In the aftermath of yet another federal Liberal party election victory, Craig McGregor’s Australian Son: Inside Mark Latham and Brian Costar and Jennifer Curtin’s Rebels with a Cause: Independents in Australian Politics offer two very different solutions to the problem vexing an increasingly disillusioned Australia; how to change the state (and status quo) of Australian federal politics.
The solution offered by Craig McGregor (with assistance from brother Adrian) is found in the man he has been researching for seven years since McGregor first recognised him as the future leader of the Labor party. Using material gleaned from interviews with Mark Latham, his friends and family members, as well as observations made while accompanying Latham on numerous campaigns, McGregor promises an ‘inside’ perspective of Australia’s alternative prime minister. While the book provides short, sharp and often insightful observations of the ‘man of dualities’, at 197 pages, it is tempting to suggest that either there is not much ‘inside’ our future leader, or, as other Latham biographers have suggested, that the attempt to quarry Latham’s ‘inner world’ is like extracting ‘blood from a stone’.
McGregor begins his biography with a visit to Latham’s suburban childhood. Through a series of semi-nostalgic, almost sepia toned, snapshots—which include Latham on the football field, Latham in the classroom and Latham doing his homework—we see an ambitious, bright, but rather lonely child who was exalted as the great hope of a family struggling against the odds. McGregor cites the death of Latham’s father and the discovery of his father’s secret first marriage and his drinking and gambling habits, as integral to both Latham’s close relationship with Gough Whitlam and his interest in the so-called ‘crisis in masculinity’.
As McGregor charts Latham’s meteoric political ascent, we can track Latham’s transformation from bright, right bovver boy to unifying party and family man and see how this has also involved the negotiation of many contradictions. McGregor suggests these include Latham being economically right, but emotionally left, a bit of a bully boy, but also an intellectual, a bloke’s bloke, with a soft underbelly. McGregor is at his weakest when he slips into adulatory appreciation of the man he has dubbed ‘The Great Suburbanite’, indulging in what Latham’s first wife has described as Latham’s ‘Messiah complex’. At his best, however, McGregor offers some convincing insights into the shifting sands of Australian society as well as critical sensitivity to Latham’s thinking. Indeed, having reviewed