Neal Blewett replies to Barry Jones

Dear Editor,

I welcomed Barry Jones’s feisty response (February 2007) to my review of his autobiography, A Thinking Reed (December 2006–January 2007). Such autobiographies, the reviews and the commentaries on them are the first drafts of history, and such debates will be valuable to later and more dispassionate historians. Apart from some sardonic barbs, which I may well deserve, he seems to have only one substantive quarrel with the review and that is with my critical assessment of his performance as science minister in the Hawke government.

He constructs three lines of defence. First, he suggests that my assessment is contradicted by other elements in the review, and, in a single paragraph, quotes tellingly to that effect. But what he has done here is to conflate two quite separate aspects of the review and two quite distinct chapters of the book. I did praise his ‘succinct and balanced’, if somewhat detached, general account of the Hawke government. This was to praise him as an historian. On the other hand, I was severe on his highly personalised account in a separate chapter on his ‘Ministering to Science’. This was to be critical of him as a practitioner. There are no contradictory propositions here.