There is much we could say about dealing with live subjects in political biography. Most of the work I have done has been based on elite interviews — in-depth interviews with people who work with key figures. The book on Whitlam started off as a study of the post-war prime ministership. But I never got any further with that project. As a political scientist, I have been driven by questions about institutions and how they operate, but in the case of Whitlam, they led to broader questions about how he got to the prime ministership, how he crafted his rise to power. I think Whitlam, with Menzies, is probably the most brilliant Opposition leader that we have seen in Australia. Both rebuilt parties in a way that no other political leader in the post-war period has matched. So the question then became: if Menzies could effectively build the Liberal Party after the disasters of 1941, then come back into power and play a key role in entrenching the party in government and himself as prime minister for another 16 years, what of Whitlam? As party leader, Whitlam was absolutely astonishing in rebuilding the Labor Party in the 1960s but then we have his three years as prime minister.

I never meant my book to say his government was a disaster. In fact it was a very exciting time, and a lot of the things it did were truly ground-breaking. Rather, my question then was: why did it all go so badly? Part of the answer was because of history: the context changed, they had an agenda for a world that had shifted beneath their feet. So, his problems were not all associated with mismanagement and failure. Yet there was a very substantial amount of mismanagement and failure by him as leader — especially in the end — to accommodate himself with the people he worked with and to economic changes.

So my book was a critical book, and I want to reflect on what happens when you write about ‘loaded figures’ and you venture into criticism. This relates back to the earlier point about who the life belongs to. It was always my view that the stakeholders I was writing for were not the party, and certainly not the leader and acolytes, or the families for that matter. I was writing for the rest of us who may have voted for them, or engaged with them, or possibly even opposed them — but whose lives had been in some way affected. I did not set out to give them the portrait they wanted, but to persuade them of why things turned out as they did, why things happened in the way they happened.

There are three aspects to this: access and intellectual stance; reception of the study; and how you are interpreted later. The first aspect is negotiating access and wrestling with the issue of your intellectual relationship with the party or movement and the philosophy from which you are approaching the study. Writing about Labor figures you quickly come face to face with the tribalism inside the party. The more I got into the research, I was conscious that some people who had reservations about talking to me only talked to me because somebody else said, ‘No, that’s OK. Jim was a branch member in Melbourne. He’s been active in the Labor party. He’s one of us.’

Now I do not think you have to be of the same political persuasion to write a good biography about a political figure. There have been some terrific political biographies in Australia by authors not of the same persuasion. Take, for instance, Warren Osmond's biography of Eggleston (1985). When he started writing about a key new liberal figure of the end of the First World War period he had himself been a fairly active member of the radical left at Monash University. In the course of his, unfortunately, all-too-brief life, Osmond moved quite a long way across the spectrum but he started out from this radical position yet wrote a terrifically sympathetic and empathetic intellectual history of the man. We do not have enough intellectual biographies.

The point is you do not have to be a Labor person to write about a Labor figure, nor do you have to be a conservative to write sympathetically about people who are Liberals and various sorts of conservatives. But I found from my experience that while my background helped with getting access it created some problems later with Labor’s tribalism, in particular, the notion that if you find out things that are less than positive, it somehow should all be kept in the family.

The second aspect concerns the reception of the study when you are critical. When my book about Whitlam came out, it was immediately tagged as a dreadful rightwing book by many Labor people. Someone actually said to me, you have to be from the other side because it is a critical study. This missed the main point of the analysis — what I was trying to explain was the Labor project and how the Labor enterprise failed. The sense of tribalism and partisanship starts to cut across what is the objective purpose which in my case was to investigate what were the strengths and failures of this sort of administration. What effects did it have on us? Where did it succeed? Why did it go wrong?

The third aspect concerns how subsequent readers relate to the book or essay. This comes back again to ‘who owns the life?’. You cannot prescribe how you will be read as a biographer. I remember a review of the Whitlam book which was never printed but which the reviewer kindly sent to me. The gist of the review’s message was this: I had not written about the Whitlam he could recognise. The review ended with these words: ‘You didn't give my Whitlam back to me’. The person who wrote this review was himself a writer of good critical biographies of literary figures who effectively wanted a biography that presented the sort of hero he wanted to read about. I had tackled this issue in the last chapter of my book which had been about why do we look for heroes and where does that lead us. So my only response to the reviewer was that my main aim was to interrogate our own responses to these figures, not to reinforce a sort of idealised picture of somebody who failed because he was misunderstood by the Australian people.

Finally, let me conclude by noting a few problems associated with authorised biographies. Years ago I was introduced to a committee fishing around trying to get what they considered to be a good life of Doc Evatt. In a sense it was not an authorised life because the family were not commissioning it, but it was driven by people who thought we ought to have a good Labor biography of Evatt. The trouble with this approach is that it comes at the detriment of biography. There are so many people busy behind the scenes with a particular version of the hero ‘they want to be given back to them’, that they set up something that is bound to fail. In this case the failure was the biography of Evatt by Ken Buckley et al (1994) which was the result of a committee trying to get the right life of Evatt. The pen-portrait of Evatt by Paul Hasluck may be only 3,500 words but it is much more perceptive than the Buckley et al biography. So, too, is the Peter Crockett biography of Evatt (1993) which tells me much more about Evatt than his ‘official life’ authorised version.

This may be why we will never see a good biography of Whitlam. In a similar scenario played out some years ago, Richard Hall was going to write the authorised biography. Unfortunately Richard died before he completed his work, but his starting point when he took on the job was to write demolition jobs on everybody who had previously written about Whitlam. Such efforts from the authorised biographer seem to fall into the category of advocacy biographies — passionate, partisan and engaged in reconstructing the hero. That is the difficulty with authorised biography as a genre. In many ways it makes the biographical project more, not less, difficult and comes back to that fundamental question about ‘who owns the life’.