Issue Details: First known date: 2023... 2023 [Review] Political Lives: Australian Prime Ministers and Their Biographers
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Unlike the United States and Great Britain, Australia has no tradition of creating pantheons for its national leaders. Nor is there the same approach to the study of leaders’ lives. The nation’s prime ministerial libraries are a relatively recent phenomenon, and, with their small budgets and habitual annexation to university libraries, form no match for the grand edifices of the American presidential libraries. Where the Americans release multi-volume collections of every president’s public remarks, only in the last decade have the transcripts of all Australian prime ministerial utterances – for the period during and since World War II – been afforded their own website. And only four of Australia’s thirty-one prime ministers have attracted two-volume biographies by historians – Alfred Deakin, Billy Hughes, Robert Menzies and Gough Whitlam. There is no Australian equivalent to the American writer Robert Caro, whose five-volume life of Lyndon Johnson – with a vast multitude of admirers sweating on the publication of the sixth and final tome – represents its own monument of patient and forensic scholarship.' 

(Publication abstract)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Australian Historical Studies vol. 54 no. 3 2023 26769573 2023 periodical issue

    'In our first article, Mark Finnane and Jonathan Richards write in response to the provocation of Henry Reynolds that leading figures in the history of colonial Australia – some honoured in the naming of universities, for example – should be held to account for their conduct. Investigating how one such figure – Samuel Griffith, Attorney-General 1874–78, Premier of Queensland 1883–88 and both Attorney-General and Premier 1890–93 – could be held morally responsible for his part in the violent dispossession of Aboriginal people, Finnane and Richards acknowledge the proximities between history writing and the more overtly political work of ‘truth telling’. They test the accusation that in both his political and legal offices, Griffith failed to condemn several well-publicised killings of Aboriginal people including those carried out by Native Police, thus with the apparent endorsement of the state. By examining a series of cases in which Griffith’s decisions and policies are documented, they portray Griffith as both ‘lawmaker’ and ‘war-maker’ – responsible for ‘policies and prosecutions that both harmed and protected Aboriginal subjects of the Crown’. The difficulties of bringing violence – both among and against Aboriginal people – under the rule of British law were not his alone. The ‘politics of memory’ will determine whether this singularly commemorated man will now be singularly condemned.' (Publication summary)

    2023
    pg. 591-593
Last amended 1 Sep 2023 09:27:12
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