'Six years after vacating his position as the longest-serving Premier of New South Wales, Bob Carr returned to politics in his dream job: as Foreign Minister of Australia and a senior federal cabinet minister.
'For 18 months he kept a diary documenting a whirl of high-stakes events on the world stage – the election of Australia to the UN Security Council, the war in Syria and meetings with the most powerful people on the planet. And they all unfold against the gripping, uncertain domestic backdrop of Labor Party infighting, plummeting polls and a leadership change from Gillard back to Rudd.
'This compelling diary provides an intimate glimpse into the day-to-day workings of a foreign minister and proves that Carr is not only a master politician and statesman, but a great writer as well.' (Publication summary)
Dedication:
As always, to H, my co-conspirator.
Epigraph:
There comes a time when you
realise that everything is a dream,
and only those things preserved in writing
have any possibility of being real.
–James Salter, All That Is (2013)
'Genres of written communication do not take place in a vacuum; rather they are fundamentally influenced by historical context and socio-political circumstance. In recent years, the political memoir genre in Australia has moved away from its tradition of personalised narrative towards a more assertive mode of historical representation. Drawing on empirical and oral history research, this article examines recent alterations in the genre as manifest in six political memoirs produced by senior members of the Rudd–Gillard Labor government. I conclude that Australia's embittered and combative political culture has driven changes in the aesthetic and epistemological features of the genre itself. This research demonstrates that the “trust deficit” embedded in contemporary democracies is manifest not only in the daily ephemera of public discourse, but also in long-form modes and genres of political communication.' (Publication abstract)
'What do Labor memoirs reveal about the 2010 leadership change?'
