'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)