When the photographer asked Governor-General, Field Marshal Sir William Slim to smile, he protested: ‘Dammit, I am.’
Sir William Yeo, a federal president of the Returned Soldiers League, dismissed the members of the British Commonwealth as ‘a polyglot lot of wogs, bogs, logs and dogs’.
Australian-reared Kenneth Wheare, Oxford professor of politics, notable adviser to new nations, used to say over his breakfast paper: ‘I see they’ve torn up another of my constitutions.’
Unfortunately, among the 673 entries in this last volume of the fourth series (1940–80) of the ADB, such memorable vignettes are too infrequent. However, before anyone suggests that this could be due to having too many tame biographers—there are 569 authors—it must be remembered that alphabetical flukes can dull any part of a series like this. Among the political leaders, for example, the first volume (13) in the period featured Beazley, Calwell, Cain, Casey, Chifley, Curtin and Dedman; the second (14) had Evatt, Fadden and Holt; the third (15) had 14 columns on Menzies by his distinguished biographer, Alan Martin, and seven on Sir John McEwan by that admirable journalist, the late Clem Lloyd. The best-known politician in this volume is Eddie Ward, the pugilistic dissident, who broke all records for being ‘named’ in federal parliament. Asked when he felt his health was failing he said it was the day he ‘took a swing at Gough Whitlam—and missed’. To make further political weight there are the conservative minister, Sir Thomas White, and, separately, his wife, the Red Cross advocate Lady Vera (née Deakin), and Labor Speaker (1943–49) Sol Rosevear, who was ‘frequently drunk in the chair’ but adept at concealing it.
Within a few pages there are portraits of the last man to be hanged in Australia, Ronald Ryan, and (with Sir Henry Bolte) his virtual co-executioner, Victorian Attorney-General, Sir Arthur Rylah, who was also distinguished in his hypothetical ‘teenage daughter’ whom he protected from reading such filth as Mary McCarthy’s The Group. Otherwise, Rylah was a social reformer in matters of betting, drinking and Sunday movies, but his biographer refrains from suggesting poll-driven cynicism. He does not, however, shirk reference to the first Lady Rylah’s strange death and precipitate burial. More explicit is the entry on the ruthless, impartial political ‘advertising executive’, Solomon Rubensohn, who knew the skeletons in all the parties’ cupboards, but who was trusted because he was ‘utterly discreet’. To his staff he was ‘an utter and