'Political Lives is an intimate history of imagemaking and image-breaking in national politics. In 2011, Chris Wallace was writing a biography of Julia Gillard. After seeing the unparalleled onslaught from the Abbott opposition, she cancelled her contract and repaid her advance with the awareness of how hard the biography could hit. Political Lives is a result of that fraught experience. In it Wallace reflects on the roles and motives of biographers and their biographies in the 20th century.
'To discover who wrote biographies, and why, Wallace interviewed every living 20th century prime minister and their biographer, from Menzies to Hawke, Whitlam to Keating. The result is an intimate history of Australian national politics.' (Publication summary)
'A biographer explores the impact of biographies of living politicians'
'Chris Wallace has written an engrossing and original study about the role of biography in image making in Australian national politics. In a story now well circulated, Wallace landed on the topic after spiking her biography of Julia Gillard because of an apprehension that the prime minister’s numerous enemies, both within and outside her government, would ‘cherrypick’ (xi) the book for ammunition to hurl at Gillard. From this, Wallace was spurred to ask questions about the practice of contemporary political biography—those published while leaders were ascending to power or while in office—and the function they serve as an instrument of ‘political intervention’.' (Introduction)
(Publication abstract)
'After decades covering federal politics in Canberra, my embarrassment at not knowing Warren Denning’s Caucus Crisis: The Rise and Fall of the Scullin Government (1937) was partly assuaged when an older colleague revealed the same.' (Introduction)
'We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?' (Introduction)
'Chris Wallace’s new book, Political Lives, is fascinating. Yes, it’s primarily about prime ministers, white men both dead and alive, wielding power. But her vivid writing, her eye for intriguing detail and, above all, her format bring it all alive. We see Australian leaders via a study of the biographies of these men and the journalists and the odd academic who wrote about them. The biographical details and preoccupations of the writers shed almost as much light on their times as on the lives of the political men they survey.' (Introduction)
'We live in an age of leader- and media-centric politics. There is a name and a personality attached to every significant political initiative, and chief among them are prime ministers and premiers. Political junkies will be familiar with the torrent of ‘leader’ profiles generated by the press and well versed in identifying implicit bias. Yet we constitute a ready market for biographies of current (and perhaps rising) stars, and journalists are often first to seize the opportunity to write ‘the first draft of history’. How well do we understand the genre and its effects?' (Introduction)
'After decades covering federal politics in Canberra, my embarrassment at not knowing Warren Denning’s Caucus Crisis: The Rise and Fall of the Scullin Government (1937) was partly assuaged when an older colleague revealed the same.' (Introduction)
(Publication abstract)
'Chris Wallace has written an engrossing and original study about the role of biography in image making in Australian national politics. In a story now well circulated, Wallace landed on the topic after spiking her biography of Julia Gillard because of an apprehension that the prime minister’s numerous enemies, both within and outside her government, would ‘cherrypick’ (xi) the book for ammunition to hurl at Gillard. From this, Wallace was spurred to ask questions about the practice of contemporary political biography—those published while leaders were ascending to power or while in office—and the function they serve as an instrument of ‘political intervention’.' (Introduction)
