Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Kerry O’Brien, Allen & Unwin, $44.99.
It’s a crusade for Walkley Award-winning journalist O’Brien to seek the truth behind the news. In Australia, he has watched 13 prime ministers come and go and has called the ‘powerful to account without fear or favour’. Even his private life has been lived in public.
It has spanned the post-war era through the maelstrom of the nuclear and digital age – a remarkable time of intense and dynamic change that has no match. The end result is a memoir like no other: an engrossing study is wrapped in nearly three-quarters of a century of social and political history.
In this personal and innovative account told with perception and wittiness, Kerry reflects on the big events, the lessons learned and those ignored, along with the foibles and strengths of public figures who construct our world.
He has witnessed many political upheavals and the personalities who have made history both in Australia and the world. Strolling the history-laden corridors of the White House unhindered while waiting to interview Barack Obama, talking with Nelson Mandela on his first day in the presidential residence in Pretoria in a room filled with the blood-soaked ghosts of apartheid, receiving a haughty rebuke from an indignantly regal Margaret Thatcher or exploring ideas with some of the great artists, philosophers and scientists of our time.
This 871-page tome neatly spans a career straddling more than five decades, 33 of those years at the ABC where he cut his teeth on the trail-blazing current affairs programs This Day Tonight and Four Corners.
“Journalists are there to bear honest witness to history in its most personal as well as its most sweeping manifestations. That is what we try to do. Build a truthful picture of the world as it really is, to shed light on why it is, and ask what it might aspire to be.”
Author of Keating, Kerry O’Brien’s mind also luckily chooses to retain the good memories from his early childhood.
