Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Ross Walker, La Trobe University Press, $34.99.
This is a significative biography of Harold Holt, the prime minister who helped create modern Australia. Ross Walker has chosen to tell history as a story.
His aim is to strike a midway point between biography and narrative non-fiction. It’s the story of Holt’s public and personal life. Though Holt was happy to talk about his love of the sea and about his life in politics, he said and wrote not a lot about his most personal feelings.
This book is an attempt to fill a gap as little of what has been written about him to date has given much idea of the inner life of the man. It asks how Harold Holt may have become the man he was and why he may have done some of the things he did.
“Holt was a man of contradictions. He was mild-mannered yet passionate; his wife Zara said that ‘everything for Harry has to be lived with his whole heart’. He was measured, but he sometimes exceeded sensible limits and could not leave well enough alone.”
In this suggestive, in-depth and sincerely investigated biography, Walker captures the worlds in which Holt moved and the people who were close to him. He reveals a popular, gentle, yet at times self-destructive man, whose tendency to always go one step further would have fatal consequences. This is a strikingly original portrait of Australia’s 17th prime minister.
Harold Holt was a pivotal prime minister in Australian history. Ambitious, modern and telegenic, he helped bring his party and nation into the late 20th century, following the Menzies years. Nowhere was Holt’s legacy more significant than in the 1967 referendum, and in helping to end the White Australia policy.
Not only are facts important, but you’ve got to get them right. One can’t forget that telling a story means everyone should be able to “see the scene”.
