Bleeding Off the Page: A Cultural History of the Political Memoir in Australia

Abstract

This thesis is a contemporary history of the political memoir genre in Australia. It examines the politicians, the publishers, and the political issues that have been at stake in those acts of post-facto literary construction. The political memoir has in the past four decades become ubiquitous in Australian political culture, a significant component of the much larger life writing 'boom'. However inelegant, these literary performances have had a distinct capacity for being newsworthy, for bleeding off the page and back into the important political and social debates that have shaped modern Australia. For all its potential for impact and controversy, the political memoir genre has rarely featured as an object of critical study in Australian historiography. Literary and cultural historians have rejected the genre as too commercial, ephemeral or repugnant for close study, while political historians have offered analyses in incisive essays, book reviews, and perceptive codas of political biographies. Rarely has the political memoir been the object of extensive analysis as a component of the broader theatre of political power in Australia. This thesis brings together distinct but connected historiographies of Australian politics, culture, and the book in order to examine the causes and effects of the political memoir in contemporary Australian public life. It is a study based on rich archival collections (draft manuscripts, commercial correspondence, book tour itineraries), a wealth of media sources (ranging from newspapers and television recordings to the voluminous public archive of YouTube), and 46 oral history interviews and email exchanges undertaken by the author. Drawing on these sources and historiographical traditions, this thesis seeks to tell a meaningful story about the growing prominence, salience and commercial significance of the political memoir as a mode of political performance. It argues that politicians' memoirs have been generated by, and have reaffirmed, the new political conflicts and emotional texture that have remade Australian politics since the 1970s. The thesis traces the unfolding of a memoir boom predicated not only on the commercial posturing of publishing houses and the hunger of the press for sensational stories, but equally on the major sources of conflict with the political class in the recent past, and the shifting emotional regime within which politics took place. The chapters examine the role of politicians' memoirs in publicly explicating distinct visions of politics and leadership, establishing personal brands and reputations, publicising passionate ideological debates within and between the major parties, reframing divisive policy debates, contesting a highly gendered political culture, and advancing the cultural authority of the modern political staffer. Memoirists pictured the political process in competing ways, emphasising executive leadership, factional power, the influence of advisors or the power of the press. In doing so, they amplified and entrenched the very real power struggles that shape Australian politics. In placing the political memoir at the centre of these stories, the thesis offers a novel but holistic perspective on the ways those important conflicts have, over time, generated a more emotional and personalised political culture in modern Australia. Show more