Most Australian political biographies tend to concentrate on the office rather than the individual. Paul Strangio’s well received Keeper of the Faith: A biography of Jim Cairns (2002) is an exception to this rule, giving as it does a balanced account of Cairns’ personal integrity with his failure as a minister. While not a biography in the traditional sense, Judith Brett’s, Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People, is another instance where the influence of the private life on the public life is critically examined. Pat Weller has made clear that, in his books on Malcolm Fraser and John Button, he was concerned not with writing a biography but with the way political institutions work, the way power is exercised, the interactions between individuals and the institutions in which they work and which they in part shape and which shapes them. When the office door closed, he lost interest in their lives.

Yet as Geoffrey Bolton pointed out, reticence to look into the private life can detract from the value of a political biography. He cited as an example Ross McMullin’s generally lively and informative study of Labor Prime Minister Chris Watson (2004) that tersely informs us that Watson’s premature retirement from federal politics was due to his wife’s complaints about his frequent absences from home in Sydney. ‘One would never know that Watson’s concern for his wife arose partly because his presence helped her in a battle against alcoholism, nor that after her death he re-married and somewhat belatedly found fulfilment as a parent’.

There is clearly a problem in writing about a living person. The restrictive defamation laws across Australia are an obvious hurdle. Jenny Hocking was not the first biographer to find that her subject, the lawyer, politician and judge, Lionel Murphy, ‘lived a prodigious public life, and yet remained an intensely private man’. There is also the problem such as that faced by Tim Rowse, to whom Nugget Coombs and his family made clear that Coombs’ private life was out of bounds. As Rowse notes in the Introduction to Nugget Coombs: A reforming life (2002), ‘The resulting book is more impersonal than most readers of biographies would wish’. There is no such reluctance to inquire into a subject’s personal life in, for example, David Day’s Chifley (2002) where the prime minister’s extramarital affairs are examined in detail and the reader is taken literally into Chifley’s bedroom. Bob Hawke’s biographer (and now wife), Blanche d’Alpuget, made no secret of her subject’s drinking problem.

The question is, how far do you need to go to understand the person about whom you are writing? Some in the media prefer the view from the bedroom or the hotel bar. I simply question whether this is always a relevant view. On the other hand, it is at least arguable that a good biography does not make a distinction between the subject’s public and private life. While the subject’s life should be the focus of intensive study, it should also be the vehicle for a wider observation of human nature and the human condition. ‘If it is relevant to a biographer of Churchill that he was a failure at Harrow, it is relevant to a biographer of Atlee that he had a difficult wife and to a biographer of Lloyd George that he kept a mistress’ (Pimlott 1990: 222). Bolton noted Laurie Fitzhardinge’s reluctance to refer to Billy Hughes’ fear of homosexual rape and the influence this must have had on Hughes’ attitude to the possession and use of power in a Hobbesian world of potential violence, and to La Nauze being temperamentally unsuited to the sympathetic explanation of Deakin’s mystical streak.

Jim Walter argued that a good political biography, particularly one written about someone still living or recently dead, is not written for the political party, the leader and acolyte. While the author needs to be aware of these sensitivities, he or she should be writing for those whose lives were affected by their subject. In Walter’s view, that is who you are trying to write for — not necessarily to give them what they want, but to persuade them of why things turned out as they did, why things happened in the way they happened. His anecdote about the reviewer who complained that The Leader ‘didn’t give my Whitlam back to me’ well illustrates the problem an author faces when writing about a prominent figure who has inspired both hate and admiration.

Because the subject of the biography may have been dead for many years does not provide an author with immunity from criticism by members of the family and friends, as David Day found when Menzies & Churchill at War (1986), John Curtin: A Life (2000) and Chifley (2002) were published. The shorter the period of a writing after the death, clearly the greater the angst that will arise when dealing with the family. As Virginia Woolf put it: ‘The widow and the friend are hard task masters’ (cited in Pimlott 1990: 219).

I recently wrote an entry for the Australian Dictionary of Biography on Harold Bayard Piper, chief judge of the Arbitration Court during the Second World War (vol 16, 6). I would like to expand that entry into a long article or book. For a range of reasons, I have yet to do so. I feel a little uncomfortable at my dilatoriness because Piper’s family were very generous to me in making material available and extending hospitality when I visited Melbourne for research. Our views on Piper differ a little. This is a problem faced by those who write about the living or where there is a living family. Few take the robust view John Gorton did when, in essence, he told Ian Hancock that as his biographer he could write whatever he liked about him, and went out of his way to assist Hancock obtain access to those who knew where a skeleton might be buried. It is a great pity more biographical subjects do not adopt the Duke of Wellington’s approach of ‘publish and be damned!’ when the courtesan Harriette Wilson threatened to publish her memoirs and his letters.

There is the difficulty of either liking or disliking your subject. Tracey Arklay referred to coming to like her subject, Arthur Fadden. I respect Piper. When David Marr wrote the biography of Garfield Barwick (1980) he started not liking his subject because of his role in the 1975 Dismissal, but otherwise knew almost nothing about him. However, as he came to know more about Barwick, Marr came to discover much to admire in the man, for example, his sheer skill of the advocate. Rae Wear (2002: xi) did not change her view that Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s premiership was an authoritarian and undemocratic regime, but she was compelled to ‘acknowledge and try to take account of alternative perceptions and his disarming qualities’. Fin Crisp knew and admired Ben Chifley (1960). As Geoffrey Bolton observed, Crisp presented Chifley ‘as a sagacious and practical statesman, almost without fault whose vision Labor [then in Opposition in the federal parliament] needed to recover’.