An unsatisfactory life.(The Life and Death of Harold Holt)(Book Review)

The Life and Death of Harold Holt, by Tom Frame; Allen & Unwin, 2005, $35.

ANOTHER GAP on the shelf of prime ministerial biography has been filled with the recent publication of the first serious biography of Harold Holt.

Unlike the authors of most Australian prime ministerial biographies, who have been either journalists or academics, Holt's biographer, Tom Frame, has a very different occupation. He is the Anglican Bishop to the Australian Defence Forces. Ben Chifley had the view that journalists should write political biography on the basis that politicians are too subjective and academics too remote from the real world of politics. One assumes that Chifley would place Frame's occupation in the "too remote" category.

The path that led Frame to write about Holt is an unusual one. His interest in Australia's seventeenth prime minister arose from researching the Voyager disaster. Perhaps oddly for someone who, in relation to Voyager, believes that Holt "misjudged a looming public controversy", Frame approached this biography seeking to redress what he sees as "unfair personal and professional denigration of the late Prime Minister". In his opinion, the unfair denigration resulted from two things--the "all the way with LBJ" comment and the manner of Holt's death.

Frame draws the obvious conclusion that Holt's death was a tragic accident, but along the way he spends an inordinate amount of space discounting the crackpot theories about Holt's disappearance at Cheviot Beach (theories recently described as "fanciful" by the Victorian Coroner). Frame's handling of Holt's disappearance is symptomatic of much of this book. His basic judgments about his subject are usually sound and balanced and yet he never quite manages to present his material in a fully satisfying manner.

The first irritant in the book is a litany of factual or typographical errors. There are several references to "Iain" Sinclair and one to Joe "Lyon's"; the date of the Canberra Conference which founded the Liberal Party is out by a year and that of the 1967 half-Senate election by a day; and the voting figures for Holt's first election do not add up properly.

The lack of confidence that these errors induces is compounded when the reader is presented within a few pages with contradictory policy positions that the author in no way attempts to reconcile, as on page 13 we read that Holt favoured "selective broadcasting of parliamentary debate" and then on page 31 that he "railed against ... radio broadcasts of parliamentary proceedings".