Bob Carr

The latest publication by former New South Wales Premier Bob Carr, a prolific author since leaving federal politics in 2013, is a political memoir that defies the norms of this often-predictable genre. Largely abandoning chronological narrative, Carr offers a disjointed sequence of nearly ...

‘Dear Dr Blewett, I am writing to you ... concerning your intention to publish the diary you kept during the first Keating Government ... Whether any legal action, criminal or civil, is initiated would be entirely a matter for the Commonwealth government and relevant authorities ... 

Books may furnish a room but they also furnish the mind. As somebody once said, ‘A man is known by the company his mind keeps’. One of my first moves on visiting a home is to check out the bookshelves, to discover something about the owner’s mind. Bob Carr, New South Wales’s longest-serving premier, has conveniently outlined his reading life in this opinionated, sometimes infuriating but always compelling account, which allows us to read his mind without physically visiting his library.

Not since Henry Parkes has New South Wales had such a literary-minded premier as Bob Carr. Parkes published his own poems and wrote two earnest volumes of autobiography. Carr, so far, has tried his hand at a novel, a memoir and a diary, as well as writing lots of occasional pieces. Carr, like Parkes, was a journalist before becoming a professional politician. Parkes, too, dragged himself from humble beginnings to a position where he could use official letterhead to arrange meetings with those he admired. Carr has sought out writers such as Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal to autograph his copies of their books and to join him at dinner. Once established, Parkes’s main aim was to stay in power. It was his only source of income, so his manipulation of factions, policies and the electorate all focused on that end. Graham Freudenberg has said of Carr: ‘Labor politics is central to Bob’s identity … if you took the politics away from Bob there would be nothing much left.’ But unlike Carr, Parkes did not have the option of moving to federal politics (he died before 1901). After Federation, NSW politics was stripped of talent as its leaders, including Edmund Barton, William Lyne and George Reid, made the move. Reid, a long-serving and highly effective NSW premier, is one of only two state premiers ever to have succeeded in becoming prime minister, the other being Joe Lyons.

Over the past few years, Bob Carr has been tweaking the veils that shroud his inner self. In essays, speeches and book reviews, he has teased and titillated us with glimpses of his diary and extracts from his unpublished autobiographical novel, Titanic Forces. Now, with Marilyn Dodkin’s Bob Carr: The Reluctant Leader, built around Carr’s personal diary, we have a grand disrobing. Although she has used Hansard reports, newspaper files and interviews, there would be no publishable work without the diary, quotations from which average two per page. Indeed Carr’s words constitute some thirty per cent of the book. The diary provides the work’s narrative structure, and, when the diarist flags, so does the book. A result of this approach is that the author’s rather pedestrian prose is often outshone by the diarist’s vivid and sardonic style.

As W.H. Auden observed more than forty years ago: ‘To the man-in-the-street, who, I’m sorry to say, / Is a keen observer of life, / The word ‘Intellectual’ suggests straight away / A man who’s untrue to his wife.’ Perhaps such popular attitudes explain why intellectuals as politicians are rare in the bear pit of modern Australian parliaments ...