Gold and Paper. A History of the National Bank of Australasia Limited
Melbourne, Georgian House, 1958.
Quarto, xvi, 430 pages with 50 plates (7 in colour) plus a front endpaper map.
Quarter morocco and cloth; front cover slightly bowed; trifling signs of use and age; an excellent copy with the slightly worn dustwrapper.
The half-title is inscribed and signed to prominent (South) Australian businessman Oswald James O'Grady (1901-1971) by George C. Hill, Chief Manager of the National Bank of Australasia (Melbourne, March 1959). In his time, Ossie O'Grady was described as 'Australia's most dynamic businessman'. However, the 'late 1950s saw a frantic expansion in Reid Murray Holdings Ltd. The board's small-town mentality and O'Grady's self-confident, but trusting, management style began to lose touch with a nationwide company's diverse interests in finance, retailing and real-estate development. The collapse of Reid Murray in the credit squeeze of 1961 - one of the largest corporate failures in Australia's business history to that time - left O'Grady battered but unbroken. Although he was fined for making loans to finance share issues and for issuing a prospectus with false statements, he was cleared by a parliamentary inquiry of any moral culpability. He maintained that precipitate and ill-judged asset sales by the trustees of debenture holders had increased the firm's losses, as had the opportunism of business rivals. His stoicism masked feelings of betrayal by some trusted social and business associates' ('Australian Dictionary of Biography'). From the dustwrapper: 'a vivid story of the rise of a great Australian bank. Born in the turbulent gold rushes of the 1850s, the bank survives to this day as the National Australia Bank'.
Item #125439
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