Political Memoir

Jenny Macklin was an unusual politician, so it should not surprise that hers is an unusual political memoir. Anyone looking to Making Progress for salacious tales from the internecine warfare of the Rudd-Gillard Government, in which Macklin was a senior minister, will be disappointed. Macklin is widely regarded as the most serious policy thinker among her generation of Labor politicians, and this account of her career, written in collaboration with Joel Deane, will only enhance that reputation. It is a book for policy wonks, and one that is perfectly timed to remind readers that, for all the sound and fury of the recent election campaign, government is a serious business.

If we adopt a charitable view about political memoirs, it is generally preferable that serving or newly departed politicians should pen their reminiscences. If they are any good, it is a bonus. To have their particular ‘take’ on events and personalities is a valuable addition to the historical record, even if such products err on the side of self-indulgence and egocentricity. Most politicians, unfortunately, take their secrets with them when they go. Moreover, to write, or collaborate in, one’s memoirs while still in public office is a remarkable achievement – undertaken only by Peter Beattie and Bob Carr in recent times.

Since his (involuntary) retirement from politics in 2007, John Howard has gone to some lengths to encourage comparisons with Robert Menzies. He authored a lengthy paean to Australia’s longest serving prime minister (2014), appeared in a television series to appraise his leadership and era (2016), and curated an exhibition on him at the Museum of Australian Democracy. And while he does not don the knightly robes that Menzies did on the cover of his volume of essays, The Measure of the Years (1970), Howard does ape Ming’s serene, far-seeing gaze on the dust jacket of this, his third book, A Sense of Balance.

In the chaos that opened the Trump administration in 2017, foreign governments were looking for any and all insiders for information. Australia turned to Joe Hockey, who turned to golf. In this very readable account of the former treasurer’s four years in Washington (2016–20), Hockey tells us how he navigated ‘TRUMPAGEDDON’. This is a story replete with funny anecdotes and unsettling observations. Diplomatic leaves the reader convinced that diplomacy is more about art and luck than about science and process. It is also oddly reassuring about the vicissitudes that the Australia–United States relations can weather, even under the most weird leadership.

Barack Obama has written the best presidential memoir since Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, and since Grant’s was mostly an account of his pre-presidential, Civil War generalship – written at speed, to stave off penury for his family, as he was dying of throat cancer – Obama’s lays some claim to being the greatest, at least so far. This first volume (of two) only reaches the third of his eight years in the White House.

Gareth Evans is one of the more interesting figures from the Hawke–Keating governments, not alone as a high achiever in a talented team, nor in the tenacity that saw him remain so long in the inner circle, but unusual in forging a cosmopolitan career of such substance thereafter. His political memoir demonstrates the continuity ...

Much like her government, Julia Gillard’s memoir resembles the proverbial curate’s egg. Where her passions are involved, as with education (‘Our Children’) or the fair work laws, we are provided with a compelling policy read. Where they are not, as in large slabs of foreign policy, the insightful competes with the pedestrian, enlivened admittedly with her personal talents in handling the great and the good – handballing a football with Barack Obama in the Oval Office, for instance. A chapter on ‘Our Queen’ and the republic is rather jejune, though Gillard has a nice line on changes in the royal succession as providing ‘equal rights for sheilas’. The fact that ‘every prediction the departments of Treasury and Finance ever made about government revenue turned out to be wrong’ makes for dispiriting reading on fiscal matters.

There is a built-in paradox for the Greens: they need to both persuade people that we face major ecological disasters and at the same time hold out hope that we can respond meaningfully to them. To do this requires the sort of corny and touching optimism that gives Bob Brown’s book its title.

Optimism is neither a conventional memoir nor a political autobiography; it is rather a collection of sketches from the life of a man who will be remembered as one of the pivotal figures of Australian politics in the two decades that straddle the new millennium. The style is largely prosaic, excepting moments of real feeling when Brown describes the Tasmanian wilderness and his relationship to it.