Books

Rogue Corporations

2023

From the 1980s until the present, the Australia public has suffered a continuous string of business scandals with often ruinous results. Quentin takes readers inside the greedy corporate cultures of some of the nation’s iconic firms to show how scandals erupt, their background causes and the often ruinous consequences for society.

NewSouth Publishers.

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Wounded Country:
The Murray Darling
Basin A Contested
History

2021

Set in Australia’s food bowl, and spread across two centuries of European settlement, Wounded Country explores Australia’s troubled relationship with Indigenous people and with the environment. Quentin shows how the Australia’s agricultural powerhouse economy was built on the brutal dispossession of the original inhabitants and the exploitation of the environment. The result has been a rolling series of environmental disasters, the seriousness of which have shocked the nation. The book is a warning about human’s capacity for over-development.

NewSouth Publishers

Adani and the
War Over Coal

2018

Why do Australian governments continually capitulate to major coal companies promoting new, climate altering projects? This is the question Quentin analyses in how the Indian-based Adani conglomerate gained approval to open up the vast, climate destroying coal deposits of Galilee Basin in Central Queensland. Billionaire Gatum Adani exploited Australia’s flawed democracy to pursue his corporate aims despite a vigorous, national protest movement aimed at stopping him.

NewSouth Publishers.

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The Rise and Fall of Gunns

2015

Tasmanian-based Gunns Ltd was Australia’s largest timber company with tentacles to the very top of Tasmanian politics. It had a controversial business model of exporting wood chips and a plan to construct a world-scale pulp mill in the pristine Tamar Valley. Quentin probes the power exerted by the company and how it captured governments to develop its business model. He documents, too, the rise of a vibrant national, grassroots campaign to defeat its plans to destroy more of Tasmania’s pristine forests. It’s a page-turning David versus Goliath story.

NewSouth Publishers.

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Rob Riley: An Aboriginal Leader's Quest for Justice

2006

The life of the WA born, national Indigenous leader spanned the post 1970s struggle for land rights, historical recognition and justice. Quentin explores the complex life of a survivor of the stolen generations who committed himself to the struggle for land rights a treaty, and to end community racism. In the end, the struggles overwhelmed Riley and he took his own life. In this searing account of Indigenous life on the front line of campaigning, it’s a story that castes important light on the ongoing struggle for justice for Indigenous people.

Aboriginal Studies Press

Brian Burke:
The Godfather

2008

Burke was one the nation’s most promising young Labor leaders when he won office in WA in 1983. Media savvy, business friendly and opinion poll driven, he was spoken of as a future Labor prime minister. Yet, less than a decade later he was mired in an official inquiry probing his government’s abuse of power and the billion dollar loss of tax payers money in failed government schemes. Quentin describes how WA Inc became a modern parable about the dangers of charismatic leaders and the pursuit of power for its own sake.

Allen and Unwin.