POLITICS and gentle in one setting, cruelly arrogant in another. There is Keating the Fascinator a telling aphorism, Watsonian in form but Keating in sub- stance: ‘one cannot warrant the truth of one’s position by succumbing to the prejudice of fools.’ Neal Blewett Keating was incorrigibly wilful. ‘Put an open gate in front of him and he would not go through it; put a fence and he’d Don Watson try to jump it.’ Increasingly, as his premiership waned, ‘he Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: would not react to a serious challenge [in domestic politics] until he felt the shadow of the axe above him’. This became A Portrait of Paul Keating PM very much a problem for his minders. ‘Years of death-defying Knopf, $45hb, 756pp, 0 091 83517 8 struggle had given him the metabolism of a cornered rat — he could not get excited until the stakes were very high, HAT IS IT about Paul Keating that so fascinated preferably a matter of life and death.’ And yet sadness hung his retainers? Six years ago, John Edwards wrote about him. He could, as I know, be the most exuberant of men, Wa massive biography-cum-memoir taking Keating’s yet melancholy was never far away. Indeed, it was this sense story to 1993. Now Don Watson has produced an even of sadness that, for Watson, remains the dominant impres- heftier tome. Narrower in chronological span — 1992 to 1996 sion, perhaps even a sense of mourning, which ‘empties the — Watson is broader in his interests, more personal, mourner’s world, leaving it like an abandoned house’. In more passionate. While not the masterpiece it might have future, when I am asked, ‘What was Paul Keating really like?’ been, Recollections of a Bleeding Heart remains the most the answer must be, ‘Go read Don Watson’. compelling contemporary portrait of an Australian prime There are some wonderful set pieces in the narrative: minister. Paul Keating has found his Boswell. a glimpse of the reception for Elizabeth II in King’s Hall in Recollections is really three books in one: a subtle and February 1992, notorious for Keating’s alleged ‘manhandling’ sympathetic analysis of the many facets of the twenty-fourth of the Queen, where, as Watson opines, ‘if he touched her at prime minister; a narrative of high — and low — politics in all it must have been little more than the epidermis of his the Keating years; and a compendium of the political wit and fingertips’; the Bankstown policy speech a year later, with the wisdom of Don Watson. heart-warming family appearance at the end, when Keating’s I was a colleague, though never an intimate, of Paul Keating ‘happiness was palpable and infectious’, and which moved for over ten years, and there is much of revelation here, for my senior adviser to tears; the triumph in the Bankstown example the erosion of his marriage, a theme running like a Sports Club on the evening of 13 March 1993 when, through drum-beat through the narrative. Yet it is the familiar that is the ‘dinging and buzzing and rattling’ of the poker machines, most striking: in passage after passage, one stops short in it became apparent that the unwinnable election had been recognition. This is the Keating I knew, but had never been won; the pilgrimage to Ireland; the passage of Mabo through able to capture in words. Complex, ambiguous and elusive, the Senate where in ‘the packed public gallery … those big he has until now escaped any convincing delineation. rodeo hats … rose and applauded’; and that last policy speech Watson portrays him as the most contrary of all politi- — ‘the hardest policy speech to write because the govern- cians: ‘an enigma, a paradox, an oxymoron on legs, a contra- ment was too old’. diction.’ He was in turn the promoter of order and the bringer Scattered through Recollections are Watson’s reflections of chaos, sometimes ‘like a man who believed the world was on politics: on politicians and the media; on the art of disintegrating and it was his lonely desperate task to try to speechwriting; on the theatre of question time; on ‘the rela- hold it together’, and at others wishing to ‘unleash the dogs, tively benign corruption’ of the democratic process; on the let all hell break loose’. He would be ‘energetic and focused wisdom of televising parliament, and a host of other mini- one day, the next inert and remote’. He is at once the refined essays. He is also good at capturing a sense of place: aesthete with his deep, if narrow, interests in the arts, who Canberra ‘affluent, informed and civilised yet … a lot like a seeks refuge in Empire clocks, Mahler and fine art catalogues, gimcrack suburb or a declining country town’; parliament and the unrivalled fighter in the gutter of politics. He was a house with ‘its giant rattling hills hoist of a flagpole … man whose life had been dedicated and consumed by politics, an elephantine expression of the suburban dream’. This and yet he denied its values and shrugged off its obligations. descriptive talent is exercised during many of Keating’s ‘He would play the delinquent stricken with ennui; he would expeditions overseas, occasions on which the prime minister slide low in his chair like James Dean in East of Eden and say was frequently at his best, handling as he was the ‘big picture the leadership thing wasn’t worth a crumpet.’ A democratic issues’, but which often had damaging domestic repercus- politician in a democratic polity, he disdained the necessary sions. Watson was there when Keating unexpectedly knelt artifices of democratic politics. He could be kind, courteous to kiss the soil at Kokoda, a reverberating symbolic gesture, 10 AUSTRALIAN BOOK REVIEW JUNE/JULY 2002 Archived at Flinders University: dspace.flinders.edu.au POLITICS but as Watson notes: ‘Old diggers … had at best mixed in 1992. These are venial sins, but indicative of the author’s feelings about this svelte creature in his Italian suit blessing tunnel vision. their ground.’ And there is a delightful glimpse of prime All this relates to the central question that any writer on minister and speechwriter in Berlin ‘in the evening gloom … Keating must answer. How did he lose the winnable election hunting Schinkel buildings, stealing round corners to evade of 1996 after having won the unwinnable one of 1993? The the press in streets all blackened and bullet-pocked from fifty former was fought in a much more benign economic climate years before’. than 1993, after four years of impressive growth accompanied Watson’s perspective is inevitably presidential, a view by low inflation, though admittedly unemployment remained focused on a single individual. Australian elections have intractable. Moreover, having had but one leader through the become increasingly presidential, contests dominated by the 1990 parliament, the Opposition now had once more suc- prime minister and the would-be usurper, with even the most cumbed to leadership troubles being led in turn by a lame influential of Cabinet and shadow ministers playing only bit duck, a clown and a recycled has-been from the 1980s. parts. But to conclude from this that our political system is Conventional wisdom has it that the voters, having dis- presidential is an error. Without Hawke’s charismatic elec- posed of the greater evil in 1993 (Hewson and the GST), tioneering skills, Labor would have been unlikely to win four simply waited behind the back shed with their axes to whack elections in a row; yet without the other evil (Keating) at the the solidarity and achievements first opportunity. The trouble of an able Cabinet those succes- with this thesis is that it sug- sive victories would have been gests that the most creative improbable. Ministers and prime politician of his generation was minister are tied together in a incapable of using the economic symbiotic relationship; both recovery — of which he was the need to flourish if the govern- architect — plus his opponents’ ment is to survive. For a scholar travails to refurbish his image to neglect this is an academic and refashion the national story. mistake; for a prime minister to Watson’s answer is not easy succumb to presidentialism can to discern amid his abuse of the be fatal. press, his continuing psychoa- Watson recognises this but nalysis of his master, and much only late in the day, on page 697 personal angst. In crude terms, Paul Keating with Bill Clinton in Jakarta, 1994 — ‘good government depended he seems to believe that Keating on more than a prime minister, it depended on a team’ — and was destroyed by the magnitude of his achievement, itself then only as a last desperate remedy to succour the prime undermined by the policy failure that ‘we never found a place minister. The rest of the book is infected with the virus of for the people in the big picture’ and by the kinks in the prime presidentialism, the symptoms of which are everywhere. minister’s personality, above all by his ‘recoil from the pursuit Watson writes as though the most significant battle within of popularity and trust, which is to say from the essence of the government was the one for the prime minister’s soul, politics’. This is a presidential explanation but one which fought out in the prime ministerial bunker between ‘the pointy transforms the simple revenge western into a drama of Shake- heads’, the high priests of economic rationalism, and the spearean dimensions, in which the hero of vast achievements ‘bleeding hearts’, the ‘suckers for every sob story’. Cabinet and great potential is brought down by flaws in his own struggles scarcely touch his radar screen.