Judith Brett

The photo is opposite page eighty. I suspect from the faint fluff in the hair that it’s late 1972. It was taken in the office by a photographer from the Australian News and Information Bureau, a group who were not your art-portrait photographers. The sitting would have been over in a minute; the subject didn’t spend time posing.

The debate about the costs and limitations of power is as old as the ALP, but it has been given new urgency by the changes in the Party since Labor won government in 1983. So far this year, three books have been published which deal wholly or in part with the Hawke government’s relationship with the traditions of the Australian Labor Party: Carol Johnson’s The Labor Legacy, Graham Maddox’s The Hawke Government and Labor Tradition and now Dean Jaensch’s The Hawke–Keating Hijack: The ALP in transition.

The cover story of the first issue of The Australian’s new coloured magazine was of five people who had made a million dollars in their twenties. These young people’s achievements were presented for us to admire and to envy. Nowhere in the interviews with them was it suggested that people might be motivated by different values from the ones that drive these lives.

John Bunting’s portrait of Robert Menzies is a book for fans. Beautifully produced, with a handsome cover, tartan endpapers, and a royal blue marker, it is an ideal gift for those who agree with Bunting’s judgement – that Menzies was ‘grand and magnificent, the best man of his time’. It will also please those who, though more reserved in their admiration than Bunting, remember Menzies with respect and admiration.

Bunting was a member of the Prime Minister’s Department for the last seven years of Menzies prime ministership, and a senior officer in that Department from the beginning of Menzies long post-war reign in 1949. He feels that Menzies suffered a bad press after his retirement and has often been misunderstood; as he can speak with the authority of experience he has taken up his pen to write of Menzies as he knew him.

Reading My Place by Sally Morgan reminds one of how powerful a book can be when there is an urgent story to be told. This book, let me say at the outset, is wonderful.

Sally Morgan and her four brothers and sisters grew up in Perth in the 1950s and 1960s. They are part Aboriginal, but didn’t know it then. They knew they were darker, different, perhaps they were Greek; their mother and grandmother told them they were Indian and this answer satisfied the kids at school, and them for a time.

To have or not to have children: a dilemma made possible by technological advances and the consequent loosening of social roles. Once, having children was both an almost inevitable result of adult sexual activity and, generally, a desired one. For most people, being an adult member of a society implied having and taking responsibility for children. And for many people it still does. But it is now possible for people to choose when to have children, or to choose not to have them at all. No Children by Choice is a collection of interviews with men and women who have chosen not to have children; Mature Age Mothers is a collection of interviews with women who have not had children until they are over thirty (except for Junie Morosi who had three children in her teens and another child at forty-five).

To have or not to have children: a dilemma made possible by technological advances and the consequent loosening of social roles. Once, having children was both an almost inevitable result of adult sexual activity and, generally, a desired one. For most people, being an adult member of a society implied having and taking responsibility for children. And for many people it still does. But it is now possible for people to choose when to have children, or to choose not to have them at all. No Children by Choice is a collection of interviews with men and women who have chosen not to have children; Mature Age Mothers is a collection of interviews with women who have not had children until they are over thirty (except for Junie Morosi who had three children in her teens and another child at 45).

The official myth of the relationship between the elected political leaders and the bureaucrats charged with the administration of their decisions has been that it is for the politicians to set the ends, choose the values, and for the bureaucrats to advise on the means for the implementation of those values. The bureaucratic advice is to be objective and impartial as bureaucrats are there to serve governments committed to very different political values. But the myth has not always fitted the reality; facts and values are not so easily distinguished. James Walter in The Ministers’ Minders: Personal advisers in national government documents the emergence of a new political role in Western parliamentary democracies from this inevitable gap between the administrative and executive arms of government; and he explores the implication of this both for traditional ways of understanding political decision-making, and the range of role options open to political activists.