Thrown shoes, sabotaged launches and exposed affairs: the drama of Australian political publishing

The most striking example of performance politics in Joshua Black’s entertaining book comes when an audience member at a 2010 taping of the now-defunct ABC show Q&A throws a shoe at former prime minister John Howard. (It echoed a famous moment two years earlier, when an Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at then US president George W. Bush.)

Howard, who laughed it off, was on the show to promote his memoir, Lazarus Rising.

Performance Politics is informative and interesting, but has a somewhat misleading title. Black’s use of the term “performance” is so broad it becomes almost meaningless. In his introduction, he claims “performances are ephemeral”, but the bulk of his analysis is based on a discussion of book publishing and television documentaries. These are not usually regarded as primarily performative.

Review: Performance Politics – Joshua Black (New South)

It may be more accurate to read this book as an account of what Black, citing historian Melanie Nolan, calls life writing. It is scrupulously researched, involving more than 40 hours of interviews with 46 participants: “politician-authors, publishers and editors, collaborators and journalists”.

Historians, Black writes, need to understand both knowledge and emotion.

In this sense, politics today is perhaps less changed over the centuries than Black suggests. Indeed, he offers examples of performative politics from the 19th century, involving street marches, “burning effigies and torchlit oratory”, which seem to deserve the term more than the appearance of politicians on morning television programs.

Late in the book, Black tells us that after the 2025 elections, a third of parliamentary time was devoted to “’political theatre’ for its own sake”. Certainly, much of parliament’s time is clearly performative, whether it’s Pauline Hanson appearing in a burqa in 2017, or Lidia Thorpe refusing to swear allegiance to the monarch in 2024.

One of the clearest moments of parliamentary performance came when Liberal Tim Wilson used the vote to recognise same-sex marriage to propose to his partner in the gallery. Oddly, these are not the sort of examples Black discusses.

It is an indication of his book’s emphasis that the longest discussion of Hanson concentrates on her now-forgotten 2007 autobiography, Untamed & Unashamed, rather than her recent surge to prominence.

Battles of the books

But if I am unconvinced by the title, Black has written an important study of the past 70 years of Australian politics. The major change he points to is the explosion of books written by serving and former politicians.

Two major themes run through his book: the importance of leadership and the role of publishing in creating a political persona. Black discusses every prime minister from Gough Whitlam to Anthony Albanese, with considerable emphasis on their role as authors.

His account of the 1975 dismissal of Whitlam by Governor General Sir John Kerr, titled “publishing coups”, explores the ways the two protagonists sought to use books as self-justification for their own roles in the affair. It appears Whitlam’s The Truth of the Matter had a better reception – and greater sales – than Kerr’s Matters for Judgement.

For Black, this battle of the books marked “a more emotionally charged and expressive public culture”. Every subsequent prime minister – and surprising numbers of cabinet ministers – would now see producing a book as an essential step towards ensuring their legacy.

The one exception was Paul Keating. Not only has he not written his memoirs, but he was scathing about his former speechwriter Don Watson’s account of his career. Launching Watson’s Recollections of a Bleeding Heart, he poured scorn on the author: “Don has the inclinations of a fruit bat,” he remarked, “he always heads back to the darkness.”

Yet Watson’s book has been one of the most successful prime ministerial biographies. It’s one I would rate, with Judith Brett’s The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, as enthralling for its psychological insights as much as for its political revelations.

Publishing’s ‘director for the stars’

The flurry of political autobiographies and memoirs of the past 30 years owed much to the enthusiasm and energy of Louise Adler, publisher at Melbourne University Press between 2003 and 2019.

While working at William Heinemann, Adler had already signed up Bob Hawke, for what was in 1992 an extraordinary advance of A$350,000. One significant political figure she did not publish was Howard, whose Lazarus Rising (HarperCollins), may be the most successful political memoir published in Australia. It sold more than 100,000 copies.

Starting with Malcolm Fraser, Adler commissioned books across the political spectrum, ranging from once Labor leader Mark Latham’s The Latham Diaries (2005) to former Liberal prime minister Tony Abbott’s Battlelines (2009).

If, as Black claims, the political memoir is a form of performance, Adler emerges as the director for the stars. (There is a parallel account of her career at MUP in Stuart Kells’ MUP: A Centenary History, commissioned by the publisher. The result is illuminating, but in striving for “neutrality”, it falls short.)

Selling books certainly does involve performances; Black quotes Howard comparing a book tour to a political campaign. But books take on a life of their own, even if most of the titles he discusses now linger unread on back shelves.

Empty fruit bowls and ‘witches’

Black is also sensitive to gender, in particular to the double standard applied to women politicians. But his almost exclusive focus on federal politics means he does not discuss the role of women in state politics. All but one state (South Australia) has now been led by a woman premier.

He does write about the infamous photograph of Julia Gillard that showed her table with an empty fruit bowl, seized upon as evidence of her failings as a housewife, and that “unmarried women without children were politically suspect and might not be palatable to the public”. More distressing were the signs proclaiming “Ditch the Witch”, a slogan which resurfaced a few months ago, against former Victorian premier Jacinta Allen.

Black’s primary example of the double standard comes from the career of Cheryl Kernot, who left her position as leader of the Australian Democrats in 1997 to join the Labor party, only to lose the seat of Dickson to Peter Dutton four years later.

After her defeat, Kernot won a major book contract with HarperCollins. But on the eve of the 2002 publication of Speaking For Myself Again, the media unleashed the story of her affair with former foreign minister Gareth Evans. Her publishers cancelled a planned book tour.

Black claims Kernot’s book “became a synonym for the dangers of women’s autobiographical storytelling in Australian politics”. One wonders whether her publishers would have behaved differently if she had acknowledged the affair in her memoir.

It would be instructive to compare the way Kernot was treated with the response to revelations about the private lives of male politicians, such as Barnaby Joyce (who started his relationship with his wife, Vikki Campion, when he was married and she was his staffer) and former attorney-general Christian Porter (who left politics over historical rape allegations that surfaced in 2021). I doubt any Australian politician could be as successful as Donald Trump in brushing aside repeated stories of sexual misconduct.

Enthralling reading for political junkies

“How,” asks Black, “did our politics become so personal, autobiographical and focused on story telling?” It does seem true, as he argues, that there is an increasing merging of the personal with the political. It’s symbolised, perhaps, by the soft approach of Annabel Crabb’s television series Kitchen Cabinet, in which she deliberately sets out to humanise our politicians.

Still, the ABC has made a number of serious attempts to chronicle recent Australian political history, through programs such as The Killing Season, about Labor’s Rudd/Gillard years and Nemesis, looking at the Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison years. By portraying the internal battles within successive governments, and the series of leadership coups involving five prime ministers in a ten-year period, political history becomes more immediate – if less impressive.

What is striking in Black’s account of the past 50 years is less the performative element than politicians’ need to use books as a way of marking their legacy and influencing political debate.

His book is as much a contribution to the history of Australian publishing as it is an account of the past half-century of federal politics. Even — perhaps especially — political junkies will find it enthralling reading.