The archive

Australian company history, from the documents

Every article here is free to read, with no account and no paywall. Each one is built from documents a reader can obtain — annual reports, prospectuses, court judgments, Royal Commission reports — and each carries a publication and review date.

Case studies in failure

Failures are the best-documented events in Australian corporate history. A collapse produces an inquiry, litigation and detailed public accounts of what went wrong — which makes these the most instructive records in the archive.

• Case study · Collapse

  The collapse of HIH Insurance

  In March 2001 it became the largest corporate failure in Australian history to that point. It did not fail suddenly, and it did not fail secretly — much of what went wrong had been disclosed in documents the company was legally required to publish. This article traces the origins, the acquisitions, the failure itself, and what the Royal Commission found.

  Ava Thomas · Published October 15, 2026 · Reviewed October 15, 2026 · 14 min read

Company histories

Long-form accounts of how Australian businesses were built — and, in several cases, how they were taken apart again.

• History · Retail

  Woolworths and Coles: how two chains became the market

  Founded six years and one state apart, by men who reached the same conclusion about fixed prices and volume. This article covers the founding years, the fixed-price innovation, the Myer merger and its unwinding, the structural reasons a duopoly forms in Australian grocery retail, and what regulators have examined.

  Ava Thomas · Published October 15, 2026 · 13 min read

• History · Resources

  BHP: from Broken Hill to the Big Australian

  A speculative silver venture on a dusty hill in 1885 became the largest company in the country. This article follows the move into steel, the Pilbara developments, the decades of diversification and its reversal, the 2001 Billiton merger, the South32 demerger, and the reporting features specific to resources companies.

  Ava Thomas · Published October 15, 2026 · 13 min read

Institutions and rules

The machinery around the market: what companies are obliged to do, and why the documents exist at all.

• Explainer · Disclosure

  What ASX-listed companies must disclose

  Australian listed companies do not choose how much to tell the market — the law and the listing rules specify it. Covers continuous disclosure, trading halts, the periodic reporting calendar, what each document is for, how to read a remuneration report, and where all of it can be found free of charge.

  Ava Thomas · Published October 15, 2026 · 12 min read

What is being researched now

We publish slowly, because a history built from primary documents takes longer to write than a summary of someone else's opinion about it. Articles currently in preparation:

• Ansett Australia: the collapse of an airline, and what the administrator found.
• Centro Properties: how a listed property trust lost access to its funding.
• Australia's banks: from many separate savings banks to four large ones — a history of consolidation.
• ABC Learning Centres: rapid expansion, and what the accounts showed.
• Reading a cash flow statement: how to tell growth that funds itself from growth that consumes cash.
• Decimal currency: how Australia replaced the pound in 1966, and what it cost business.

If you would like to suggest a subject, or ask a question you think an article should answer, write to info@ceramicstory.com. Reader questions shape what gets researched, and we will tell you plainly if a suggestion falls outside the archive's scope.

How these articles are produced

Sources are ranked, and primary documents always come first: annual reports, financial statements, prospectuses, ASX announcements, court judgments and Royal Commission reports. Every date and figure is traced to a document a reader can obtain. Every sentence is classified as either a record — something a document states — or an interpretation, which is our assessment, and interpretations are written as interpretations.

The full method, including the rules on naming individuals and how corrections are handled, is set out in our research method.