Morry Schwartz

The Accidental Developer: The fascinating rise to the top of Mirvac founder Henry Pollack by Henry Pollack

September 2005, no. 274

Henry Pollack, the founder of Mirvac, one of Australia’s largest and most successful property development companies, started life in Lodz, a booming Polish textile town. Born in 1932, he belonged to a well-to-do family and became a bookish boy. He writes about his youth with vivid openness, describing not only events but his feelings, thoughts and youthful ideals. With this memoir, written towards the end of his life, Pollack comes close to being the writer he dreamt of becoming as a boy. Memories of his childhood have a fidelity and clarity that may well be the result of a life lopped and restarted at the age of sixteen; those early years are preserved as if in a time capsule.

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Black Inc. and the attorney-general

by Morry Schwartz •

August 2004, no. 263

Defamation is easy. Australia has any number of good defamation lawyers who will ‘legal’ a manuscript if you pay them enough. But if your manuscript threatens to transgress the National Secrets Act, you are on much shakier ground. Axis of Deceit, Andrew Wilkie’s ‘story of the intelligence officer who risked all to tell the truth about WMD and Iraq’, was always going to be hot. Our investigations didn’t turn up a single Melbourne lawyer who could advise us if we had crossed the line, so we asked David Wright-Neville, a Monash academic and ex-spook (like Wilkie, he had been an analyst at the Office of National Assessments, Australia’s peak intelligence agency), to check the manuscript. He read it thoughtfully and suggested chopping a dozen or so offending passages, which was acceptable to both Wilkie and Black Inc.

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