Chris Wallace

In her Preface to Telling Lives, editor Chris Wallace invites the reader to join a thought experiment: a group of biographer-refugees, driven by earthly global warming to reside on planet Alpha Centauri, ask themselves: ‘Did biographers play a role in the downfall of Homo sapiens on Earth?’ Were they, in other words, complicit in the culture of disinformation that contributed to global catastrophe? Writing in the ‘post-truth era’, Wallace highlights the centrality of truth in what has traditionally been termed the ‘biographical contract’.

In June 1971, Sir John Bunting, secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, observed that new prime minister Billy McMahon was ‘the most political of all politicians’: demanding, difficult, always reacting to new, feverish urgencies. The result, according to Bunting, was constant crisis. ‘In fact,’ he went on, ‘I have come to look forward to each new crisis because it is the only way I have discovered of being able to be rid of the existing one.’

We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?

One of the most important pieces of public interest journalism in recent times, and one with direct relevance to Australia, was written from a prison camp east of Moscow in 2021 by Russia’s de facto opposition leader, Alexei Navalny, incarcerated by the Putin government after its failed assassination attempt on him (Guardian, 20 August 2021). During his imprisonment, Navalny had identified a pattern in the memoirs of world leaders. Integrity was never mentioned in their accounts of ‘big agenda’ policy successes, only failures. The argument that pervasive corruption in the government of Afghanistan explained the failure of Western intervention there is one example. Navalny said the pattern invited an obvious question.

Thucydides once said, ‘In a democracy, someone who fails to get elected to office can always console himself with the thought that there was something not quite fair about it.’ Chris Wallace is not inclined to agree with the Greek historian, particularly when dissecting the Labor Party’s shock federal election loss in 2019. In her latest book, How to Win an Election, Wallace nominates the ten things that Labor must get right to succeed at the next federal election, and self-pity is nowhere among them. This approach appears simplistic, even tongue-in-cheek at times, but she has captured the key elements of electoral success and makes a strong case that Australia cannot afford another ALP loss.

Australian Sikhs delivering free meals to fellow citizens in need has been a heart-warming news story against a backdrop of doom and gloom this year as bushfires then the coronavirus laid waste to life as we know it. Public housing tenants in lockdown, international students stranded without support, and bush-dwellers who lost everything in the fires are among those who benefited from their kindness and competence.