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River

Risk and reward

Biography as political intervention

James Walter

Political Lives: Australian prime ministers and their biographers

by Chris Wallace UNSW Press

$39.99 pb, 327 pp

We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?

Chris Wallace is a shrewd and experienced political journalist; an accomplished biographer with previous works on Germaine Greer, John Hewson, and Don Bradman; and now an academic. This book draws on her PhD thesis. That breadth of experience is significant: she presents an innovative argument, is diligent about archival research and direct engagement with those about whom she is writing, and her lively and accessible style and gift for telling anecdotes will win a wide readership.

Her argument is that contemporary political biography – that is, work published while its subject is still active – can constitute a political intervention that might make or break a politician. She was driven to this realisation by reflecting on the potentially adverse influence of a biography of Julia Gillard she was near to completing while Gillard was still prime minister. It was never intended as an attack biography, yet Wallace became convinced that her analysis of Gillard’s gifts and all too human flaws would be filleted by opponents looking for negatives to amplify their already fierce denigration of Gillard. So, she abandoned the project, and returned her publishing advance.

Turning instead to a review of contemporary biographies of all prime ministers, Wallace seeks to present ‘biography as intervention’, asking how biographies frame the thinking of fellow political actors about leaders, and those who write about them, influence the way they are more broadly represented, and shape the contours of political opinion. Hence, the other novel aspect of her approach: we need to understand how and why biographers wrote as they did. This book is unique in focusing as much upon biographers and their intentions as it does on prime ministers.

Historians will be intrigued by Wallace’s exploration of the few contemporary biographies, the cumulative, long-forgotten journalistic portraits, and the interesting unpublished manuscripts, about our ‘absent fathers’, the early prime ministers, and those who wrote about them. It provokes the question: why was so much useful insight buried or unpublished?

The answer is outlined in the chapter ‘The Menzies Biography Mystery’, where Wallace compares the few works that appeared while Menzies was in office with an unpublished biography, written with Menzies’ co-operation, and possibly largely completed, by journalist Allan Dawes. What is striking, given her elaboration of Menzies’ hostility to contemporary biography, is Wallace’s revelation not only of Menzies’ engagement with the project – his ‘prescient observation of the trend away from ideas and towards people’ – but the production of the biography as a group enterprise, directly involving several of Menzies’ staff and close friends.

This book is unique in focusing as much upon biographers and their intentions as it does on prime ministers

Wallace’s dissection of the annotations of Menzies and others on Dawes’s manuscript, and the subsequent gossip – mostly to Dawes’s detriment, deftly rebutted by Wallace – about why this work was not completed, are engrossing. It is framed by the supposition that the project was endorsed in the early 1950s, when Menzies’ and his government’s stocks were falling, and was then abandoned in 1954 when opinion swung in the Coalition’s favour. A politician wants to control the story. ‘If the context changes, the abandoned Menzies biography suggests, so might the risk and reward calculus attending it.’ This prompts another question: what of the risk and reward calculus for the biographer? Dawes died soon after without pressing his case, but what of those earlier ‘unpublished’ authors – and what, too, of those writing now?

Notwithstanding the serious attention given to the contemporary Whitlam biographies and later to those of Paul Keating, John Howard and others, the centrepoint of Wallace’s argument – extracts of which have been published and widely publicised – is her discussion of Blanche d’Alpuget’s biographies of Bob Hawke. Here was the ideal conjunction of biographer and subject necessary to Wallace’s thesis. Work started in 1980, when Hawke was on his way to seizing the Labor leadership. D’Alpuget believed in him and, with publication in 1982, was making a political intervention to help him reach that goal. Her judgement, shared by her subject, was that his strengths were so apparent that they would offset her exposé of his heavy drinking, philandering, and ruthlessness, a transparency that would inoculate him against the dirt files of opponents. Wallace suggests that the biographical process – and the renunciation of excesses it identified – also helped Hawke to settle and project ‘an identity which formed the personal plank of the platform from which he pursued and conducted his prime ministership’.

What was not transparent at the time – though it was to be detailed with candour in an essay d’Alpuget published in 2008 and elaborated on in interviews with Wallace – was that Hawke and d’Alpuget then began a sexual relationship. But that too was renounced, at least for a time. Eventually, the relationship covertly resumed and once his period of office ended, Hawke abandoned his loyal partner and prime ministerial wife, Hazel, to marry d’Alpuget. Yet, it is argued, with her first biography d’Alpuget symbolically reclaimed her man and by implication her second book – on Hawke as prime minister – sealed his legacy.

It is a provocative argument. D’Alpuget’s transition from researcher, to lover, to political player offends every principle of conventional research, appropriate distance, and full disclosure. But is it different in kind, or only in degree, from the work of other committed contemporary biographers – Graham Freudenberg on Whitlam, Don Watson on Keating, for instance? At the least, it alerts us to what to expect from other contemporary biographers, since Wallace on completing her review remarks on ‘the unexpected asymmetry between the number of [postwar] biographies lifting a subject up compared with the single one designed to drag its subject down’: Stan Anson’s Hawke: An emotional life (1991).

One might question this on several grounds: What about Alan Reid’s vitriolic The Whitlam Venture (1976), published while Whitlam was still Labor leader and before the 1977 election? More pertinent to Wallace’s project, Anson was working with theoretical tools learned as a postgraduate under the supervision of Graham Little, a key figure in A.F. Davies’ psychoanalytically oriented ‘Melbourne School’ of political analysis. Was Anson intending a polemic, or simply following where his analysis led? Little, as Wallace explains, had also been a friend of d’Alpuget, encouraging her to develop the psychological insight that was paired with narrative flair to create her successful biography.

Anson’s alternative ‘intervention’ ruptured that friendship. Did the ensuing controversy, provoked less by Anson’s ‘out-there’ psychoanalytic framework than by d’Alpuget’s attempt to have it withdrawn (by threatening legal action challenging its appropriation of her work) terminate the development of psychologically informed biography in Australia? Certainly, it did in relation to contemporary biography, says Wallace, taking it back to the old business as usual model: ‘Voters know just that much less about their potential and serving prime ministers as a result.’

I am not persuaded. Consider other instances. Don Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart on Keating (2002) was as much influenced by his friendship with and insights stimulated by political psychologist Graham Little as was d’Alpuget’s Hawke. Recollections, Wallace might argue, does not qualify as ‘contem- porary biography’, since Keating was out of office, though still an active public figure. This might also be said of my own book The Leader: A political biography of Gough Whitlam (1980), also a product of the Melbourne School. But it raises a larger problem: how much does this emphasis on ‘contemporary biography’ occlude broader understanding of political biography and the ways in which it is taken up by the reading audience?

Already, reviews and discussion of Wallace’s book have seemingly accepted that early prime ministers have been consigned to the shadows. Really? Voters interested in biography can learn a great deal from conventional biography, which picked up enormously in the mid-twentieth century. A review in 1987, contributing to an Academy of Social Sciences project, identified only four prime ministers who had not been the subject of full biographies. Now there is only one – Frank Forde, who served for just a week in 1945. Politicians (for some of whom reading biography seems a favourite pastime), as well as general readers, can sample the full range.

Further, her lament for the lost possibility of psychologically informed biography consigns not only the essays of Little on Hawke and Keating and Davies on the tasks of biography, but also the marvellous work of Judith Brett on Robert Menzies and Alfred Deakin, to the margins – as well as a host of others working on politicians who never gained the top job (Peter Crockett on H.V. Evatt, Warren Osmond on Frederic Eggleston, John Rickard on H.B. Higgins, Paul Strangio on Jim Cairns, for instance). There is much to admire in Wallace’s spirited innovation, but there is more to be said. g

James Walter is emeritus professor of politics at Monash University, and author of arguably the first psychobiography to appear in what Chris Wallace deems ‘the modern era’, The Leader: A political biography of Gough Whitlam (1980). He has since published extensively on biography, leadership, ideas, and prime ministers.

This article, one of a series of ABR commentaries addressing cultural and political subjects, was funded by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.