Whitlam and his public service demons

The great confrontation between Whitlam and Wheeler over the Connor loans proposals goes unrecorded. A clash of Wagnerian proportions, Wheeler, when told by the prime minister that he was on the skids, responded: "Prime minister, I simply seek to inform you of facts your ignorance of which will bring you down." Not the sort of thing you can put in a family biography of this kind.

On the other side, the appointments of Wilenski and Jim Spigelman as departmental secretaries, and the associated uproar, likewise warrant no mention. Even significant changes such as introduction of ministerial staff, and accompanying controversies, are dealt with cursorily, while the account of the introduction of four-weeks' recreation leave leaves most of the tale, notably the attempt to reintroduce union preference, untold. Paid maternity leave similarly seems to slip through the net.

At the time, the eminent political scientist, the Australian National University's S. Parker, complained that it was "not too surprising that political journalists ... present permanent heads to the public as mandarins, often, it seems to me, out of . .. imperfect understanding of the real work of government and the abilities and knowledge of senior public servants.

I sometimes wonder if journalists magnify the outstanding permanent heads into sinister giants from the same kind of juvenile fright as backsliding pupils feel about a stern headmaster." It would seem that this particular mantle has now passed to academics.

This is a very conventional biography generously financed by the Australian Research Council.

Readers of the recent fourth volume of Robert Caro's The Years of Lyndon Johnson will notice many opportunities presented by Whitlam's time as prime minister, which a truly innovative and insightful biographer would have exploited with considerable dramatic and illuminating effect. As matters now stand, Graham Freudenberg's portrait remains unchallenged as the top study of Whitlam in terms of narrative, interpretation and analysis; Jim Walter's The Leader is a clearly valuable supplement.

But for the revelations about Sir Anthony Mason's part in the deeds of Remembrance Day, this biography would have been accounted a very ordinary book indeed. And even they, as his subsequent rebuttal suggests, are incomplete.