A long-listed finalist for the 2009 Walkley non-fiction book of the year
"Australia seemed to bring out the worst in Winston Churchill. Often enough to form a discernible pattern, Australia found itself on the wrong side of the very qualities - his strength of will, singleness of purpose, his refusal to 'give way, in things great or small, large or petty', the power of his imagination to set grim reality at defiance, his mastery of the English language - that made Winston Churchill, as the philosopher Isaiah Berlin described him, 'the saviour of his country, the largest human being of his time'."
Winston Churchill was a titan of the 20th Century, universally acknowledged as one of the greatest leaders of his age. Yet his relationship with Australia was a fraught one, tainted by the military failure of the Gallipoli campaign in the First War, and the disaster of Singapore in the Second.
Graham Freudenberg offers the reader history deeply rooted in the slow birth of Australia’s geopolitical awareness, told with the insight of one who spent his life amid the political maelstroms of Canberra and Sydney.
Freudenberg gets the politics right in the struggles of various Australian leaders – especially Menzies and Curtin — with Churchill.
Churchill sought to set his place in history by writing that history, and Freudenberg does a good job at deflecting or defusing some of the slights and backhanders Churchill delivered to Australia in his history of World War II.
Curtin could not publicly confront the gathering geo-strategic storm. The Labor leader’s responsibility was to hold together a party that had a distressing ability to self-destruct.
As Freudenberg elegantly judges, "The ALP had received such terrible blows, and inflicted so many on itself, that its mere survival was marvel. The conscription split (in WW1) had twisted its soul, the Depression had broken its heart and the legacy of the Russian Revolution [...] had clouded its intellect."
Freudenberg’s analysis of the political cost to Menzies of Churchill’s magnetism is masterful. The book elegantly captures the politics and the logic of the Party machinations that killed Menzies’ Prime Ministership in 1941. As a long-time denizen of the Federal Parliament, Freudenberg has a sharp feel for the political assassination of Menzies. After being knifed by his colleagues, Menzies left centre-stage with one of the best-ever exit lines of Australian politics, saying he would "lay […] down and bleed a while."
Written with extraordinary narrative verve, and relying on exhaustive research and a true insider's knowledge of the political world, this is history written at its compelling best; Freudenberg captures the blood and the tears, the love and the loathing.
