'Harold Holt was a pivotal prime minister in Australian history. Ambitious, modern and telegenic, he helped bring his party and nation into the late twentieth 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. At the same time, as the Vietnam War raged, Holt dramatically increased Australian troops, telling President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1966 that Australia was ‘all the way with LBJ’.
'In this evocative, intimate and deeply researched biography, Ross 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 seventeenth prime minister.' (Publication summary)
'Harold Holt has been the subject of only one biography and a significant amount of conjecture. The former is arguably the result of a lack of personal papers that might flesh out the life of Australia’s 17th prime minister; the latter is certainly thanks to the bizarrely banal circumstances of his disappearance and presumed death in 1967. Stories of Chinese submarines and suicide so occluded the real question posed by these events that Holt’s first biographer, Tom Frame, felt it necessary to spend a litany of pages debunking them. Why Holt decided to ignore his health problems and enter waters that were notoriously dangerous for even the fittest of swimmers has always been hard to fathom but—in what speaks to the opportunity that biography provides—Ross Walker’s Harold Holt: Always One Step Further offers a convincing and artful answer.' (Introduction)
'I found this book to be somewhat puzzling. Ross Walker writes very well and has a gift for telling stories. I could imagine this being the sort of book that one might purchase at an airport to read on a flight.' (Introduction)
'If Scott Morrison taught us nothing else, it is that we must pay attention to the behaviour of leaders who can take decisions that potentially impact us all. That is reason enough to welcome serious political biography. Yet a reader new to the field might be puzzled to find on her bookshop shelves (or in an online search) multiple volumes on, say, Robert Menzies or Bob Hawke and now Harold Holt – even Scott Morrison – and many others. There is no dearth of choice: the question is how to choose?' (Introduction)
'If Scott Morrison taught us nothing else, it is that we must pay attention to the behaviour of leaders who can take decisions that potentially impact us all. That is reason enough to welcome serious political biography. Yet a reader new to the field might be puzzled to find on her bookshop shelves (or in an online search) multiple volumes on, say, Robert Menzies or Bob Hawke and now Harold Holt – even Scott Morrison – and many others. There is no dearth of choice: the question is how to choose?' (Introduction)
'I found this book to be somewhat puzzling. Ross Walker writes very well and has a gift for telling stories. I could imagine this being the sort of book that one might purchase at an airport to read on a flight.' (Introduction)
'Harold Holt has been the subject of only one biography and a significant amount of conjecture. The former is arguably the result of a lack of personal papers that might flesh out the life of Australia’s 17th prime minister; the latter is certainly thanks to the bizarrely banal circumstances of his disappearance and presumed death in 1967. Stories of Chinese submarines and suicide so occluded the real question posed by these events that Holt’s first biographer, Tom Frame, felt it necessary to spend a litany of pages debunking them. Why Holt decided to ignore his health problems and enter waters that were notoriously dangerous for even the fittest of swimmers has always been hard to fathom but—in what speaks to the opportunity that biography provides—Ross Walker’s Harold Holt: Always One Step Further offers a convincing and artful answer.' (Introduction)
