Making the "Little Digger" dull.(Billy Hughes: Prime Minister and Controversial Founding Father of the Australian Labor Party)(Book Review)

Billy Hughes: Prime Minister and Controversial Founding Father of the Australian Labor Party, by Aneurin Hughes; John Wiley & Sons, 2005, $29.95.

THE PAST FEW MONTHS have proved to be a busy time for the publication of biographies of Australian prime ministers. First, there was John Edwards with an intriguing, if ultimately unpersuasive, reinterpretation of John Curtin. This was followed by Tom Frame with a solid account of the life of Harold Holt, one of the few prime ministers not previously to have been a biographical subject. It was easy to discern what purpose Edwards and Frame had in mind when undertaking their works.

It is far harder to ascertain what Aneurin Hughes is attempting in his recently published biography of Billy Hughes. It is not as if there have not been other biographies of Hughes. There have been several, three of which the writer mentions briefly in his introduction. Undoubtedly, the most authoritative work is L.F. Fitzhardinge's two volumes, but Aneurin Hughes dismisses this predecessor's work on the ground that it says "more about Hughes the politician than the man". Maybe it has escaped the attention of the writer, but the fact that his subject was in either the state or federal parliaments from the age of thirty-two till his death at ninety, probably means that the politician and the man were inexorably entwined.

Aneurin Hughes seems to be laying claim to having made a greater study of the sources than others and thus presuming greater insight. He discerns that Hughes was "much more complex and perhaps more interesting" than posterity remembers him. This book manages to capture some of the complexity, but almost manages to achieve what would previously have been thought to be the impossible and make "the Little Digger" dull.

Aneurin Hughes was EU ambassador to Australia from 1995 to 2002, and the attraction of Billy Hughes as a subject seems to have come from the shared surname and Welsh background. Billy Hughes' own appreciation of his Welsh heritage merits a whole chapter in this slim volume as the writer reads great significance into Hughes' polite replies to people claiming this link with him.

The writer's lack of insight into Australia is brought into its most graphic relief when he writes of an incident in 1917 that saw Hughes suggesting a girl, then aged twenty-two or twenty-three, that his friend Keith Murdoch might consider as a companion. The author comments: "Whether the lady in Hughes' mind was Elizabeth Green, who Sir Keith married in 1928, is not known."

Besides spelling Elisabeth and Greene incorrectly, the author seems to be suggesting that Dame Elisabeth Murdoch ...