Like most readers, I turned first to the death scenes. The details are assembled in workmanlike fashion. Harold Holt spends the weekend before Christmas 1967 at his Portsea holiday house. There are dinners and paperwork. On the morning in question the one blemish is a phone argument with Billy McMahon, his Treasurer, a figure who only gets murkier with time. (How would a biography of McMahon read?)
Around midday Holt is with friends on the back beach when he is inspired to go for a swim. Where were the minders? The bodyguards? The common sense? Dame Zara Holt’s first question was whether he was wearing sandshoes or flippers. As it happened, sandshoes. The surf was high, the water treacherous, Holt had little control over his movements. It did not take long for him to disappear below the surface, never to re-emerge.
Tom Frame rejects motives like suicide, and elegantly scuttles the Chinese submarine theories. For him, the prime minister’s death is one of accidental drowning, a common mishap at Australian beaches, and only uncommon here because we are talking about the prime minister. A very recent coronial inquiry agrees with Frame. He concludes that if there are other reasons, we probably will never know them, and gives murky explanations too for why the sea does not give up its dead.
The headlines of that summer left Australians with a strange feeling that still lingers.
Here was a national leader who did not vanish after an election defeat, was not assassinated or forced to retire; he simply disappeared. Holt’s disappearance became the identifying moment in national memory, the start of the discussion: who was Harold Holt?
In an age when politicians have biographies written before they even become prime minister, what do we make of the first life of Holt coming out 38 years after his death? One of the most surprising facts is that he had the longest wait of any parliamentarian, 30 years, before becoming PM, a record the current member for Higgins wouldn’t equate with ‘being there for the long haul’.
Although he was Menzies’ favoured protégé, Holt was far from being Menzies’ epigone. They had worked together since the 1930s and could be seen as co-founders of the Liberal Party, two great survivors. He was an enthusiast, a man who took to portfolios with smooth and energetic purpose: Supply and Development, Trade and Customs, Labour and National Service, Air and Civil Aviation,