Reappraising Curtin.(Book Review)

Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's Greatest Prime Minister, by John Edwards; Allen & Unwin, 2005, $35.

FOR A NATIONAL LEADER there can be no greater challenge than to lead a country during a time of war, particularly a war when the country itself is under threat of invasion. If you manage to see off the threat, you are entitled to a high ranking when historians come to rank leaders. John Curtin's role in leading Australia during the Second World War has always seen him placed near the top of any list of our prime ministers, and usually at the top if the list is compiled by a Labor partisan.

The view of Curtin as our greatest leader is summed up by the title of a little-remembered 1980s biography by Norman E. Lee entitled John Curtin: Saviour of Australia. The two better-known Curtin biographers, Lloyd Ross and David Day, wrote more balanced but still sympathetic works. Now, we have a new book about Curtin, written by John Edwards. Edwards' work, unlike its predecessors, is not a full-length biography of Curtin; it is more a lengthy biographical essay focusing on Curtin's prime ministership and looking at earlier parts of his life only where they can be seen to have influenced his actions in the nation's highest office.

I approached Curtin's Gift in a charitable vein, because Australia needs more people with the range of experiences that John Edwards brings to the task of writing. People whose careers straddle the private sector, academia, political offices and writing historical biography are rare enough that we should do all we can to encourage them. Edwards' previous piece of political biographical writing was a 500-plus-page effort on Paul Keating. In that case, Edwards was helped in his understanding of the subject by his time as an economic adviser in Keating's office. With the Curtin book, he has had to make do with a year spent undertaking a fellowship at the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library in Perth.

Edwards presents a radical new interpretation of Curtin. While seeking to maintain Curtin's position as "Australia's Greatest Prime Minister", Edwards wants to replace the conventional set of reasons for this status with a completely new set and argues that "Australians cherish the memory of ... Curtin, mostly for the wrong reasons". He presents an intriguing argument that Curtin has been overrated for his role as a wartime leader, but underestimated in the significance of his actions in shaping the modern Australian economy. Unfortunately for Edwards, and perhaps more so for Curtin's historical status, the argument is more persuasive on the former than the latter.

On the economy, Edwards does make a reasonable argument for the fact that it was Curtin rather than his Treasurer Ben Chifley who drove much of his government's economic policy. (Ironically, in this regard his arguments sound very similar to those of Bob Hawke promoting his role against that of his Treasurer in the 1980s.) Similarly, Edwards does explain that the policies Curtin was pursuing were part of a long-held and coherent framework. Curtin indeed seems to have been a Keynesian before Keynes himself and as these ideas had, by 1941, become very much the fashion, one can certainly say the times suited him.

Making the case for Curtin's place vis-a-vis Chifley is one thing, but the argument for the significance of the government seems weaker. Edwards is effectively trying to overturn the model of the Australian Settlement painted by Paul Kelly in The End of Certainty. According to Kelly, the regime based on protectionism, ...