Moshe (Morry) Schwartz came to Australia with his parents as an infant and was raised in Melbourne. His father, Andor Swartz, had made a fortune buying and selling land, but when the Nazis came to Hungary, he and his wife (a survivor of Auschwitz) fled. In 1949, his parents were again forced to flee their home, this time from the communists. After making their way to Israel with fourteen-month-old Moshe, they found only temporary respite, being required by Israeli law to leave the country in 1958. They subsequently immigrated to Australia, settling in Melbourne. Moshe, who took the name Morry in an effort to sound less ethnic, initially intended pursuing a career in architecture, but abandoned this after two years of study at Melbourne University. Although only twenty-two, he established, with a friend, a film exhibition business that involved buying the rights to foreign films and screening them in regional Victoria and NSW. The business ended a little over a year later, however, when his partner died.
Schwartz's next venture was Outback Press, an independent publishing company that he formed in 1973 with three friends: Mark Gillespie, Colin Talbot and Fred Milgram. Their decision to enter the field of publishing was influenced very much by the domination of the local industry by British publishing houses, which meant that unknown Australian writers, particularly young emerging writers, had few options in terms of getting their work out to the public.
In order to help generate a cash flow to support Outback Press, Schwartz started a concrete pouring company, Aardvark (a wordplay on 'hard work'). It was a decision that eventually led him towards a long-term career in real estate and business investment. According to Schwartz, in a 2009 interview with Lucinda Scvhmidt, 'Aardvark evolved into Pan Urban, a mid-size property development company that [later] developed Melbourne's GPO after it was gutted by fire, as well as Liberty Tower and apartments at Victorian snow resort Falls Creek.'
Five years after starting Outback Press, the relationship between various partners became fractured, resulting in a 'devastating falling out' when suggested changes in how the company should be run were raised (Colin Talbot, ctd. in Button, n. pag.). The result was that Schwartz and Milgram sided together and forced the others out. Schwartz then converted Outback Press into a new publishing house, Black Inc. (Schwartz means black in Yiddish). Schwartz then went to New York, where he charmed his way into publishing houses in order to buy book rights for Australia. Although English publishers at that time still had the first option on any American books that might sell in Australia, Schwartz realised that there was a category of book that the British houses did not want: the self-help manual. He subsequently published a number of hugely successful titles, including James Fixx's The Complete Book of Running, Irene Kassorla's Nice Girls Do, Robert Ringer's Looking Out For #1, Nathan Pritikin's The Pritikin Diet and H. Jackson Brown, Jr's Life's Little Instruction Book. He also published Blanche d'Alpuget's (q.v.) biography of Bob Hawke.
Although badly burnt by the 1989 property crash (despite having published a book the year before called The Great Depression Ahead), Schwartz eventually managed to regain his momentum and, by 2001, was able to unveiled plans for his company's Watergate complex in Melbourne's then almost-deserted Docklands wasteland. In 2005, he launched The Monthly, a magazine of cultural and political writing that has, to date, managed to survive a period of upheaval for many mainstream media publications. In addition to his publishing ventures, Schwartz is chairman of The Australian Film Institute. The distribution of Black Inc. books (including Schwartz, Nero, and Quarterly Essay titles) is through Penguin Books Australia.
