Regrettably, there is a dearth of administrators’ memoirs, accounts by federal and state public officials of their working life. What we have is sparse and of uneven quality. Nor do we have books of the quality of Peter Hennessy’s Whitehall (1989) and Cabinet (1986) that show in detail the inner workings of our public services. Pat Weller’s forthcoming book on the federal cabinet may fill one gap, but where is the equivalent of Whitehall? Nor are there many good biographies of public servants.

One problem is the various secrecy provisions in public servants’ employment conditions, and legislation that explicitly forbids the disclosure of information that has come to the public servant’s notice in the course of their duties. They do not have the same opportunity, however limited, of Commonwealth ministers being able to ‘refresh’ their memory. There is also the strong tradition, although possibly now a bit frayed around the edges (Wilkie 2004) of public servants having a strong ethic of confidentiality. The various codes of conduct formally reinforce this traditional reticence. It is also probable that by the time most public servants have retired they do not feel inclined to spend their retirement researching their administrative past. Few serving (and former) public servants are prepared to speak on the record, although Pat Weller has left us a treasure trove in his Australia’s Mandarins: The frank and the fearless? (2001) which draws upon interviews with over 100 past and present Commonwealth departmental heads. As Weller noted, ‘If the public face of government can be found among the elected representatives, the public servants provide the sinews and muscle that make the body politic work’ (2001: 3). No biography of a minister can ignore the influence he or she had upon their department — and that of the department on the minister.

There are, however, a few memoirs by senior federal (and state) public servants, although a number of agency histories now exist. There is a strong slant towards the memoirs of Foreign Affairs and Defence officers. There are a number of books and monographs about and by heads of the Department of Foreign Affairs, in particular.

Regrettably, we have very few accounts by career public servants which give attention to the administrative routine, rather than to career highlights. Richard Woolcott, the former Secretary of the Department and Foreign Affairs and Trade, makes clear in the title of his memoirs The Hot Seat: Reflections on diplomacy from Stalin’s death to the Bali bombings (2003) where his primary interest lay. The occasional paper derived from the transcript of oral history interviews with one of his predecessors, Sir Keith Waller (1990), similarly favours diplomacy over administration. Sir John Bunting’s affectionate memoir of a man he clearly admired, R. G. Menzies: A portrait (1988), tells a little about the relationship between one permanent head and his minister, but the emphasis is very much on Menzies rather than departmental administration. What we are told about the relationship of senior officials with the prime minister is very much the view of a mandarin and his regard for what he terms ‘due process’ (Bunting 1988; see also Hancock 2002). However, as Weller points out in his survey of research on the Commonwealth executive, Bunting’s book is also ‘an account, and a defence, of Cabinet government in the 1950s and 1960s’ (2005: 36). John Menadue’s account of his term as Secretary of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet in Things You Learn Along the Way (1999) is a useful record of the development of that department’s ‘activist role’ which started under Whitlam and continued under Fraser, and of the ‘Loans Affair’ and The Dismissal. He briefly covers his tenure as Ambassador to Japan and as Secretary to the Department of Immigration and Ethnic Affairs, and, later, Trade.

One exception, albeit slight, to the paucity of administrative memoirs by senior Commonwealth public servants is They Also Serve (1974), the memoirs of Sir William Dunk, chairman of the Commonwealth Public Service Board, 1947-1960. (Dunk preferred the term ‘Notes’ of his ‘worm’s eye view’ through a full generation of official experience.) These notes include, for example, the detailed memorandum the Board put to Cabinet in June 1947 outlining ‘the action the Public Service Board has taken, and the policies it proposes to follow, in carrying out its duties of staffing, organization and efficiency in the Public Service’ at a time the service was being concentrated in Canberra. Dunk gives us an insight into his character when he tells us that Cabinet’s acceptance of the Board’s submission ‘was a comfort (it is a useful thing to have a powerful piece of paper to wave under the nose of objectors)’. We also gain a slight understanding of his relationship with Prime Minister Menzies, who when asked on his appointment as prime minister in 1949, to endorse the memorandum ‘gave a lordly wave of the hand and said “Carry on Sergeant-Major”’.

We also have Nugget Coombs’ ‘guarded and occasionally misleading account of his public life’, Trial Balance (1981). Another account by a senior public servant, albeit in this instance one who did not look so favourably on his experience of the Australian public service, is that of Dr. V. G. Venturini. His vitriolic Malpractice: The administration of the Murphy Trade Practices Act (1980) covers his term as a commissioner on the Trade Practices Commission from early 1975 to 30 June 1977. Venturini does not share the affection for the public service which is so obvious in the works of Bunting and Dunk. To Venturini, the ‘true bureaucracy — the top public service — still services: itself first and foremost, second, the rich; and moreover, it does that at the expense of the rest of the Australian community’. No Grey Profession, the memoirs of a director-general of the National Library, Harrison Bryan, are a far more sympathetic account of the institutions in which he worked, as are those of Frank Green, Clerk of the House of Representatives 1937-1955 (Bryan 1994; Green 1969).

While not a biography in the traditional sense, mention should be made of David Horner’s valuable Defence Supremo: Sir Frederick Shedden and the making of Australian defence policy (2000). There is the biography of Robert Broinowski, secretary to three post-federation Ministers of Defence who retired in 1942 as Clerk of the Senate, written by his grandson, a former senior officer of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (2001). But biographies of public servants are all too few. Peter Edwards’ biography of Sir Arthur Tange adds to a very small library of major biographies of public servants, federal or state. While we have his memoirs, Prosper the Commonwealth, a biography of the first Secretary of the Commonwealth Attorney-General’s Department, Sir Robert Garran, is long overdue. There are also the several books by and about Charles Perkins, the first departmental secretary of Aboriginal descent (Perkins 1975; Read 1990).