Review: Political Lives, by Chris Wallace

Originally published in The Age.

Here was a moment. On October 24, 1977, the historian Manning Clark launched Graham Freudenberg’s biography of Gough Whitlam, A Certain Grandeur, at Canberra’s John Curtin House. It’s a scene that hums with nostalgia, luminaries of the Australian left glimpsed shimmering hazily across the years, like clustered peaks in our historic geography.

Within days, Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser called a federal election for early December. Defeated again, Whitlam would leave the parliament in July 1978, and in a way, that was that. Labor and Liberals would continue their arm wrestle through to the millennium and beyond, but somehow the Whitlam moment spoke of something broader and transformative in the national culture, something beyond the routine detail and contest of politics. Grandeur, perhaps.

Political historian Chris Wallace sketches this short sequence of events in Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers, pausing to soak a little in the significance of the episode while quoting correspondence from Freudenberg to Clark, “... we need an understanding of the whole story [otherwise] we shall all fail in the search for the true meaning of existence in Australia”.

Wallace makes her own contribution to that search for meaning in this meticulous survey of political biography. It is a book with a specific focus and scope. As Wallace explains: “I decided to confine the study to the first hundred years of federation. I found, read and researched every biography written in the lead up to, or during, the active political careers of Australia’s twentieth century prime ministers – books that could actually affect their careers.”

Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers by Chris Wallace.

On this last point Wallace knows precisely of what she speaks. The book opens with an explanation of how she shocked her publisher and an eager reading public by withdrawing a biography of Julia Gillard on the eve of publication in 2011. The politics of the moment were “fetid”, Wallace told her publisher, with Gillard pincered between Opposition Leader Tony “Misogyny Speech” Abbott and Kevin “Narcissistic Specificity” Rudd.

Wallace feared there was abundant detail in the book that might be nitpicked and weaponised against the beleaguered PM, and so concluded “after much soul-searching and lost sleep” that “I don’t want on my conscience a destabilisation of the Gillard government just as it rights itself”.

This instant of clarity about the potential power of contemporaneous political biography informs this book, as it traces a 100-year arc in the slow escalation of publicity as a key element in the darkening arts of political messaging. We meet both the political players and, as intriguing, the writers who put words around them. It’s a fascinating prism, often revelatory, and a testament to the author’s capacity to pair very particular scholarship with delightfully enlivening storytelling.

In the beginning, though, scarcely a word was written.

Our first half dozen prime ministers would come and go with scant contemporary biographical detail. These men were “the absent fathers of Australian politics” says Wallace, men whose names are now jumbled in that deeper forgettory, the self-conscious vacuum of settler Australian history.

Edmund Barton, Alfred Deakin, Chris Watson, George Reid, Alfred Deakin (again), Joseph Cook, Andrew Fisher, Deakin (redux) and then Fisher (encore) come and go from the prime ministerial stage with precious few of the words of contemporary assessment that might give their political lives colour and context.

Deakin was “a lifelong memoirist — just not for publication”, though as the century wore on his life would receive due consideration. The earliest account of Chris Watson, Labor’s first PM, does not appear until Al Grassby and Silvia Ordonez produce The Man That Time Forgot in 1999. Fisher’s biography would wait a century. Reid lived in a world of words, but most of them were his. He was, notes Wallace, “far ahead of his time in terms of political self-promotion”, a highlight in that endeavour being a slim volume, The Diplomacy of Victoria on the Postal Question and the True Policy of New South Wales; film rights pending.

The reader is left to wonder at the freight of these early omissions. Did they not think this unfolding federation a thing worth documenting? Was that a view apiece with our subsequent broader aversion to the sum of our history for fear of what some of that history might show? Or did a stoic colonial instinct to go meekly about your business forbid the indulgence of contemporary biography? It’s startling in its way: we look back now on a federation barely three lifetimes old and full of shadows.

William Morris “Billy” Hughes began to cut that cloth a little more flamboyantly, the first prime minister to use a comparative welter of contemporary biography to pursue that most modern of political ends: personal aggrandisement. To quote from one: “Never in the history of the world has a man triumphed over greater obstacles in his rise to power...” You can see the appeal.

Robert Menzies eventually twigged to the possibilities after a long-standing reluctance. At the root of that hesitation, ventures Wallace, “... was Menzies’ scorn for many, if not all of those writers of the first draft of history, who also tended to be the writers of contemporary political biographies: journalists”. But in the end it was a journalist, Allan Dawes, who would work with Menzies on a full, but perhaps overly robust and honest biography. The twist in the tale? It never saw the light of day.

This is a complex and mysterious episode, of a book that may have outlived its political purpose and thus been quietly suppressed. Says Wallace: “A political biography’s potential as a political intervention is contextual. If the context changes, the abandoned Menzies biography suggests, so might the risk and reward calculus attending it.”

This is perhaps how the detailed biography that illuminated the comparatively brief but transformative prime ministership of Whitlam is different: these were works driven as much by their authors’ sense of the historic moment as they were by the political imperatives of their subject. They were substantial in every way.

Freudenberg’s book would “play a major role in the battle for human hearts”, said Manning Clarke. The four volumes detailing the rise, government and fall of Whitlam by journalist Laurie Oakes eventually totalled 1409 pages, 868 of them co-authored with another press-gallery luminary, David Solomon. Here was meat worthy of the Whitlam turning point, and a sense that this first reckoning with the national narrative through biography was at last a serious and thoughtful undertaking.

It’s fascinating to read Wallace’s detailing of motivation and process, particularly on Freudenberg’s book, a work that aimed to detail, said the author, “10 years of struggle for the idea of the Australian parliament as the principal instrument of change and reform in Australia”. The climax was tragic in its strictest sense: “how the parliamentary system itself was used to destroy a government led by the Australian who ... fought longest for the meaningful survival of the system”.

That system would be kinder to one Bob Hawke, but parliamentary distinction was merely a possibility when Blanche D’Alpuget began work on Robert J. Hawke: A Biography in 1980. She would be Boswell to Hawke’s Johnson, Wallace suggests, as well as, in order, “interviewer, lover, estranged lover, biographer and lover, ex-lover, interviewer, clandestine lover, spouse, business partner and, once again, biographer”.

So it was that contemporary Australian political biography came of age in happy tandem with a political moment that increasingly prized public profile and had settled on the means of both creating and influencing it.

Some could do without it. John Howard considered biography to be “superfluous”, while the last word should perhaps go to his predecessor, Paul Keating. “For Keating,” writes Wallace, “contemporary political biographies are imperfect objects which nonetheless possess their own virtue”. This book makes concrete sense of both possibilities.

Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers by Chris Wallace is published by NewSouth, $39.99.