October 2024
- Opinion
- Chanticleer
Chanticleer’s 10 legends of marvellous Melbourne
Melbourne has always been Chanticleer’s spiritual home. As part of the column’s 50-year celebrations, we name 10 big characters from the past five decades.
- James Thomson
July 2024
Rod Carnegie: corporate giant felled at the final hurdle
Sir Rod Carnegie soared across the corporate sky in the ’70s and ’80s but was thwarted in his attempt to secure full Australian local control of mining giant CRA.
- Andrew Clark
March 2024
Vale Charles Williams, corporate poacher turned gatekeeper
The influential regulator was born, raised and worked in the heart of the Melbourne business establishment but became a key oversight figure.
- Andrew Clark
January 2022
Why Australia’s best companies were built in the 1980s
Some mark the ’80s as the era of the corporate cowboys, but it also heralded the arrival of Australia’s most successful global finance house, major hi-tech success stories, and ‘ocker’ advertising.
- Andrew Clark
The boardroom battles that shocked Australia
The business establishment watched in horror as corporate raiders made a play for Australia’s biggest company, BHP, and prominent newspaper empire, Fairfax, in the 1980s.
- Andrew Clark
How the takeover king of the 1980s came undone
John Spalvins controlled the biggest industrial group in Australia at the end of the decade but it all came crashing down.
- Andrew Clark
September 2021
- From The Archives
- Platinum Year
Money for jam: John Elliott’s first big move into wealth
Two Australians made a fortune in preserves. John Gilmour profiled Achalen Palfreyman in 1967 and AFR editor-in-chief Michael Stutchbury picks up the story with John Elliott.
Peter Costello: We won’t see the like of John Elliott again
The Elders IXL founder thrived in the buccaneering 1980s, but the reckoning came in the 1990s and the 2000s with much tougher compliance, says Peter Costello.
- Updated
- Ben Potter, Patrick Durkin and Julie-anne Sprague
Rise and rise, and fall of John Elliott
John Elliott was a man of big appetites who rose and fell in the world of business and politics. But he left behind a distinctive legacy.
- Andrew Clark
- Opinion
- Chanticleer
Why John Elliott was a finance reporter’s dream
Finance journalism no longer has colourful characters like this beer baron, who strode the world stage in the 1980s making highly leveraged takeovers.
- Tony Boyd
Buccaneering businessman John Elliott dies
Unconventional and politically incorrect, the Melbourne businessman’s influence loomed large across the business, football and political worlds for decades.
- Ben Potter, Patrick Durkin and Julie-anne Sprague