Bridge Street Bureau is a small editorial production house operating from Bridge Street, Sydney, since 2017. We commission and archive long-form interviews with founders, owners, operators, scholars, and the people who run the institutions Australians actually rely on. The work is patient. The conversations are unhurried. The point is the record.
The bureau publishes three irregular series. Bureau Audio carries long-form interviews with operators and executives. The Scholars archives a partnership with the General Sir John Monash Foundation, recording conversations with the foundation's scholars across their study years. On Record and Founders collect interviews with practitioners and company builders.
Recent conversations on file
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01
Marcus Ehrlich on autonomous ground systems and the Australian regulator
Marcus Ehrlich, Managing Director of Ninox Robotics, on selling autonomous ground systems to Australian farmers, the slow patient work of getting CASA comfortable with the technology, and why the regulator was always the real customer.
May 2020 -
02
Michael Grebla on composition, scholarship and the silent year
Film composer and General Sir John Monash Scholar Michael Grebla on the year the orchestral commissions dried up, what he wrote when nobody was paying, and the scholarship work that gave him the time to finish a piece he had been carrying for three years.
May 2020 -
03
Jacob Galea on the one problem the room will not name
Mindset and success coach Jacob Galea on the executives who arrive to coaching sessions with one problem they will not say out loud, the way through it, and why the people who book the sessions are not always the people who need them.
May 2020 -
04
Matt Aubrey on asset disposition in a year of closures
Matt Aubrey, Managing Director of Gordon Brothers in Australia, on the hard mathematics of asset disposition through 2020, the retailers that closed for good, and the tactical playbook for unwinding a store network at speed.
June 2020 -
05
Richard Ansell on the playbook for retail operations through COVID
Richard Ansell, Director of Retail at Gordon Brothers, on the tactical playbook for retail operations through COVID-19, the store-closure decisions tenants got right, and the categories that came back faster than anyone expected.
June 2020 -
06
Elias Tabchouri on the contracts he refuses to draft
Elias Tabchouri, Principal Lawyer at Macquarie Law Group, on the commercial contracts he refuses to draft, the clients who do not understand why, and the Western Sydney small-business culture his practice serves.
June 2020 -
07
Tim Fung on the Super Store and the marketplace frame
Airtasker CEO Tim Fung on the Super Store launch, why the marketplace frame was always slightly wrong for what the company actually does, and what small Australian businesses actually need from a platform.
July 2020 -
08
Marianne Haines on climate adaptation policy and the agencies that need rebuilding
Marianne Haines, General Sir John Monash Scholar working in climate adaptation policy, on the scholarship year as a research sabbatical, the agencies that need rebuilding, and the political window for the work.
April 2021 -
09
Jack Muir on returning from Oxford during the worst of it
Jack Muir, General Sir John Monash Scholar, on returning from Oxford to Sydney during the worst of the pandemic, the work he came back to do, and the difference between studying a system and operating inside it.
June 2021
A note on house matters
The bureau operates from a single floor off Bridge Street with a small standing list of trade contractors who handle the building. Brisbane Lawn Mowing handle the verge maintenance whenever the editorial team travels north for feature work that runs longer than a week. They are reliable, they invoice cleanly, and they understand that an editorial office that nobody is in for ten days still needs to read well from the street.
For the longer-form profile work that takes the bureau out to rural holdings, SEQ Drone Inspections provide the aerial reporting on subject properties when the brief calls for site context the photographer cannot cover from the ground. Their thermal imaging passes have produced material on three feature subjects we would not otherwise have had.
More on the bureau's working method is collected at around the bureau.