‘Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers’
By Chris Wallace
University of New South Wales Press, 336 pages

A professor at the Faculty of Business Government and Law, University of Canberra, Chris Wallace completed a biography of a prime minister, Julia Gillard, that was scheduled to appear during a hostile political campaign. Dismayed at how a biography might be used against the incumbent, Ms. Wallace withdrew her book and repaid her advance.

Ms. Wallace then wondered what role biographies had actually played in the country’s history, and how much biographers had shaped views of prime ministers and candidates for the highest office. Ms. Wallace discusses the pivotal role of biographers and biography since 1901, when Australia became federated as one nation. That you may not be familiar with this history should be no bar to appreciating the uniqueness of this book, a powerful contribution to the understanding of biography that transcends national history.

Ms. Wallace shows that certain prime ministers welcomed biographical attention, seeing it as a way to shape public opinion, and that others shunned biographers, who might make discoveries that would damage and perhaps even destroy a candidate’s campaign or a prime minister’s tenure in office.

No book like Ms. Wallace’s exists in America or, so far as I know, anywhere else in the English-speaking world. Each biographical subject and each biographer is discussed in terms of educational background, occupation, and personality. The psychology of biography and the tensions between biographers and subjects are given full play in this lucid and insightful book.  

The most riveting parts are about Bob Hawke, the 23rd prime minister of Australia (1983-1991). I can think of no other politician in the English-speaking world like him: an avowed alcoholic, a womanizer and adulterer, as well as a controversial trade unionist before he took office.

As a biographical subject, Hawke was a dream. Even before election to the prime ministership, he welcomed the attention of biographers, especially novelist Blanche d’Alpuget, with whom he had an affair. Hawke’s rivals thought that after certain salacious disclosures he would be defeated. Hawke, who had stopped drinking but not adultery and other disqualifying behavior, believed that Australians would see him as one of their own, which they did.

Ms. Wallace has to be quoted to be believed: “Four things were happening simultaneously” between d’Alpuget’s first interview with Hawke in January 1980 and the book’s publication in October 1982. Firstly, Hawke was on the road to seizing the Labor leadership, the necessary prelude to become prime minister. Secondly, d’Alpuget was making a political intervention to help Hawke achieve his goal, Thirdly, d’Alpuget was symbolically reclaiming Hawke as a man before, after publication, putting him aside. And fourthly, through the biographical process conducted by d’Alpuget, Hawke was settling and projecting an identity which formed the personal plank of the platform from which he pursued and conducted his prime ministership.”

Another writer might have pointed out how many ways Ms. d’Alpuget was performing biographical malpractice, but Ms. Wallace eschews strictures against Ms. d’Alpuget on the way to showing that she produced a compelling biography. This astounding story of biographer and subject, told with such galvanizing celerity by Ms. Wallace, calls into question virtually every bromide about the proper conduct of biographers.  

How John Marshall, one of George Washington’s first biographers, would have been gobsmacked to learn that Ms. d’Alpuget and her interpreter, Ms. Wallace, have given a whole new meaning to Marshall’s view: “A desire to know intimately those illustrious personages, who have performed a conspicuous part on the great theatre of the world, is, perhaps, implanted in every human bosom.”

That Ms. d’Alpuget is a novelist is given some play in Ms. Wallace’s book, but perhaps more ought to be said about the sensibility of someone who writes fiction, which transcends the ethical boundaries biographers place upon themselves. Look what happens when a novelist like Ms. d’Alpuget decides not to respect those boundaries.

Yet that is not the end of the story. Following the end of her affair with Hawke after her biography was published, and two years after Hawke was in office, the couple rekindled their relations and more: That’s right, reader, she married him.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography” and a work in progress: “Making the American Presidency: How Biographers Shape History.”

Correction: Julia Gillard is the name of the prime minister. The name was incorrect in an earlier version.