood is a bit of a lad but very proud boy from Broken Hill. He said to me the other day, you must interview Rob McLean. I said, what is Rob McLean? He said, he's this boy from Broken Hill who's done great things. He's traveled the world. He's been a captain of industry. He heads up all sorts of different organizations. But he's written a book and the book is called The Town Like No Other, a Story of Broken Hill. And he joins us, Rob McLean, welcome to the program.
00:00:31
Speaker 2: How are you very well? Thank you, and I'm delighted to be with you.
00:00:35
Speaker 1: Graham. Steve Heigwood, I wonder if you're as good a friend as he makes out you are.
00:00:40
Speaker 2: Steve's been a friend for a long long time, and in fact he was a schoolboy when he played with me and with South Broken Hill in the late sixties.
00:00:53
Speaker 1: And he said, Robie's just like he's done really well in industry and business, but he's just a boy that.
00:01:01
Speaker 2: Lived in Yeah, I lived in Bonanza Street, which most people know is the road to the street to the airport. That was only two blocks away from Almaroval, which was the home of the South Football Club and the primary school that I went to, so they're all familiar territory.
00:01:17
Speaker 1: So you played for South Broken Hill and.
00:01:20
Speaker 2: Played for South Broken Hill and never lost that love of the red and white, which continues to this day.
00:01:28
Speaker 1: There's been some other famous footballers come from that club, have they not?
00:01:32
Speaker 2: There have been a number, but in the time that I was growing up, our first VFL player, Ronnie Serich went to Richmond, and then George Lakes went to Melbourne. Steve himself went to Richmond and now of course we've had procession of players that have gone to the South Australian League, including our most celebrated player Taylor Walker, who had the pleasure to meet last year.
00:02:00
Speaker 1: He's very well, he's very faint and very popular down here. There's been very few more popular players than Taylor Walker.
00:02:07
Speaker 2: I just mentioned Graham the Taylor's grandfather was captain of South Broken.
00:02:13
Speaker 1: Hill and did his dad play as well?
00:02:16
Speaker 2: His dad pay dad played as well. It was a champion and also played for New South Wales. So there's a long sporting history there.
00:02:25
Speaker 1: Well, we may come to that if there's time. It makes all the other achievements that you've had. You've called the book the Town Like no Other. Most people would say a town like no other? Was that the important to you in the title?
00:02:39
Speaker 2: I think it was. I think we all think about expressions like a town like Alice. But as I'd lived my life and gone back to Broken Hill from time to time and reflected on this period from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy that I write about, I genuinely came to the conclusion that it was that the town like no other, because there were things that were quite exceptional about it, and that's what I try to write about in the in the book.
00:03:08
Speaker 1: What is interesting about the book is how you talk about the impact and the cooperation between management and unions in the development of the town. Whereas you do mention Broken Deals sometimes gets a bad rap by other people who talk about it or write about it, but you seem to want to put the record straight about the about the town or the city.
00:03:30
Speaker 2: I do, and I felt it was for me and for friends that I talk with. It was a fabulous place to grow up in. We had a good a good school system. We had a wonderful sense of freedom and independence and we had a whole sense that the future was ours for the for the taking, and at this time we didn't quite appreciate and this is in the early fifties, just how much prosperity that we had. And miners were working a five day week, thirty five hours this minded, this is over seventy five years ago. They were being paid four times the basic wage at a time when half Australians were on the basic wage, and a whole lot of things went with that prosperity. We had more cars than any other place in Australia registered in nineteen fifty three, and an incredibly strong sense of community, of joining and being part of that community.
00:04:36
Speaker 1: You're talking about the number of clubs and particularly from the music scene, a number of different bands there. What was it about Broken Hill that stimulated that interest in music and the different clubs.
00:04:51
Speaker 2: You're right, there was something like seven bands and in the town we also had repertory and of course raft sporting organizations. We also had seven gun clubs, and that of course was a detime when recreational shooting was very popular. But my point was that people in the town had time lived off one income and they were joiners of organizations, So you just came to accept that being part of the community and joining community organizations was part of life in Broken Hell.
00:05:30
Speaker 1: You made me. As I'm reading the book, you may think I wish I'd lived there. But then when you delve into a little bit deeper and you talk about the marginalization of married women, for instance, the marginalization of the indigenous population, Well, was that an issue? Did it ever create division in those days between the fifties and the seventies.
00:05:51
Speaker 2: To some extent yes, and to some extent no. I think the I talk about the fact that Indigenous people who had lived along the Darling River, the Barker. You know, for time immemorial, there wasn't an Indigenous kid in my primary school or high school. But if you went to the towns on the outskirts of Broken Hill, like Sword in India or Volcanya, you know, you would see Indigenous populations. So they weren't part of school, they weren't part of the workforce of the mines, and that was just accepted at that time, which of course comes as a surprise today.
00:06:33
Speaker 1: Yeah. What about in the footy teams? So they did they make marks Indigenous players?
00:06:38
Speaker 2: No, they didn't. We had no indigenous players at the time. What we did have in this South team I talked about in nineteen sixty Jack Walker was the Taylor's grandfather was the captain. We had nine out of nineteen in a photograph of the premiership team were European and five were Yugoslavs. So I have a chapter that I call multicultural before we knew the word existed. And captain coach albern Perak was of course Croatian, and Ronnie Sarachu I've mentioned who went to Richmond and others. But you know, so we had acceptance and integration into the culture of a Yugoslav and other European groups of people at that time.
00:07:30
Speaker 1: You must have been a bit of a star. I want you probably played down that you with your modesty, but you were flown back from Armadale in sixty six and sixty seven to play in the finals.
00:07:41
Speaker 2: It was Armadale is probably about fifteen hundred kilometers from New South Wales and I was talking about it the other day in Broken Hill and the person interviewing me is assumed that it was a sort of light jet or something, you know, be back, but no, it was a flight from Armadale to Sydney and then from Sydney to Broken Hill. But yes, I did get to come back and be part of winning winning football teams from that period from nineteen sixty seven to nineteen seventy.
00:08:16
Speaker 1: The thing that strikes me about guys who played in premierships and you're talking sixty seven, sixty sixty six, sixty seven, sixty eight, and I guess some of them have passed on, But there's that's that unshakable bond between guys who played in premierships and all the great things you've done in business. I suppose that you would still pick up the phone from somebody who you played with.
00:08:39
Speaker 2: You would always pick up the phone with somebody you played with, and you know that better than most.
00:08:44
Speaker 1: I understand that. But this is country footy and you sort of have you spread your wings from Broken Hill? Is it hard to go back in terms of the logistics of it to get back and with all the activities that the other activities that you have.
00:08:59
Speaker 2: No we enjoy going back. We've had some ties to Broken Hill through a couple of other friends, Lee Clifford and who became the head of Real Tinto and Roger Masley Green who worked in Broken Hill and their families.
00:09:16
Speaker 1: We have.
00:09:18
Speaker 2: A water scholarship for university each year, and this year we'll have four young kids from Broken Hill going to going to university.
00:09:29
Speaker 1: That's your charity. Well, look we need to take you right. We'll talk about that and lots of other things when we come back. Rob MacLean is my guest. He's very proud of his heritage at Brokenhill and he's written a book about it, The town like no Other. For the Breakfakes, my guest on conversations today is a high achieving gentleman called Robert MacLean who has traveled the world in all sorts of different capacities in the corporate world and the world of benevolence and charity and philanthropy. He's from Broken Hill. We moved there when he was ten, and he's written a book about the town, The town like no other. Rob. The one thing that took my eye, and I don't think you explored it in the book was the prefix to your father's name the military medal tell us about that place.
00:10:15
Speaker 2: My dad was was with the second twenty seventh the South Australian Battalion and he was in the Middle East, and then in campaigns in New Guinea and Buna and Gona. Now when I see these pictures of the Latani River in the current war with Israel and Lebanon, I go back to my father's diaries of talking about crossing the Latani River and going into Syria in the campaign. And it was during that area, during that time that my father was awarded the military Medal for bravery. And I think he was the first in the second twenty seventh, or close to the first in the second twenty seve to achieve that honor.
00:11:02
Speaker 1: Have you read the citation?
00:11:04
Speaker 2: Yes?
00:11:04
Speaker 1: I have. Can you share it with us?
00:11:08
Speaker 2: I don't think I would do justice to it. But it related to the fact that you know, they signalers were trying to establish lines of communications and they had to go well ahead of the unit to establish those lines of communications, and my father was out on his own for something like twenty four hours and faced a number of quite dangerous situations in order to restore the line. I think that's that's the gist of what was behind the ord.
00:11:43
Speaker 1: Do you have his medallions?
00:11:45
Speaker 2: Yes? I did you.
00:11:47
Speaker 1: Did you get a chance to talk to him about his time in the army I did.
00:11:52
Speaker 2: What my dad did that was a wonderful legacy was that he wrote down a number of these stories and my sister Judith typed them up and we have them as memoirs within the within the family, so that legacy continues through his writing.
00:12:17
Speaker 1: Did you not contemplate putting a bit more detail in your book about your dad?
00:12:22
Speaker 2: I did. I made a bit of a journey in the course of the book, Graham, and that I started off thinking I would write a memoir that I loosely called growing Up in South Broken Hill. And my wife, who's an editor, she said, Rob, no one really wants to read about read about you growing up in South Broken Hill. What is it that you really want to tell people? And that took me down this path of saying, well, I lived in this exceptional town that had great wealth and prosperity, but it also had some things as you touched on earlier. Married women weren't able to work, Indigenous people were at the margins. You know, some of the elements of liberty weren't strong. There were known to be cases of domestic violence. So I didn't try to paint a picture, you know that isn't a true picture of what some people faced in that time. But I have tried to sketch out what it is that made this place that was three percent of Australia to have such extraordinary impact, both economically and socially and culturally.
00:13:47
Speaker 1: Do you think your appreciation or your knowledge has been enhanced by the nostalgia of looking back? I think because we all do that though, we all go back to the good old days and we've sort of filled out the tough times.
00:14:03
Speaker 2: Well, we do. But I've talked to quite a lot of my friends growing up. I think the experience I've had living in Sydney and Melbourne and New York and London. But when it came to this topic of where did you grow up, and I say Broken Hill, people looked at me as if to say, you poor barga. You know. I used the expression in the book that when I say I went to the Broken Hill High School, people are looking back to me as you said, you mean the Broken Hill Reform School. So what I was trying to do was paint a different picture, paint a picture that it wasn't this stereotype you know, of a dusty, union run town a long way away from anywhere, you know, that wouldn't have been much fun to grow up in it all.
00:14:56
Speaker 1: You do have a crack at people who have written critical stuff about the city, do you not.
00:15:03
Speaker 2: Well, I do talk about I do talk about in the period from nineteen fifty to nineteen seventy where the Burr Industrial Council or peak body of the trade unions embarked on social engineering, and that was done with very good intent because inflation was a problem in Australia at the time as it is now, and they felt they wanted to reduce costs of the price of a haircut or going to the movie theater or the price of a beer to people in the town. But there were times when they stopped the girl guides from doing Bob a job week because they said that would interfere with local trade. And I give another example when they stopped pies and pasties and cakes coming from Adelaide. And by that time people have broken helm New Balfers and love Bealfers and prevailed on the unions to abandon that. So that there were some things where that you just wouldn't expect to see today that happened at that time.
00:16:11
Speaker 1: You do make a point of mentioning Donald Horn, the author who wrote scathing appraises of Broken Hill. Did you figlure you had to defend the city?
00:16:21
Speaker 2: I felt that what Donald Horn talked about is what I touched on. But it's so really so it failed to really grasp the picture. We had a world class mining metallurgy center, truly world class, with some of the best people in the world. We trained people who became the leaders of the mining industry around Australia and the world. We showed that mining could be done more safely without the terrible loss of life that had occurred in the first fifty years. We showed that we had a we were a community that worked for its people. So that well, well, Donald Horns, there was strength of his argument. What I've tried to paint is a richer picture, and I think a truer picture of what this town was all about at that time.
00:17:25
Speaker 1: How did your family get to Wiler when you were born in Wyler? So to tell us about the grandfather's.
00:17:32
Speaker 2: No, that was that was fairly easy because my dad joined He left school at fourteen and he joined b HP and then he organized a transfer to the to the whale of shipyard in just before the before the war, and then after the war he went back.
00:17:54
Speaker 1: Was why wasn't he designated essential service?
00:17:57
Speaker 2: In that regard he was one of those men who felt his obligation was to fight for his country.
00:18:05
Speaker 1: Must have been a great man.
00:18:06
Speaker 2: Actually he was, and you know, I think about him just about every day, and because I know that he was one of these people who with other opportunities, you know, and an the time would have I would have seased. But it was after the war. I was born in nineteen forty six in Whaler and my brother Ian was born shortly after. But by nineteen fifty my mother wanted to come home, come back to Broken Hill because her family was still there, and so the family moved back. And that's the period that I grew up, went to school, and that I'm writing about.
00:18:48
Speaker 1: Rob McLean is my guest, Folks. The book is called the Town Like Noah that they tell me it did mix it glenelgets selling really well. It's a story of Broken Hill. Is she ready? I think I would have liked to have lived there, like to have played footy there back after the break. Welcome back, everybody. Now, look you've just tuned in on chatting with a gentleman called Robert MacLean, who has done great things in the corporate world and the world of philanthropy and benevolence, and we'll get to that. He's very proud of his heritage and Broken Hill to the point that he's written a book, The Town like no Other. You talk about other companies in the book, like Rio Tinto and the like. There's not a lot about BHP, the Broken Hill Proprietory Limited, and I thought their presence was more than Wyala, maybe Newcastle. What's the connection to Broken Hill because it's in the name.
00:19:38
Speaker 2: BHP is terribly important in the history of Broken Hill because we'd had some small scale mining around Silverdin just out of Broken Hill in the early eighteen eighties. But it was the discovery of the literally the Broken Hill by Charles Raft, a boundary rid who then staked acclaim. He thought it was ten but it was silver, lead and zinc. He's boss, the station owner, George mccullott, put together what was called the Syndicate of Seven that included a bunch of other sort of farm workers, and they were the group that floated BHP as a company as the largest company on the line of load and BHP had a very strong presence in Broken Hill right through to the into the First World War. But there you have to think of the line of load. It was like a boomerang, and in the middle of the boomerang were BHPS leases, but they only went down about five hundred meters, whereas the other extreme of North Broken Hill and Zinc Corporation New Broken Hill consolidated at the other end and they went down over one thousand meters. And so BHP played a huge role in making Broken Hill the town it was, but it was on borrowed time once you got into the New century, and by nineteen eleven they in fact made the decision to go into steelmaking and that became the focus of their activities. But they held onto their leases and mined and left the town in nineteen thirty nine, which is a time when my father was and grandfather were hired work for BHP. But that was the end of their time.
00:21:47
Speaker 1: Did the Boundary Rider become wealthy?
00:21:50
Speaker 2: Charles Rasp did become very wealthy and had I think one of the finest homes in Adelaide. George McCulloch moved to London and became an extraordinary art collector, so great great fortunes were made at that time.
00:22:07
Speaker 1: But he was just a boundary writer, a boundary writer. I don't know whether you know the answer to this question. Did he develop the airs and graces of a wealthy person?
00:22:18
Speaker 2: I don't think he did, but his wife did, of course, that's another story.
00:22:24
Speaker 1: So you're going to Brokenhall High School? How do you then break out of Broken Hill into this grand adventure that you have that takes you globally. You get a full Bright scholarship to Columbia University in New York. I mean, tell us about your ambition as a young fellow.
00:22:44
Speaker 2: Well, during high school I did some economics and I was introduced to the law of supply and demand and how prices get set. And this was a revolution to revelation to me that, my goodness, the world worked, you know, in some ways that I never understood. And I wanted to understand this better. So I studied economic So then went on to do finance and at Columbia University.
00:23:13
Speaker 1: And you jump too quickly, then, So you graduated from Broken Hill.
00:23:18
Speaker 2: I graduated from Broken Hill High School. I then did. I went to the University of New England in Armadale and Regional New South Wales.
00:23:26
Speaker 1: That's that's when you got flown back to playing the footy Grand final.
00:23:29
Speaker 2: I got flying back to playing in the football finals.
00:23:32
Speaker 1: So why would you pick that university? And where did the ambition come from?
00:23:36
Speaker 2: I wasn't a city kid, and I felt a bit terrified by going to Sydney University or even Adelaide University. So I was happy just going to a country university. But in that time I got to understand, you know, where the real talent and scholarship were, and that took me to Columbia, which is famous for finance.
00:23:58
Speaker 1: How did you how did you arrive on that decision? You had to apply for it, like airs.
00:24:04
Speaker 2: Yes, and you know through my economics program and economics degree. I thought, this is really what where my future lies? And I even missed out on a Grand final in order to start my classes in the United States. But you know, I was on a new mission and that was important to me. And and off I went.
00:24:29
Speaker 1: Look, I'm belaboring this point, I know, but a kid growing up in Broken Hill, you know, he gets through school, gets through high school, probably all of his mates going to apprenticeships or traineeships. Why did you have this ambition? Where did it did? What did mom and dad say? Would you explain?
00:24:48
Speaker 2: I think they were enormously supportive. But I always felt that my father grew up in a time when he didn't have these opportunities, and he was very bright and very talented. But there's there's You're right to press on it, because there was clearly something, you know, that led me to say, I've got to take this chance. I have this opportunity, and I've got to make the most of it that I can.
00:25:17
Speaker 1: Did your brother have the same ambition?
00:25:20
Speaker 2: Ian was a very successful lawyer in Adelaide, So yes, there was a plenty of ambition in the family.
00:25:31
Speaker 1: So you get to America to New York, what's the culture?
00:25:36
Speaker 2: Shot like, Well, it's absolutely huge, and you're in this this this place, You're not far from from Wall Street. New York truly felt like and still feels like the center of the universe for people in business and in finance. So I felt a degree of intimidation and you know, trying to find a way around. In that time, I joined the rugby club. I really hadn't played rugby, but I could kick a footy and you know, so I played fullback with Columbia and represented them for several years. So that was a great way to make friends and lifelong friends. And you come to Grips with a new place.
00:26:30
Speaker 1: Did you contemplate staying long in America?
00:26:34
Speaker 2: No, because under the terms of the Fulbright Scholarship there was I was able to work for a year or two, but then the expectation was that you returned to Australia. That caused me to speed up my decision to propose to my wife, Paula, who was a fiction editor in New York, and she joined me and we got married in the US and came back to Australia in nineteen seven. You won.
00:27:00
Speaker 1: So it's Paula.
00:27:01
Speaker 2: Is she American or as American? She grew up in a little town upstate New York called Sydney.
00:27:08
Speaker 1: It's called Sydney, called Sydney. What was the culture shot like for her coming to Australia from New York?
00:27:17
Speaker 2: It was pretty big and I think there wasn't a better example of it than Christmas in nineteen seventy one. We were going from Adelaide to Broken Hill and we stopped at the pub at Yanta and went into the bar and Paula ordered a lemon squash, and she was told to go next door to the ladies lumbe oh. She stormed out of the Yander pub and got into the car and said she wasn't going to have a drink at all. But twenty years later we were going from Broken Hill to Sorry, from Adelaide to Broken Hill and stopped at Yanda and she proudly siddled up to the bar and got a lemon squash.
00:27:59
Speaker 1: Which is kind of you. They're coming from New York to like Janter and even Brokenhill. But we need to take a break. My guest is Rob MacLean. Proudly grew up in Broken Hill, and think about it, the town like no other. The story of Broken Hill back shortly, folks. Welcome back, folks. Rob McLean very proud and native and broken even though he was born in Whaler Like that's the time a Whaler like some of us did. Talented young footballer growing up, but had ambition to advance his education. Went to America on a full Bright scholarship at Columbia University. He met his wife, Paula, married Paula, and then came back to Broken Hill. We can talk about that for endlessly, but the things that intrigued me about the book is not so much the social engineering, although you do touch on it in the book, is how Broken Hill is restored from a mining wasteland to some sort of resemblance of it, of its previous life before it was torn apart by mining. Can you talk about the revegetation of it. Yes.
00:29:08
Speaker 2: When you go to Broken Hill, you see around the town is a green belt called a regeneration area, and it's fenced off so that you can't have feral animals in there, and rabbits and goats and kangaroos. And that was originally designed in the nineteen thirties to reduce the impact of what were called sand drifts and dust storms. But it's something where I were mining, where the mining companies and conservationists, the field naturalists, and the council all came together in this scheme to try out which species thrived under the circumstances and how you built this green belt. And what I love about the story is how mining chiefs like Sir Marris Morby and A. J. Keast were very actively involved with the field naturalists working together. And it was at a time when Murray Morby, who came to head the Rio Tinto group in Australia. He then went on to become one of the original founders of the Australian Conservation Foundation. So you have this picture today of miners and conservations being at each other's throats, and here we were in Broken Hill, collaborating for the common good, to reduce the to make the town a better town.
00:30:45
Speaker 1: Is mining safe these days? And you do touch on the early days when there were terrible tragedies, and you talk about the periods where between the sixties and the eighties where it became safer. Is safe occupation these days?
00:31:02
Speaker 2: Well, it's one of the examples I've given the book is that a couple of years ago I was with the chairman of Rio Tinto and he made a comment that in the past year, operating in seven continents and with over fifty thousand employees, they hadn't had a fatality. So that was a wonderful example to illustrate that mining can be done safely. And I think what I've set out in the book is this notion of the expectation that when a miner goes to work that he will come home from work was very much alive in the period I'm writing about from the mid fifties to nineteen seventy and just a huge amount of effort went into mining safely and safe behavior in the mind.
00:32:02
Speaker 1: When I look at your CV and I have to do that now because we're run out of time, I mean, there's that You've You've made your way in the corporate world incredibly, I mean you, but that's your It's your ventures into the into the world of benevolence of philanthropy that are intriguing to me. What was it about your makeup that chose you to you know graduate, I guess to go hand in hand being success, in having success in the corporate world, but then being able to share the wealth. Can you tell us about that that that journey place.
00:32:40
Speaker 2: I got to a point where I'd had twenty five years with the consulting firm McKenzie, traveling around the world and leading the practice in Australia and being absolutely full on, you know, as a corporate executive. And then after that, I just that I would like to spend some time on boards, being an investor, but also doing some things of a community nature because I hadn't really been able to do that. And a couple of organizations like Benevolent Society sought me out, I sought out the Nature Conservancy. My wife and I decided to put together a family foundation. So this past twenty five years, so much of my time has been relating to things that perhaps aren't working well in our society and what you can do about it. You know, whether it's education of young people in Broken Hill, you know, whether it's protecting some of the important landscapes we have in this beautiful country.
00:33:53
Speaker 1: Do you have success stories that you can share somebody who from very humble origins benefited from your benevolence.
00:34:03
Speaker 2: Well, I think what we're now seeing with scholarships in Broken Hill, we're seeing lives changed, young people given opportunities that otherwise they wouldn't have had. We're seeing in places like Tamworth, where my wife has been leading an initiative about the children zero to five reading, we're now seeing that by the time kids come to go to school in Tamworth, they've actually had to increase the reading level because kids are so much are now so prepared for reading having their parents read to them from the ages of zero to five. And then in the in the environment, there's things like the Bird International Bird Sanctuary in Adelaide that my wife took a lead in providing private funding for that. We're seeing things that have happened that otherwise it wasn't clear that they were going to happen.
00:35:16
Speaker 1: You are the co author of another book called Bulletproof Problem Solving, The One Skill That Changes Everything, that was written in twenty eighteen. Yeah, you're holding it up to the zoom. So can you tell me what is the one skill that changes everything?
00:35:34
Speaker 2: It's learning to be a problem solver, and we're in the book we take you through the process of how you define a problem, how you de say cre create a problem, how you do the analysis, how you synthesize, and how you draw conclusions and recommendations. And we found that this wasn't something that was taught in high school, wasn't taught in university, and we're now finding that it is being taught in a number of universities around the world. And the fact that it's in ten languages tells us that we've got something that people are interested in. And we're about to launch an online course that you'll be able to do on you to me to improve your problem solving skills.
00:36:31
Speaker 1: Interesting you say that because I was asked last night. It was a simple thing, trying to find someone that we had to look after our dog at Easter and it was running and I was asked and it made me stop and think. He said, are you looking for a solution or are you trying to create a problem. And it was a really blunt question that makes you stop and think, are you looking for an answer or are you just looking for the problem? Is that what you touch on? It is?
00:37:00
Speaker 2: But I also touched on some quite practical things, like you know, should I have a nearthroscopy or where to serve in tennis? Because even things in your social domain lend themselves to the problem solving capability that I talk about in the book.
00:37:21
Speaker 1: I might have to get that one. So Broken Hill today is the is the city of your dreams.
00:37:30
Speaker 2: We were there two weeks ago for the launch of my book and you have to picture this extraordinarily beautiful art gallery in the main street of Broken Hill with some of the finest art of any regional gallery in Australia. And we had we had indigenous people like Badger Boats there, we had corporate leaders like Lee Clifford and put football friends like John did there with me, and we had the village drummers singing the Broken Hill Song and the Away Song, and then I talked with Andrew Smith from AYBC Radio about my book, and it was just truly a beautiful evening in which we felt great pride in this town that had nurtured and nurtured us and given us opportunities.
00:38:26
Speaker 1: You explained that word away in the book, and you dedicate the book for Paula or your wife, and you just say simply for Paula from away. Perhaps you can explain that to the listeners please.
00:38:37
Speaker 2: Well, it's an expression that whenever people come to Broken Hill, they're described as coming being from away. And for a lot of those people that doesn't matter. It matter whether they've been there twenty or thirty years, they're still viewed as being from away. But I think it's what, you know, an isolated, remote commit unity does to sort of look look after its own. But it's an expression that is almost, I think somewhat unique to Broken Hill, and one we treasure.
00:39:12
Speaker 1: Did you have kids, right?
00:39:17
Speaker 2: I do, Graham, And we have an order's daughter, Heather, a daughter of Virginia, who is the publisher of my book, and a son, Tim, who's got a real estate practice in the Southern Highlands. And I'm delighted to say that they all came to Broken Hill for the launch and you can see there their mother and father. You thrilled to be making a contribution to this community.
00:39:46
Speaker 1: Indeed, did they contemplate how they would have done growing up in the city.
00:39:52
Speaker 2: Well, we laugh about the times when they would come to Broken Hill and go to sheep stations and and our old just Heather would say to our friend Carl Scamp, Carl, you have a very big park here. This property will come to station was the size of Singapore. And you know, so there's lots of empty spaces in places that city kids just don't understand.
00:40:22
Speaker 1: Well, Roberts, it's a great chat. The book is terrificate that then, folks a bit of envy. I think I would have liked to have experienced that, and I'm sure anyone from Broken Hill would love to read it, and from without Broken Hill as well. So good luck with it. I deserves to do well. Thank you so much for your time.
00:40:39
Speaker 2: Thank you.
00:40:40
Speaker 1: Indeed, Rob McLean is my guest. Folks. This book is called The Town Like No Other, a story of Broken Hill, and you will read it with a little bit of envy. So why wasn't I there? Then, thank you so much for joining us.
