Robert McLean - The Town Like No Other

Name: Robert McLean - The Town Like No Other
Start: 2026-06-03T18:00:00+10:00
End: 2026-06-03T18:00:00+10:00
Location: Upstairs at Gleebooks

About

6pm for 6:30pm Wednesday 3 June

Robert McLean launched by Duncan Peppercorn

In The Town Like No Other, Robert McLean blends memoir with social and economic history to capture Broken Hill’s ‘magic years’, 1950–1970.

He paints a portrait of a town that punched above its weight: a world-class mining centre with record incomes and productivity, and a tightly knit community where unions, managers and miners forged pragmatic partnerships. Alongside this, artists, migrants, educators and conservationists shaped a fiercely local yet nationally influential cultural identity.

Honest and nuanced, the book holds both civic pride and opportunity, and the town’s contradictions: married women excluded from work, Indigenous people pushed to the margins, and families grieving lives lost underground. Through lived experience and careful research, McLean captures Broken Hill at its zenith: resilient, inventive and deeply human.

Robert McLean AM is a Director Emeritus of McKinsey & Company. Having chaired The Nature Conservancy Australia for 20 years, he now serves as Vice Co-Chairman of TNC Asia Pacific. He is a former Dean of the Australian Graduate School of Management (UNSW), a founding trustee of McLean Foundation, a founding chair of Social Ventures Australia and a former director of Paul Ramsay Foundation. Robert became a member of the Order of Australia in 2011, and was awarded Philanthropy Australia’s Life Time Achievement Award in 2021 and an Honorary Doctorate in Business from the University of New South Wales Business School in 2024. Robert is the co-author of Bulletproof Problem Solving, and The Imperfectionists.

Duncan Peppercorn is a consultant working with corporates, for-purpose and Indigenous organisations to get results for stakeholders. He started the consulting business at Social Ventures Australia and has also run the operations of a global professional services business. He chairs the board of the Centre for Eye Research Australia. Duncan loves Broken Hill.