Criticisms first. Kim Carr’s insightful yet evasive memoir, A Long March, reads more like a short march. As a key left factional leader in the Australian Labor Party for the best part of forty years, the former Victorian senator squibs on details. He doesn’t explain the subterranean workings of the ALP; doesn’t fess up on the genesis of his feuds with the likes of Julia Gillard, Kim Beazley, Greg Combet, Anthony Albanese, and John Cain; doesn’t come clean on the part he played in the fall of the Gillard government in 2013; and doesn’t take his share of responsibility for the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments’ failure to implement his laudable industry policies. This book should be more revealing, much longer, and much more reflective.

Despite its flaws, A Long March is an important addition to the growing canon about the political suicide of a Labor government that, much like the Chinese Red Army’s famous long march in the 1930s, spent years staging a fighting retreat following the overthrow of Kevin Rudd in 2010. Unlike the Chinese Communist Party’s military retreat, Gillard’s political retreat didn’t end in glorious victory but in three electoral defeats and the agony of life in Opposition.