After forty-five minutes, conscious of the media deadlines, Sonia tugged him outside. For the TV reporters, he repeated his criticisms; for the photographers, he and Sonia posed. He affected nonchalance and relaxation in the flicker and flashes; she smiled and gripped his shoulder tightly. His press secretary handed out bottles of KB for the sweating print journalists.
It was impossible to deny that his timing was painful. The New South Wales Liberals had no money to contest a by-election. The 1.2 per cent margin with which they held the seat would not be enough. Even with a very good candidate, McMahon admitted, they were unlikely to hold it. He would not bet on it himself.46
‘A loss for the Government would put added strain on Mr Fraser’s leadership which could be compounded by any setback the Liberal Party receives in the Victorian State election,’ wrote one journalist.47 Despite suggestions that Sonia stand for the seat, speculation that Neville Wran would make a move to Canberra, or even that a brash young lawyer by the name of Malcolm Turnbull would take it, the candidates remained colourless.48
McMahon would not hear of suggestions that he had timed his resignation deliberately to target Fraser. As he recounted, he had been implored to resign repeatedly, only for these to be suddenly contradicted. ‘In 1976 I was invited by the wizards in Canberra to resign … After I had received preselection in 1980 I was again invited to retire … After considerable discussion I was asked to contest the election.’ The timing would never be great, but he was quite willing to admit that the look on Fraser’s face when told of his resignation was ‘horrified’.49
As ever, he returned to his time as prime minister. ‘At the end of 1972 we put up a record that I don’t believe has ever been equalled.’ Look at unemployment, he said. Unemployment was 88,000 people in October 1972, and the government ‘had the five best months we ever had’ just before Christmas. Inflation was low, he argued. But there were considerable regrets, he said. ‘There were many forces against me and there were many unbelievable problems within my own party. I never had a chance as Prime Minister.’50
Everyone would understand soon. Everyone would know what he had done, what he had grappled with. They would be shocked. ‘When I publish my autobiography and tell of the things I had to put up with,’ he said, ‘none of you will believe it.’51
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
A Liberal View
1984–1988
The work continued. McMahon pressed on. Bowman’s departure was not going to dissuade him.1 He approached other writers, sought assistance, hunted for feedback. But word had spread. The book had become notorious, and there were few who wanted to deal with its misshapen, unpublishable mass.
Those who had been involved believed that there was a remedy. The manuscript, Richard Smart said later, ‘will remain unpublished until Sir William allows someone to take it away and knock it into shape.’ Even after all the tribulations with Bowman, Smart still saw some commercial potential in the work, thinking that somewhere in the morass of material was a ‘bloody good story’.2 But McMahon’s unwillingness to hand over control ensured it was unlikely to be heard any time soon. ‘As it was,’ Smart said elsewhere, ‘it was unpublishable. Sir William would not accept that. To him it was like Moses’s slabs, so we couldn’t continue with it.’3
The contract with Collins was abandoned, with both parties claiming they had walked away. The supposed flare of interest from Macmillan faded quickly once they got wind of the nature of the work. A submission to Angus and Robertson finished with rejection. Another, to the Hutchison Publishing Group, ended the same way: there would be too much work involved to get the manuscript into shape, Hutchison informed McMahon, in July 1985.4 The University of New South Wales Press was the next to consider the manuscript; they, too, passed.
Throughout it all, McMahon was undeterred. He continued to proclaim that his autobiography would set everything straight, that it was all coming together. ‘I have completely finished the writing and only have to make a decision about the photographs,’ he said. ‘It’s absolutely extraordinary what I have done.’
Few believed him. His attempts to write the book, the veritable industry of ghostwriters and assistants who had worked on it, the list of publishers who had read it and backed away — these all began to loom larger than the history he was trying to write. Commentary from previous staff members fuelled the notoriety. While Bowman was restrained, saying only that his six months with McMahon were ‘an interesting experience’, others were more forthright. Mark Hayne, who had worked for McMahon for three months before resigning with a plea of ill-health in 1983, was cutting:
I wouldn’t have minded if he [McMahon] had wanted to tell lies — that’s his right, it’s his biography … But I was employed to produce something that was coherent, grammatical, interesting to the reader and, of course, publishable. None of that made any impression on him and I realised I was just wasting my time.5
Others were more generous. The journalist Paul LePetit, who worked on the manuscript for more than a year, thought it viable commercially and historically. ‘It’s a good book and it’s a good read,’ he said.6 Yet even he could not see the work brought up to a publishable standard. In 1986, following the surprising success of Jim Killen’s memoir, Killen: inside Australian politics, the publisher Methuen agreed to consider McMahon’s manuscript. No contract was signed, but the publisher managed to extract an agreement that McMahon hand over some editorial control. It was no use: soon enough, Methuen had backed away.
McMahon continued to seek advice and help. Richard Farmer was surprised to receive a phone call from a researcher at the National Library, who told him that she was calling on McMahon’s behalf. The former prime minister wished to cite an article in The Daily Telegraph in which Farmer had stated that McMahon would have won the 1972 election had it been held two weeks later. ‘But,’ she went on, ‘I’ve looked everywhere, at everything you wrote, and I can find no record of this. But when I went back and told Mr McMahon that I couldn’t find it he said, “No, it’s there, you go back …”’ Listening over the phone, Farmer could not help but laugh. He had written no such thing. Never. ‘But he [McMahon] had decided that even Richard Farmer, the man who had caused him all this trouble, had said that he would have won if it had gone on two weeks longer,’ Farmer said, later. ‘He had totally rewritten history in his mind.’7
Phillip Adams also found himself on the receiving end of an approach. Woken in his hotel one evening, Adams endured three bumbling attempts by McMahon’s staff to connect a telephone call. Finally, McMahon’s shrill pipe came down the line to greet Adams and declare that he wanted help with the book. ‘I want you to edit it for me,’ McMahon told him.
To Adams’ reply that he was not an editor, McMahon begged: ‘Please, could you at least read it for me?’
A great pile of paper bound with thick rubber bands was delivered to Adams by courier the next day. Sitting at the end of his hotel bed with the manuscript in front of him, Adams read it through carefully and guiltily. By now, the book had no title. The long sections on Sonia had disappeared. But the writing was poor and the story flat. ‘It was really, really bad,’ Adams said later.
Not sure how to tell McMahon this, coming up short with advice and feedback that might be useful, Adams sent the manuscript on to Barry Jones. Could Jones advise him on how to respond? he asked.
Jones read the manuscript. As he said later, ‘dreadful’ was the charitable way to describe it. ‘He [McMahon] seemed to suffer from total recall and to feel that every sentence he had uttered deserved to be preserved for all time,’ Jones said. ‘He had superior analytical skills and a waspish sense of humour, but was completely unable to apply either to himself.’8
Then Jones lost the book. Adams had to make a grovelling apology to McMahon for doing so — and that was the end of his relationship with McMahon.9
McMahon approached the publisher Corgi and Bantam. Their consideration
of the manuscript progressed further than any previous submission: the book went through three readers’ reports that variously focused on the story, the structure, and, finally, the political and legal aspects. ‘Virtually, we are at the point of making a decision, but we haven’t got a contract,’ said its managing director. ‘It could go either way.’10 Three months later, Corgi and Bantam had also rejected it.11
These were blows, but McMahon persevered. He was not willing to give up. He was not willing to change direction. The book had to come out. It had to be finished.
But reminders of his late age were growing ever more frequent. McMahon’s brother, Sam, died in December 1985. Alan Reid died two years later. Colleagues and supporters, too, began to pass away. And while McMahon scrupulously held to his regimen of squash and swimming, his health was suffering. In November 1984, he discovered a lump the size of a fingernail on the outer rim of his left ear. It was removed, and he underwent a dose of radiation therapy. But then doctors realised that the cancer had reappeared, this time behind the ear and inside it. McMahon was told that his ear would have to be removed. ‘It was a bit of a shock at first but I quickly became resigned to the operation,’ he said.12 He grew his hair long to disguise its absence, laughed off the jokes and suggestions of self-consciousness, talked of returning to work on the memoirs. Whatever he said publicly, it was clear that such blows took their toll: LePetit, working with McMahon throughout this time, recalled the former prime minister’s frustration as his memory continued to fade and his hearing difficulties increased. ‘Yet, he continued, as far as possible, to keep to his daily routine: travelling to his office, reading the papers, underlining sections for his staff to file, and keeping in touch with his business affairs,’ said LePetit.13 For his family, this was bravery. ‘He was wonderful then, when things were very grim,’ said Sonia later.14
The quality that characterised much of McMahon’s career — a dogged refusal to countenance defeat, a willingness to confront obstacles, an indomitable instinct for survival, of persistence — would not abate. Even at the fag end of 1987, he persisted in his work. He would continue, determined that his memoirs and his views be published.
It was not to be. McMahon would die, of complications due to pneumonia, in his sleep, in the early hours of 31 March 1988. All work on the book would cease. The twenty-seven filing cabinets of papers and files on the nineteenth floor of Westfield Towers would be emptied, packed into boxes, and sent to Canberra. Upon its donation, the McMahon papers would constitute one of the National Library of Australia’s largest individual collections, rich and vast — but access to those papers and files would be closed.15 Drafts of the autobiography would be scattered through the collection. Sonia’s own copy would vanish: ‘I’ve mislaid it,’ she said, years later.16 The book, it seemed, would never see the light of day.
It is hard to think that, even had McMahon finished the book, it would have prompted the recognition he so desperately sought. Even had he lived another decade, had he been in the best of health when he wrote, it would have been a fiendishly difficult task. To take his readers back through his life required a sense of history that, for all his first-hand experience, McMahon could not muster. He could not make the past live again. To make his readers understand the unrealised nightmares that had pervaded the 1950s — nightmares of nuclear war, communist revolutions, economic ruin — required an act of historical imagination for which McMahon’s storytelling abilities were simply inadequate. To extend that imagination to the 1960s, and through to the 1970s, was too much for McMahon. ‘At times everything seemed to be changing,’ Donald Horne wrote of this period. ‘Was it?’17
For a man so fixed in his views, seemingly so out of his time, apprehending that change and wrestling it into a convincing book would have been a mighty, mighty task. Most crucially, to show readers the options that were open to him, amid all the daily uncertainties, and have them understand the decisions he made and the actions he took, commendable and disreputable, right and wrong, would have been beyond him. McMahon could not admit fault. Would not admit fault. Rarely even saw fault. And that would be crippling. ‘Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful,’ wrote George Orwell. ‘A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from the inside is simply a series of defeats.’18
The failure to produce a publishable manuscript, and to see it published, would have a profound effect on McMahon’s precarious legacy. His side of the story — the history he witnessed while in the Menzies government, the actions he took under Holt and Gorton, the perspective he might offer as a former prime minister — would remain untold. His opportunity to explain and argue for what he had done, at length, was gone. The potential to salvage his time as prime minister from the dustbin of history was lost. Those who had known him had little doubt that this would be the case. ‘Because he led the Liberal-Country Party Government to defeat,’ Peter Kelly would write, shortly after McMahon’s death, ‘he was never given the full credit for the numerous policies that he implemented.’19 David Fairbairn, speaking at McMahon’s memorial service at St Andrew’s Cathedral on 8 April, echoed the remarks: ‘I believe he was never given full credit for some of the policies which he implemented as prime minister.’20
‘Death is swallowed up in victory,’ the governor-general, Sir Ninian Stephen, read that morning. ‘O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?’21
The victory would be of the sort that is visited on all men and women. What Henry James described as ‘the hand of death’ would smooth the folds of McMahon’s image, simplifying it, summarising it, making it more typical and general.22 Within a few years, McMahon would be known in profile form only, as a silhouette cut from the confusion of life, a one-dimensional figure of little consequence or merit. He would become a punchline, a by-word for failure, silliness, ridicule. Historians would concur: he would be entrenched as the worst prime minister Australia had ever had.23 And where every other prime minister attracted a Boswell, McMahon would be nearly ignored. Only the ‘shilling life’, as Auden called it, would be told.24
Throughout all this, his widow — and, upon her death in 2010, his children Melinda, Julian, and Deborah — would become the keepers of the McMahon flame. ‘I’m so proud of him,’ Sonia would say. ‘In his twenty-one years as a minister, he served with distinction in just about every portfolio and, I believe, was a particularly fine treasurer and prime minister.’25 The toll of continuing derision was palpable. ‘It hurts when someone attacks and ridicules the man you love, questions his achievements and wonders if his life has been largely a lie,’ Sonia would say. What his family wanted — for a man who was a husband and father far more than a politician or prime minister — was fairness. ‘Bill deserves a fair go,’ Sonia told a prospective biographer.26
Fairness, however, would mean making a judgement about McMahon — this man who in death became a byword for silliness and treachery, but who in life was a mass of contradictions and change; whose youth was buoyed by wealth and opportunity, but blighted by death and deprivation; whose gaiety and charm gilded a naked ambition and hidden determination; whose absorption of a conservative, upper-class milieu propelled him to the law and then to politics; whose hearing difficulties isolated him but never silenced him; whose desire for advancement compelled him to act nefariously and unconscionably; whose propensity for hard work was almost without equal, yet also aroused jealousy and dislike; whose flaunting of wealth, fashion, and pomp betrayed his almost total lack of self-awareness; whose exercise of power was alternately informed by principle, pragmatism, and pure political expediency; who, holding that power, vacillated between periods of administration, change, and complete inaction; whose desire to hold and extend that power was tenacious, despite the tolls and setbacks; who, through the highs and lows of a long career, survived, endured, persevered where others faltered and gave in; who never stopped believing that one day there would be
vindication for all he had done; and who, to the end, persisted in a quest to find recognition for the years he had served, the things he had done, and the battles he had fought, lost, and won.
David Bowman had seen this side of McMahon quite clearly, quite early on. In February 1984, amid a torrid few days of bad moods and forgetfulness, McMahon had asked Bowman to record him practising a speech. Bowman organised it, but later in the day became curious. What was the speech like? How had it gone? He abandoned the manuscript he had been toiling over, retrieved the tape, and listened to an excerpt. What he heard evinced grudging respect.
‘His voice was strong, unhesitating. The old warhorse,’ Bowman wrote in his diary, ‘sniffing the breeze of a battle.’27
Acknowledgements
This book was written without the co-operation of the McMahon family, and without access to McMahon’s papers, which are held at the National Library of Australia. In light of these absences, this book would not have been possible without the considerable generosity of interviewees, the efforts of staff at archives and libraries across Australia and the United Kingdom, and the contemporaneous work of an array of journalists, biographers, scholars, and historians. The notes that append this work speaks to the debt that I owe to all these people, and the thanks that are their due.
I am grateful to staff of the National Library of Australia (in particular, those staff in the oral history and manuscript reading room sections, and those who maintain the wonderful Trove), the National Archives of Australia, the British National Archives in Kew, London, the Noel Butlin Archives at the Australian National University, the Library at the University of Canberra, and the National Film and Sound Archives in Canberra. Thanks are also due to Bridget Minatel, archivist at Sydney Grammar School, and Karin Brennan, archivist at Sydney University, for their helpful and informative responses to my queries; and to Adam Carr, whose Psephos archive is invaluable.
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