Launch of Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man

The Hon Tony Abbott MP, Prime Minister of Australia, launched Gerard Henderson’s Santamaria: A Most Unusual Man (MUP) on Thursday 30 July 2015 at the Melbourne offices of Arnold Bloch Leibler. The Prime Minister was introduced by the event’s host, Mark Leibler AC and MUP CEO and Publisher-in-Chief Louise Adler spoke on behalf of MUP. In launching the book, Tony Abbott described B A Santamaria’s life as “a magnificent failure that changed and improved our country and hundreds, if not thousands, of its leading citizens”.

LAUNCH OF SANTAMARIA: A MOST UNUSUAL MAN

LOUISE ADLER

Thank you very much Prime Minister. I’d like to also begin by welcoming the guests here tonight. A warm welcome to our Prime Minister, one of MUP’s most loyal and generous authors. To our host this evening, Mark Leibler, many thanks for making it possible for us to hold the launch at the offices of Arnold Bloch Leibler in Melbourne. To current and former parliamentarians, to the Santamaria family and distinguished guests.

I should acknowledge that I do feel a little guilty reminding the Prime Minister of his duties as a MUP author of importuning him all too frequently to launch our books. But I only felt a twinge of guilt tonight because I knew that, when it came to the subject of BA Santamaria, the PM has a track record as an intelligent and thoughtful analyst.

Some years ago now I remember listening to him launch Patrick Morgan’s edited collection of B A Santamaria’s papers for MUP – B A Santamaria – Your Most Obedient Servant. It was clear that Tony Abbot’s relationship to Santamaria was personal and professional, emotional and intellectual, so I could think of no one more appropriate to launch this biography. Thank you very much Prime Minister. Your support has been invaluable to MUP. I know you support the Australian book industry, and I know we will have your support into the future. It matters a great deal in these challenging times for those of us who are committed to books about ideas, books that matter, books about the subject like the one we’re talking about today.

The relationship between MUP and B.A. Santamaria dates back a very long time, way back to the 1970s. We published, not before my time of course, two of his biographical studies of Archbishop Mannix and Australia at the Crossroads. But B A Santamaria was a prolific writer and, at times, even had to avail himself of the support of other publishers including OUP, Campion Press, Connor Court and the Hawthorn Press. I hope someone will illuminate what the Hawthorn Press was for me later. I expect it might have been run out of the Santamaria home. I can see Paul Santamaria nodding over there. In the last decade MUP has continued to work on documenting the B A Santamaria contribution to national affairs with Patrick Morgan’s edited collection of Santamaria papers, a compendium of selected documents from his professional life. Some years ago we became aware of Gerard’s interest in a biography of Santamaria and that he was actually writing one. We expressed our interest in publishing it once he was finished writing.

Authors do come in a variety of personalities but very few in my experience exhibit the fierce independence of Gerard Henderson. From the cover image through to the refusal of an advance which is very, very rare, to the guest list, to tonight and even through to the running order, he left nothing to MUP. So the idea of the publisher as the hand maiden to the author’s creativity has been entirely incorrect in this instance.

The author Gerard Henderson is in fact a slightly disturbing foretaste of the future of Australian publishers where authors don’t need us for anything. For the present, thankfully, we still have some small role to play at least in enjoying the launch.

Now biographies are a problematic literary genre, most of you here today will enjoy and savour the form. What are biographers’ responsibilities to their subjects’ reputations? What niceties should be observed regarding the subject’s family and friends? Are the most interesting biographies those who take for their subject a flawed individual? Does the author actually have to like their subject?

It’s a pain staking craft and I think when you read this book you’ll see the work and the research that has had to go into it. As one English historian remarked, biography is a definite region founded on the north by history, on the south by fiction on the east by obituary and on the west by tedium. Biographies of political figures must account for the man or the women, for their talents and their peccadillos and for the larger world in which the subject operates. Biographies are a delicate balance between detail and broad brush stroke between chronology and anecdote between a men, his times, his friends and his enemies.

Gerard Henderson has been thinking about B A Santamaria for many years and this biography has been a lengthy project and the result, I think, will provide readers with a really new and fresh and original interpretation of his life and the work. Biography at its best is a revelation. It offers us new insights into significant individuals but also allows us a reader’s privileged access to a conversation between the biographer and his subject.