Political History

How does one review a serious academic study of 950 pages that covers two thousand years of political history? In this case I shall be upfront and declare that I am only reviewing part of Keane’s thesis, and will leave it to historians to discuss the remainder of his book. If I concentrate on the last 300 pages, this is because they contain more than enough material for even the keenest reader, let alone a harassed reviewer.

If you look carefully at a political cartoon, the most remarkable thing is the quantity of latent information it depends on. Opening Russ Radcliffe’s collection from the Howard years at random, I spot something from one of the nation’s less fabled cartoonists, Vince O’Farrell of the Illawarra Mercury. It is a picture of a military aircraft marked Labor, barrelling along the ground. The pilot has a pointy nose and broad girth, and the co-pilot’s voice bubble tells us, ‘I say skipper … That’s the end of the runway and we still haven’t taken off’. The whole story of Bomber Beazley’s last, tortured term as Opposition leader is there in an image and a couple of words that takes only seconds to assimilate.

This is not an airport read; anyone wanting colourful stories about Harold Holt’s private life will have to dig deep. Dr Tom Frame, Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Force, has written the first substantial biography of Australia’s seventeenth prime minister, who succeeded Robert Menzies in early 1966 and drowned on 17 December 1967. The Life and Death of Harold Holt, about ten years in the making, is a meticulously researched and scholarly work, and should become an essential reference for anyone interested in Australian politics and history. It wasn’t a commissioned work, but Frame deals with his subject sympathetically.

Fresh from celebrating one glorious misadventure in Australia’s radical history, the labour movement now confronts a more awkward anniversary. The recent 150th year celebration of the Eureka Stockade brought with it a certain self-congratulatory afterglow. Less sanguine recollections will no doubt colour the fiftieth anniversary of the great ALP Split of 1955. This catastrophe had its origins in a decade-long struggle between right-wingers combined in Industrial Groups, and communists, over union power. The legacy of this Split ran from mass expulsions in the ALP, to collapse of state governments, disaffiliation of a union bloc and, finally, to a new political party, the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), whose preferences ensured that the ALP could not win a federal election for two decades. Whatever malaise debilitates contemporary Labor, the Split remains the party’s greatest tragedy.

This book explores an unprecedented phenomenon: coast-to-coast Labor governments in the states and territories. The peculiarity of the current situation is magnified by Labor’s continuing failure at the national level. Where state politics can boast political ‘stars’ such as Bob Carr and Peter Beattie, federally the cupboard seems bare. Yet this collection reminds us of the unfairness of comparison between Labor’s national failure and sub-national success. Victory is great for your image. It takes considerable historical imagination to appreciate that there was a time when Carr was regarded as ‘a stopgap leader’ – as he was in the aftermath of Labor’s 1988 electoral humiliation. David Clune shows that Carr’s first year or so in office, when the government had a majority of one seat, was no raging success.

Tom and Audrey McDonald have shared a life of commitment together, promoting what they consider to be the political, social and economic interest of the Australian working class.