POLITICAL LIVES: AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTERS AND THEIR BIOGRAPHERS

What was the story behind Bob Hawke’s famed biography? Why does Paul Keating think biographies of serving politicians are “like Polaroids of a busy life” while John Howard considers them a big mistake? Where is the “missing” Menzies biography? And, why are our early prime ministers largely absent from historical memory? Chris Wallace Australian is a political journalist, biographer, academic and author (most recently) of Political Lives – Australian Prime Ministers and their biographers. On Monday 19 June 2023, Chris Wallace addressed The Sydney Institute to offer some answers to these questions. The paper which follows is taken from an edited transcript of Ms Wallace’s remarks on the night.

POLITICAL LIVES: AUSTRALIAN PRIME MINISTERS AND THEIR BIOGRAPHERS

CHRIS WALLACE

It’s a delight to be here again at The Sydney Institute with old friends Gerard and Anne Henderson. Now, Hendo, it’s actually our 40^th anniversary this year of meeting in the hallowed corridors of Old Parliament House, which was then Parliament House. At that time, Gerard was a young whipper snapper. He’d written a journal article in Quadrant, called “The Industrial Relations Club”. He was a kind of mysterious, powerful figure because he’d written this journal article which had shaken up the way people thought about the industrial relations system. Some people thought for good, some people thought for ill.

Being a working-class kid, I was fascinated by people who thought and wrote and tried to do things in the world. The fact that someone could write something in a fairly small circulation journal and have such a national impact in terms of pivoting thinking – even amongst those who were hostile to Gerard’s article – raising questions that needed to be thought about, this was a big deal.

Gerard wasn’t the easiest person to know. It was 1983 and he was the chief of staff to the then shadow treasurer, John Howard. The typical Gerard Henderson encounter in Parliament House in 1983 went like this. You’d be walking up the corridor and coming the other way would be this very intense fellow, ostensibly looking relaxed but not at all relaxed, and bouncing a black squash ball off the walls as he went along. Folks, that’s different. In Parliament House, there are a lot of many and varied people, but this was unusual.

Then he’d open his mouth and he’d say something like “Chris, thanks for dropping in”, and you’d think, “What?” He was a very discombobulating but fascinating person who – in that great way he has of getting people slightly off balance – just sticks a little hook in your head and you think, “I’ve just got to talk to this guy, he’s different.” You won’t always agree with him – God knows. Our Venn diagrams probably don’t overlap all that much these days in terms of politics. But you’re a very boring person if you only know people who are 100 per cent agreeing with you. You’re never going to learn anything. You’re never going to contribute a lot. It’s so important to keep engaging, not only with people from the past, and keeping them somehow in the current, whatever happens. But also, to keep talking.

I moved to the Canberra Press Gallery in 1987 and joined the then Melbourne Herald. Rupert Murdoch had been given the okay by the then Labor government to take over the Herald and Weekly Times group. Murdoch had plucked out of the Fairfax organisation the editor Eric Beecher and put him in charge of the whole of the Herald and Weekly Times group. He, personally, also made him the editor of Rupert’s dad’s old paper, the Melbourne Herald, and had given him carte blanche. He told Eric, “You’ve got two years to turn this joint around commercially, otherwise I’m folding it into the Herald Sun.” You know how that story ended.

It was an incredible two years and Eric Beecher hired a lot of fascinating people. The first thing he did was move along the then political correspondent for the Melbourne Herald and replace him with Kate Legge, whom you’ll all know from reading The Australian for decades. At the time, she was a leather jacketed, mini skirted hot news breaker. She got to choose her bureau and she hired me to be the Melbourne Herald’s economics writer. I remember when I was broadening out a bit and beginning to write features, one of the first profiles I wrote was of this crazy guy, Gerard Henderson. He actually said to me, “You know, Chris, you might have a bit of a knack for this sort of thing.” Which probably means I was too kind, but it worked out well for a time until I went on to become a biographer. This book I’m going to talk about tonight is partly the product of that.

From different perspectives, what Gerard Henderson and I have in common is a deep conviction about the importance of political history. Political history is pretty unfashionable in the academy these days. In particular, political leadership history is really neglected in mainstream history departments.

This book has been some time coming. For those who have ever had contact with the academy, in the form of trying to do a PhD, will recognise that it is an incredible period of your life. There are many PhD students who come into a department with a plan, execute the plan and pop out the other end neatly and are called “Doctor”, They have learnt, evolved and developed very minimally, if at all. They just get a publication. To me, the greatly exciting PhD student is the one that comes in with a plan, is open to being challenged, to understanding that there’s so much more to understand, that gets cracked open by the process and is prepared to follow a new path rather than execute the plan they came in with. You can see the two groups; it’s quite clear. It is so much harder to be that second type of PhD student. But I would argue it yields so much more richness and depth in terms of their development and output.

I rocked up to the ANU School of History to do my PhD in history as a mid-career kind of person. My first career was as a political journalist. I worked in the Canberra Press Gallery from 1997 onwards in a range of capacities across different media. My favourite gig was as economics writer and columnist at the Australian Financial Review. I still read the AFR first thing every morning, I just love it. But I went along to Australia’s historical establishment where the Australian Dictionary of Biography is produced. It has a very esteemed history. It’s the largest and longest running exercise in collaborative scholarship in Australian history. It’s a magnificent project. It’s still ongoing despite an attempt early this century to kill it off. It’s a big deal. Its current editor is Professor Melanie Nolan, who became my PhD supervisor.

I set out to look at Julia Gillard’s prime ministership. Dear readers, I’m here to tell you, I failed. I failed for very specific historical reasons, and I had to reformulate my topic. That story is in the preface of this book. It’s well known that I set out to write a biography of Julia Gillard, I spiked it, I returned the advance – and this was a very radical thing to do. From the ashes of that project came the thesis for this book. When I began the Julia Gillard biography, she was Australia’s deputy prime minister, she was a formidable performer in parliament, extremely popular and that became an ever-intensifying thing as prime minister Kevin Rudd’s prime ministership declined. It’s well known that he went to the Copenhagen Climate Summit at the end of 2009 thinking he could, magically, bring world leaders together and set up a great climate deal for the world. He declared climate change the great moral challenge of our time and was intensely focused on achieving that outcome. However, Rudd got to Copenhagen and found that world leaders weren’t all that interested in doing an amazing climate deal. This was a big shock for Kevin Rudd, formerly a professional diplomat, who really thought he could deliver it. Most people would say, even back then, it was an unrealistic aspiration.

Rudd came back to Australia and, according to the accounts of those closest to him, was effectively paralysed from that point on as if in shock at being unable to deliver the deal he’d so hoped to achieve. Many in the Labor Party were saying, Kevin, have an election now, do it on climate policy. We’ll win it. He didn’t; he remained paralysed. And in that first half of 2010, as Rudd remained inert and in shock, Labor’s polling sank. People forget these important contextual details, and things conflate as we look back. Whatever you think about Julia Gillard, she was relatively innocent in that whole episode of replacing Kevin Rudd as Labor leader.

In fact, Labor tribal elders at the time wanted Kevin Rudd to lead Labor to one more federal election. They thought he could win another election. They did not want to get rid of him at that time. But what happened was that, as the polling sank, backbenchers got nervous, especially as an election had to be held that year. Were they going to lose their seats? The backbench got rebellious. And, of course, Bill Shorten, never one to miss out on the leadership struggle, got involved. And from that moment, it was on.

Julia Gillard was one of the Labor elders at that time who preferred Rudd to stay on as Prime Minister. It was not a timing of her choosing. But, once Bill Shorten got involved and things amped up, she had really little choice. What was she going to do? Say, “No, I don’t want it”? There was frankly no viable alternatives at that time. So, the Rudd prime ministership was essentially a dead branch of a tree that just dropped to the ground. With that, people signed up for the line that Julia Gillard was the Lady Macbeth of Australian politics.

You would all be aware that Julia Gillard’s prime ministership was a patchy affair. She did manage to achieve the negotiation with the crossbenchers to form government, bettering Tony Abbott at that. She did run a remarkably effective parliament with the assistance of Anthony Albanese as leader of the government in the House. Albanese did a lot of the negotiations for her, and with her, to get bills through. She achieved a massive legislative agenda, including some major reforms. But she was being torn apart between Tony Abbott’s Coalition opposition, from one side, and the Rudd allies inside caucus coming from the other. Gillard was caught in a terrible pincer movement. And my book was going to land right in the middle of that minefield. Allen and Unwin’s publicity manager said, “Look, we’ve got to do this launch at the Press Club; there’s a feeding frenzy going on, you know, the people just want to eat your book.” I thought this was a pretty disturbing development. This is not who I was, as a biographer.

I was not someone who wanted to create material for people to use maliciously against a serving prime minister. It was not that I was a Labor person favouring Gillard. You’ve got to remember, there was a significant number in caucus also gunning for Gillard. So, there was plenty of scope to be a Labor person keen to get such a book out. But what I felt deeply was that to be a biographer is to accept a great responsibility, especially with a living subject. You’ve got to be accurate; you’ve got to be fair. But at the same time, you’ve got to deliver everything. You’ve got to do it with the necessary nuance. And you hope, and I think it’s reasonable to expect, a nuanced, thoughtful reaction. Not some mad, crazed feeding frenzy, where things that in a normal political atmosphere, instead of a supercharged one, would have been matters for interest, discussion, reflection debate. Gillard did not deserve to be torn apart by wild dogs in the Australian Parliament. She didn’t deserve it. So, I spiked it, gave my advance back and then resolutely never answered the question asked of me so many times – “Why didn’t you publish that biography of Gillard?”

I then set out to do my second PhD on that topic. And to do that I identified every biography written of an Australian twentieth century prime minister, written in the lead-up to or during their term of office. I was not at all interested in biographies written after the prime ministers had left office. Only those written in the lead up to or during their term of office, to see how their careers were affected by it. I had to identify the books, find out who the biographers were, work out their motivations, consider the motivations of the subjects, and look at the dynamics between the subject and the author, between the biographer and the politician. What was going on in that exchange?

These were very much the questions on my mind. And at the back of my mind was a comment made to me when I was writing my first biography of John Hewson, when he was opposition leader. They said, “Chris, you know, you got to be careful with this stuff. Biography is like a form of sorcery.” So that is the genesis of the book which has produced some unexpected results.

I’ll just briefly explain the structure. I call the first chapter “Absent Fathers”. It looks at the first half-dozen Australian prime ministers who were Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin, Chris Watson, George Reid, Joseph Cook and Andrew Fisher. It’s astonishing how little was written about those first six prime ministers. In some cases, it was 100 years after their prime ministership that a first book got written.

We have a national forgetting of these figures, too. So little written. With such enormous effect. This is just a lacuna in our national consciousness. And some hardy journalists tried to fill it. People like Alfred Buchanan, and Herbert Campbell-Jones were journalists in the press gallery when parliament met in Melbourne for the first quarter century of its life. They wrote contemporary sketches of those early prime ministers, kept their notes and subsequently tried to publish them. But no one was interested. Their manuscripts are languishing in the National Library of Australia collection right now.

The second chapter, “The Great War to the Great Depression” covers Billy Hughes, Jim Scullin and Joseph Lyons. There’s been quite a lot of work on Hughes. And I cover some of some of that here. But Scullin and Lyons, were scandalously neglected. The third chapter is called “Menzies Biography Mystery”. This is one of my very favourite chapters. Bob Menzies absolutely hated journalists, and he absolutely hated biography of living subjects. We think back on Menzies, and we see a legend, a titan, an extraordinary politician. The truth is, for a time, he was a failed politician. He, effectively, lost the confidence of his own cabinet and had to depart as Prime Minister first time around. Then he remade himself. But even when he won the 1949 election, he was still tremendously unpopular, so unpopular, that he was prompted to, against his better judgement, collaborate in the production of a draft biography with a journalist called Alan Dawes, who had done work for the Liberal Party and who was a friend of the party. Dawes had been press secretary for a few early non-Labor government ministers.

Manuscript material in the National Library offered me a jigsaw puzzle with many pieces missing. It suggests the picture of a journalist interviewing Menzies on tape, transcribing the tapes, writing up chapters, sending them to Menzies office, where the Prime Minister’s secretary would distribute them to the press secretary Stuart Coburn, to Menzies brother and to Menzies. It was a collective effort to produce a Menzies biography which never saw the light of day. And the question is why? You have to read that chapter to find out but it’s a good story.

The next chapter, “World War Two to The End of the Menzies Line”, covers John Curtin, Ben Chifley, Harold Holt, John Gorton and Billy McMahon and is pretty slim pickings. Except with Gorton. Alan Trengove wrote a really interesting biography of Gorton after he became prime minister. In his biography, Trengove anticipated that thing we’re so familiar with now, where politicians structure the injection of difficult aspects of their lives into the public debate, so that they can get it out structured their way rather than have their enemies structure it in a way that could hurt them. It has become a kind of inoculation by biography against political scandal. And Alan Trengove was the first person to do that in Australia. He disclosed quite controversially for the times Gordon’s illegitimacy in a way that was sympathetic, factual and informed. That was important.

Chapter five is “The Modern Era Begins”, with Gough Whitlam and Malcolm Fraser. The Whitlam chapter is really quite something, because the books were so good. There was Laurie Oakes’ quartet of books on Whitlam, one of which was written with David Solomon, then also a press gallery journalist as well as a legal scholar. These books offer an astonishingly good portrait of a politician emerging. We think we know Gough now. But Laurie Oakes started the project that suggested Whitlam was a conundrum, and set out to work out who he was, what was he about, who this strange animal was. So large, so eminent looking, so toffy, and who was a Labor leader.

Of course, the other figure in the Whitlam biographical realm that’s so important is Graham Freudenberg. Whitlam’s great alter ego, his press sec-cum-political advisor-cum alter ego. They were so close they could finish each other’s sentences. Freudenberg wrote A Certain Grandeur after the dismissal. It’s such an intelligent book in unexpected ways. These years are a very fascinating period in political biography in the twentieth century.

Chapter six is “Bob Hawke Writ large”. Well, where do you start? I don’t care where you look in twentieth century political biography, there’s no better story than Blanche d’Alpuget’s book, Robert J. Hawke, and its role in reconstructing Hawke’s own psyche. In effect, it got him into race worthy condition. So that he could actually stay off the grog and become prime minister and be an effective prime minister. It is a phenomenal story.

And, of course, it was the third Hawke biography. There was already Robert Pullen’s and John Hurst’s. These were of a completely different complexion and importance. John Hurst’s biography of Hawke is written very much from the kind of drinking mate perspective of Bob Hawke, the kind of Trades Hall character, knockabout bloke kind of thing. There is just a little hint at the end about the potential dangers for Hawke with his drinking.

The Robert Pullen biography of Hawke is a fantastically solid journalistic job from ethical, excellent research. Robert Pullen held Hawke’s career in his hands, as he had learned that Hazel had aborted twins so that Bob could take up his Rhodes scholarship. Pullen knew that. But being a journalistic craftsperson, he would not write it unless he found a corroborating source. That is how we were all trained as old school journalists – you find something out but, unless you find a corroborating source, you can’t write it. Pullen didn’t write it. Had Pullen done so, Australian political history would certainly have been different. Blanche d’Alpuget also found out about it, but in deference to Hazel Hawke’s privacy and preference that it not be disclosed, she didn’t write it either. It is a classic kind of ethical dilemma biographers face – how they deal with that and the consequence for political history. Finally, there is “Polaroids of a Busy Life” where I cover Paul Keating and John Howard.

I made a point of tracking down and interviewing the biographers and their subjects in the case of each living Australian prime minister, to get that extra dimension of what’s going on between biographer and subject. I offer a few conclusions about political biography as a political intervention. I’ll just read the very last paragraph of the book, rather than paraphrase it, because I thought long and hard about how to put this. This is the last paragraph of political lives.

Reputation is political capital. biographers are among those who coin it and who can destroy it, as well as providing the material for others to do the same for their own multifarious reasons. None of the biographers in Australia’s first century of national politics faced the potential frenzy I faced with the Gillard project, early in its second century. Pressing on would have constituted a political intervention of an unintended kind. Some will say not pressing on itself constituted a kind of political intervention. To which I would respond by asking whether contemporary political biography demands a variation on the Hippocratic Oath. First, do no harm, unless it’s deserved, and intentional.