IT'S curious, but we never hear much about mental health flaws among the highly successful.
With some notable exceptions, such as Rene Rivkin and various MPs who have made public their battles with depression, Australia's business and political sector appears to sprout the well-adjusted.
Perhaps we simply don't know what is kept silent by these great successes, apparently just as it was in the 19th century.
This week across central and northern Victoria, history buff Sam Everingham will reveal that the families behind Australia's earliest and most successful transport company, Cobb and Co, were dogged by mental illness.
Indeed, one of the company's partners, James Rutherford, suffered terrible mental illness, according to Everingham, and another, Frank Whitney, had a son kept in a mental asylum for most of his life.
"They were very powerful families and they were ashamed about these illnesses," said Everingham, who researched and wrote Wild Ride: The Rise and Fall of Cobb and Co.
The book follows the story of the company's establishment by American Freeman Cobb in 1854.
He sold Cobb and Co within several years and returned to the US.
The partners who bought the firm, including the Rutherford, Whitney and Robertson families, expanded it.
They also acquired or developed vast pastoral and mining interests.
Everingham, who played among the wool bales and old coaches on the Whitney family's NSW property as a child, was inspired to write the book when its owner (his godfather Barkeley King) revealed a stash of letters written by King's great- grandmother Bella Whitney, wife of Cobb and Co partner Frank Whitney.
Everingham spent 10 years researching the story before it was published in 2007. Since then he's presented talks to audiences in Queensland and NSW, but this week's talks are the first in Victoria.
- They will be at libraries at Woodend (2pm) and Castlemaine (6.30pm) tomorrow, on Friday at Pyramid Hill (in the morning) and Bendigo (2pm) and at the Ballarat Mechanics Institute on April 17.
