Tom Frame

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.

When I first heard that Tom Frame’s latest book was about the Voyager disaster, I wondered if the author had come down with amnesia, for he had already published a book on this subject thirteen years ago. However, if the federal government required two royal commissions to come to a conclusion about this naval accident, it is surely appropriate that Frame, having written Where Fate Calls: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy, should write a second book – The Cruel Legacy: The HMAS Voyager Tragedy – to revisit and reconsider this complex and controversial event.

In 1972, at the start of my career as a science journalist, I was asked to produce the Commonwealth Day documentary, a portrait of the spectacular Anglo Australian Telescope being built on Siding Spring Mountain. Together with the Australian National University, an independent board was driving the telescope project. I set off to Canberra to interview the infamous Olin Eggen, then director of Mount Stromlo.