A cynical take on biography is that it serves one of three purposes. First as a hagiography — biography is the standard format used to pay homage to great persons. Political hagiographies are frequently written by partisan persons. For example, the 1997 authorised biography of John Howard, by David Barnett and his wife Pru Goward, was regarded by many as being ‘not only a hagiography but a very bad one too’ (Switzer 2004:38). Switzer was not alone in his judgment. Alan Ramsey, political columnist of the Sydney Morning Herald, claimed it was not ‘only a propagandist's book but a lazy book, too, which could have been written almost entirely from the public record’. The second reason for writing biography, cynics suggest, is to ‘set an example for future generations’ — Plutarch’s various lives are instances of this approach. A final motivation is simply to ‘make money’ (Gerraty cited in Theakston 2000: 1).

H.B. Higgins, politician and High Court judge, stated that biography was a means by which ‘the biographer becomes the disciple, and his temptation to play God, presiding over the subject’s life, deftly pulling the strings’ is great (Rickard 1987). I could also add biographies are occasionally used as a way of ‘getting even’; a method by which to ‘discredit a person,’ ‘expose their failings’ or serve as a warning to future generations of what not to do. There are few of these — especially among more recent biographies. Many political biographies in Australia are written by salaried academics. Subjects are selected because they are historically significant and because with biographical research, there always remains the tantalising prospect of what may be uncovered. Many political biographies are funded and written to commemorate significant events — the centenary of the Australian federation, for example. Despite these serious works, the criticisms that have been levelled at the methodology have resulted in political biography being regarded as the ‘disciplinary poor relation’ to the study of political science more generally (Pimlott 1990:224). As Walter (forthcoming) states:

Biography and conjecture are a dangerous duo — and raise the question: how much about the life of a person can we hope to know? If biography can tell a life history by ‘expos[ing] those intersecting patterns of experience, personality and circumstance which mould a man’s response to the contingent and hence lie under the existential surface’ (Martin cited in Clendinnen 2004:14), why is it that so many biographers follow the conventional route of chronology? Perhaps because the other is too difficult. The psychoanalytic approach is controversial. While not every biographer sets out to write a psychological style of memoir, Walter is right when he suggested we do need to be aware of patterns of behaviour, how a person reacts under stress — those tell-tale signs — that reveal so much about the subject.

If biography is, as Michael Holroyd, biographer of Lytton Strachey and George Bernard Shaw, stated, a ‘cousin to the novel’ (Britain 2002:5), then how do you extract meanings from historical facts, archival documents and birth, death and employment records? Biography and memoirs recreate a life. In that regard they use similar ‘character-creating techniques’ to those used by writers of novels. They are one person’s ‘take’ on another. Seasoned biographers have noted the moral and ethical difficulties inherent in the task. As David Day reflected, after writing a biography of John Curtin, ‘it struck me how presumptuous it was for me to be digging around in someone’s past life’ (Day 2002a). Wheatley (2002) expressed this dilemma another way: he observed that with any person under investigation, the life does not belong to ‘readers, or fans, or political supporters … Most of all … the life does not belong to the biographer’. A biography in the end is one person’s interpretation only.