0 - Eureka Street

L"' MOST
Philip Harve y
Who was Harold Holt
The Life and Death of Harold Holt, Tom Frame. Allen & Unwin, 2005. JSB 1 741 14672 0, RRP 535
AD>RS, I tumcd ficst to
the death scenes. The details arc assembled
in workmanlike fashion. Harold Holt
spends the weekend before Christmas
1967 at his Portsca holiday house. There
arc dinners and paperwork. On the
morning in question the one blemish is a
phone argument with Billy McMahon, his
Treasurer, a figure who only gets murkier
with time. (How would a biography of
McMahon read)
Around midday Holt is with friends on
the back beach when he is inspired to go for
a swim. Where were the minders The bodyguards
The common sense Dame Zara
Holt's first question was whether he was
wearing sa ndshoes or flippers. As it happened,
sa ndshoes. The surf wa high, the
water treacherous, Holt had little control
over his movements. It did not take long for
him to disappear below the surface, never
to re-emerge.
Tom Frame rejects motives like suicide,
and elega ntly scuttles the Chinese submarine
theories. For him, the prime m inister's
death is one of accidental drowning,
a com mon mishap at Australian beaches,
and only uncommon here because we are
talking about the prime minister. A very
recent coronial inquiry agrees with Frame.
He concludes that if there are other reasons,
we probably will never know them,
and gives murky explanations too for why
the sea does not give up its dead.
The headlines of that summer left
Australians with a strange feeling that
still lingers.
Here was a national leader who did not
vanish after an election defeat, was not
assassinated or forced to retire; he simply
disappeared. Holt's disappearance became
the identifying moment in national memory,
the start of the discussion: who was
Harold Holt
In an age when politicians have
biographies written before they even
become prime minister, what do we make
of the first life of Holt coming out 38 years
after his death One of the most surprising
facts is that he had the longest wait of any
parliamentarian, 30 years,
before becoming PM, a
record the current member
for Higgins wouldn't equate
with 'being there for the
long haul'.
Although he was Menzies'
favoured protege, Holt
was fa r from being Menzies'
epigonc. They had
worked together since the
1930s and could be seen as
co-founders of the Liberal
Party, two great survivors.
He was an enthusiast, a
man who took to portfolios
with smooth and energetic purpose: Supply
and Development, Trade and C ustoms,
Labour and National Service, Air and
Civil Aviation, Treasurer. He was good
friends ('mates' would be a risky word to
use) with many in the union movement,
his motivation being productivity, his foes
being the Reds.
Frame accentuates his uccesses in
negotiation with all sides of industrial
relations, but is honest about such disasters
as Holt's handling of the waterside
workers' strikes in the 1950s and economic
reforms that almost lost them the
1961 election. Cheery moments intervene,
like his pioneering of decimal currency.
The book marks out the chronology
well, though is remarkably uncritical
of Holt's politics and unanalytiw
cal of his psychology.
HEN PUSHED TO AY what Holt
stood for, the words that recur lack real
definition: progress, stability, initiative,
values, freedom, co-operation. Indeed,
they come close to the virtues extolled in
Holt's guiding creed, Rudyard Kipling's 'If'.
There was never a comprehensive vision of
change for Australia; it was always steady
as she goes. Britain was still an ideal, and
unbounded progress a euphemism for
unquestioned ca pitalism. His infamous
faux pas during the Vietnam nightmare,
'All the way with LBJ', betrayed the anxious
and shifting a llcgiances that
remain cause for outrage
and doubt to this day.
But another factor has
to be considered. Why the
Liberal Party Menzies and
Holt wanted a party that
was over and against what
it was not: not illibera l,
not socialist, not crusty old
Tory. Frame quotes Rohan
Rivett from 1954: 'They represent
the liberal, middle of
the road section of the party
and in most major matters
of policy arc more broadminded
and progressive than the majority
of the benches behind them.'
Australia was comfortable and relaxed
with a government that was neither radical
right-wing nor radical left. The book
is a goldmine for historians of the parties
and their changing character. Menzies
and Holt would find alien the closed
debate and amoral actions of the current
Liberal Government.
What is also missing is much about
Holt's family or personal life. Prurience
sells, and perhaps Bishop Frame wishes to
disappoint the headline editors, but he gives
signs of a private world that wouldn't look
out of place in Euripides. There are clearly
personal dramas and secrets in Holt's life
that help explain why he devoted all his
time to politics. The inner emotional world
of an extrovert would be the perfect subject
for the next Holt biography. That, and the
peculiar widespread view, well expressed
in David Man's Barwicl