Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers

Abstract

on the conviction that politics matters. His conceptualisation of ‘the political’ is relatively broad, encompassing Australians’ expectations of their political system, the relative effectiveness of that system, and actions undertaken to shape and remake that system. It is a history of ideas as well as institutions, followers as well as leaders. From the breadth of his vision follow several notable features, unthinkable to the ‘political historian’ of an earlier period. While readers will find in this book a reliable and often penetrating discussion of major figures and decisions taken by national leaders of colonies, states and Commonwealth, Bongiorno commences his narrative with a discussion of First Nations’ self-government. Across the volume, he often looks beyond the dominant national political leaders and scrupulously considers local and regional variation. He discusses Chinese democrats alongside white Britons. He gives attention to women’s collective campaigns; labour-movement action, institutions and ideas; First Nations’ struggles as well as exclusion; anti-socialist mobilisations; migrant politics; environmental campaigning; and contemporary challenges from the right. Reflecting the insights of cultural history, Bongiorno is concerned to understand politics as a performance, and he offers sensitive readings of the stump, the emporium, and the hotel as spaces of democratic assertion and exchange. He scrutinises the changing form of ‘the politician’ as a type, considers leaders as gendered and embodied actors, and interrogates the language and meanings of political claims. The book is a narrative history, and Bongiorno is a buoyant and energetic stylist, his craft honed not only in earlier works of history, but also in repeated contributions to public debate. Dreamers and Schemers is enlivened by often subtle penportraits of keyfigures, a capacity to work outwards from a dramatic episode to a larger pattern, an eye for an arresting or evocative detail, and an often amused and amusing spirit. The book unfolds in nine chapters, which span a period from ‘the earliest times’ to the ‘age of COVID-19’. The pace is unhurried, the scope formidably wide, and yet the volume less than 500 pages. Bongiorno aims to reach a readership beyond expert scholars. He deserves to engage the interest of very many Australians. Bongiorno’s authorial choices necessarily bring with them limits as well as possibilities. The narrative approach means that the book is not organised as an argument about the form or significance or transformation of Australian politics. Bongiorno concludes that the most recent election disclosed the ‘resilience and adaptability’ of Australia’s ‘distinctive democracy’, but the preceding pages have only hinted at what was or remains ‘distinctive’, and there is no systematic explanation for such distinctiveness (or its relative decline). The book’s title, ‘Dreamers and Schemers’, suggests a sustained interaction of idealistic visionaries and grubby deal-makers, but if this is an abiding dynamic of political life, it is not consistently deployed as a framework of interpretation or explanation. The breadth of Bongiorno’s approach is commendable, but since his account remains organised around Australia’s ‘political system’, movements that have challenged that system tend to appear episodically and only at moments of direct engagement with the state. Readers with a less formal understanding of power and resistance may be left wishing for a more complete break with the traditions of ‘political history’, with its emphasis on government and its administration as the sun around which all else orbits. But this is ‘a’ political history of Australia, and the indefinite article underlines the space for future interpretations. Bongiorno’s ambitious contribution to the genre is laudable for its civic-mindedness, impressive for its range, and overwhelmingly successful in its own terms. It vindicates Bongiorno’s claim of the importance of politics. It establishes, also, the significance and the value of a renovated historical approach.