Rodney Cavalier reviews the reissue of a classic political memoir that's stood the test of time.
Reviewing a book you first encountered 32 years earlier – devoured in a matter of hours back then – provides wholly different challenges to most reviews. Like the author, this reviewer has to confess to a thorough admiration for the subject (and for the author too, a friend for many years). In 1977 Graham Freudenberg was describing the very recent time of the Whitlam Government, cut short so brutally in November 1975. Emotions were raw for author and reader alike, a sense of injustice abounded in Labor ranks, “hope was a scarce commodity”. The book presented the case for Gough Whitlam. The passage of the 32 years has been kind to the subject. The text has endured and may stand on its merits, a fine capturing of an Australia and an Australian Labor Party that have disappeared forever.
Very little is new – a chapter on Timor, a few photos, an epilogue which considers the standing of the government and its leader against new knowledge conferred by three decades. Freudenberg saw no cause to intrude in his own text. So much detail was invested in 1977 to explain events then recent. These decades later, the episodes unknown to new readers, largely forgotten by those who lived through them, the text is a compendium to the scandals that headed newspapers and news bulletins for day upon day – the VIP affair, Voyager, F111, Harradine. There is the erosion of the authority of Harold Holt, the spectacular emergence of John Gorton and his no less spectacular crash, the inanity of Billy McMahon.
Then followed the election of the Whitlam Government, accompanied by a new string of one-syllable simplicities – Gair, Cairns, Connor, Cameron, Cope, Iraqi loans, Khemlani. The net effect was controversy unending, the denial of legitimacy to the elected government so that it was not ever able to settle into governing. If there appeared to be a succession of crises, one cause was the probability the government would be forced to an election at a time of the Opposition’s choosing. The immediacy of Freudenberg’s account explains so very well the outrage of those who served Whitlam that his government did not enjoy the courtesies Labor in opposition had offered without a thought to the government of the day. No one writing 32 years later could possibly attain the dignified disappointment that Freudenberg’s prose has captured.
The work is not a biography in any sense. Not until page 73 does the author introduce the subject in conventional terms – Edward Gough Whitlam was born in Kew, July 11, 1916. Parents, homes, schooling, university, marriage, war service, legal career, joining the ALP and election to parliament are dealt with in one paragraph. The book’s sole concern is a political life related through the times in which Gough Whitlam served and so much influenced. The beginning takes great care to explain the Menzies hegemony, an era dominated by the war in Vietnam – another version of the communist threat emanating from China that dominated political discourse for all of the 1950s and 1960s. The essence of Menzies’ success was that he “never made the mistake of raising Australian expectations”. Menzies invested nothing in splashy announcements – he made his significant statements on the floor of the parliament. The substance was everything.
Politics inhabited a different world. Parliament was central to conflict, the national theatre in which the parties of government and opposition set out their policies. When in 1965 Menzies took advantage of the absence of Labor’s leader and deputy to announce the government’s commitment of combat troops to Vietnam, the expediency was considered poor form by all. Adversary politics operated inside basic courtesies. Parliament was the primary forum. Neither the government nor the press gallery expected the Labor opposition to make a reply to that statement except in parliament when the parliament resumed the week following.
The ALP once enjoyed a vibrant internal debate. Whitlam’s ambition was no more and no less than achieving for the Federal leader by right of his office to be a part of the debate. Whitlam counted his ability to present an argument, to lead the ALP’s open conversation, to shape and refine and guide. It is a faculty known as persuasion, a skill lost to modern Labor politics.
Gough Whitlam was very much a product and a reflection of the Labor Party in Sydney’s suburbs of the 1940s and 1950s. Not a golden age, but a time when party members thought that they mattered. In the perilous times ahead, Whitlam enjoyed overwhelming support from below because the members recognised he was of and from them.
Unsparing in detail, Freudenberg recounted the means by which Whitlam positioned himself as the obvious successor to Arthur Calwell, a veteran of four decades of Labor infighting. Freudenberg sets out the details of each byplay and feint. Policies divided the ALP. Whitlam campaigned for a limited form of state aid to non-government schools, a strategy that placed him at odds with his leader and the controllers of the Federal ALP machinery. The cause served the additional purpose of placing Whitlam on the side of the modernisers, from which he could argue the merits of recognising the needs of children in private schools as well as highlighting the absurdity of a party organisation that excluded its parliamentary leadership from a role in decision-making.
Whitlam risked all to gain that place at the table. He went within an ace of expulsion in 1966 by the ALP Federal Executive, who did not cavil at rubbing from its ranks the party’s deputy leader. Thwarted in his challenge for the leadership that same year, the landslide defeat in the 1966 election ensured Labor would clock up 20 years in opposition. A shattered party room elected Whitlam as leader only after he had faced a ballot against four very serious opponents. Because he was determined to lead his party and challenge its structures, Whitlam was a divisive figure. He calculated that unity for its own sake was of no value. The Labor Party needed to be rebuilt from the top and from the bottom, a squeeze play that would effect maximum pain on all those in the middle – the controllers of preselection and policy-making.
No one doubted what Whitlam stood for. From his first term in parliament, he had seized every opportunity to express in memorable phrases his attitude to how the next Labor government should behave. His vehicles were memorial lectures, academic conferences, op-ed pages, trade journals, industry gatherings. Most of all there was parliament and its committees, so well served by Hansard, a record of a remarkably consistent set of principles. Whitlam reached out to experts wherever they might be found, universities most obviously. His personal interest inspired people to think that political action might have a point. This work took on a new dimension when it was for the leader of the ALP, the alternative prime minister, a man who might just be the real thing. A moribund ALP enjoyed a surge in membership, young people and the younger workforce reckoned electoral politics could make a difference. They thought they mattered.
The year 1968 was one of great events. Certainties were under challenge. The Tet offensive ended confidence by the American electorate (and the Australian) that the war on the ground was going well. The electoral value of Vietnam ceased for the Liberal and Country parties. A new generation of journalists were occupying the press gallery in Canberra as the stalwarts with memories of Curtin and Chifley retired. In short order the gallery saw the arrival of Laurie Oakes, Maximilian Walsh, Alan Ramsey, Jonathan Gaul and Peter Samuel, among others. The space was available to explore stories in depth. Specialist newsletters run by the likes of Don Whitington and Max Newton were publishing information from insiders. Veteran journalist Alan Reid published an account of the succession to Harold Holt that became a bestseller, spawning an industry for an account of major events inside the covers of a book very soon after those events occurred. Each of these developments enhanced the agenda of a Labor leader who understood the only weapon available to an opposition is words and the use they make of them.
From opposition Whitlam set the agenda on independence for Papua-New Guinea and recognition of China. He was fertile on all fronts – a national health scheme, direct grants to schools, free university education, law reform, equality for women, land rights for Aborigines. The 1972 Policy Speech, one of the grand occasions in an Australian democracy, was based on ALP policy which had drawn heavily on the writings and speeches of the party’s leader over two decades.
Not until page 244, half-way through the book, does Whitlam gain election. Freudenberg, present for every day of Whitlam’s leadership, wanted his readers to understand that every position taken by the Whitlam Government was anchored in all those years of consideration. Polling, market research and focus groups played no role in how Whitlam Labor governed. Nor were its policy imperatives blown off course when world events undermined the public confidence essential for a reform government to effect its program. The world price of oil quadrupled, inflation took off. Human weakness was the staple of reportage as ministers allowed themselves to be depicted an enjoying the creature comforts of office. Winning the Double Dissolution of 1974 was a remarkable achievement given the emerging economy. The victory, however, gave no respite from a conservative opposition determined to reclaim its rightful place. In immense detail, Freudenberg trawls through those troubles. What passed for investigative journalism was reportage of leaks.
The era came to an end with the dismissal. Freudenberg lacerates his leader and himself for not observing John Kerr’s desire for an expanded role for the viceroy, a clue that might have caused Whitlam’s circle not to believe what they wanted to believe about Kerr’s intentions. Freudenberg has inserted new material on how close more than one Liberal senator was to buckling. Three sitting days at most, the supply bills would have passed. Malcolm Fraser played Kerr’s weaknesses astutely; Whitlam treated a man wanting to be stroked as a cipher.
The story ended there. A defeat of the magnitude of 1975 could not be reversed inside one term, certainly not by the man the people had rejected so overwhelmingly. The final pages evaluate the heritage. Labor lost an election in 1975 in defence of representative democracy. The loss and the circumstances of dismissal persuaded every participant that the damage inflicted was a course Australia could not again enter. In recent days the views of Paul Hasluck, the Governor-General who had sworn in Whitlam, have been published: Hasluck would have stayed his hand, confident that a political crisis was certain to be resolved by political means. Whitlam lost an election in 1975. He has won the battle for history. This book was the first flag on the field. Its quality has ensured its enduring appeal. Republishing is warranted.
A Certain Grandeur: Gough Whitlam’s Life in Politics, by Graham Freudenberg, is published by Viking/Penguin Australia, rrp $35.
Rodney Cavalier writes extensively on politics and cricket. He has edited a monthly political newsletter for the past 14 years
