38 REVIEWS Settling Old Scores The Cameron Diaries by Clyde government and economic manage­ Cameron claims that his aim in con­ Cameron. Allen and Unwin, 1990. ment did not help - nor did Gough stantly undermining Whitlam's Whitlam's insistence on standards far leadership - sometimes openly, often Hardback, rrp $49.95. Reviewed by more rigorous than those adopted by not - was based on a genuine convic­ Mungo MacCallum. any national government before or tion that Whitlam had become an ir­ since - but, after all, it was not the revocable liability for the party. The difficulty with Clyde government which perverted the Political rehabilitation was impossible Cameron's diaries is deciding composition of the Senate, or which and therefore amputation was the how much of them to believe. blocked Supply, or dismissed itself. only option. He glosses over the fact that, at the start of 1976, no one else - This is not because Cameron in­ not his favoured candidate Lionel dulges in fantasies or memory Bowen, not Bill Hayden, not even Bob lapses, as might have been the Hawke if a seat could have been found case had Sir William McMahon for him - wanted to take over the ever found a publisher for his leadership. There was simply no alter­ native to Whitlam. memoirs; it is because a large part of Cameron's reminiscence Cameron, however, refused to accept consists of gloating accounts of the inevitable, and spent the next two how he was able to deceive and years working against Whitlam. In mislead his colleagues. It is the this way his "genuine conviction" be- f-fulfillircame a self-fulfillingf-fulfillircame prophecy. Clear­ old logical paradox of the man ly, if it was obvious to any outsider who comes up to you and says: tnat Whitlam's own party was con­ "I am a liar." In this instance, is spiring against him, the general public he just for once telling the would never accept him as leader. It is truth? impossible to quantify just how much this constant destabilising operation But let's be charitable - a concession affected the 1977 election result, but Cameron himself seldom makes. Let's Cameron is totally disingenuous in assume that the man once described not even considering it as a factor. by W C Wentworth, a politician with whom he had a love-hate relationship, It is also very difficult to accept that as "a predatory owl" is being strictly Cameron acted as he did for altruistic, honest in recounting his actions and rather than vindictive, motives. There feelings in 1976 and 1977. If this is the are simply too many giveaways in his case, the Labor Party was in an even own words. worse mess than it appeared at the time. All the other characters who appear in his diaries are fairly consistently Not only had it to face the trauma When the parliamentary party left the referred to either by given names (for following the devastation of the 1975 caucus room on November 11 singing friends and allies) or by surnames (for dismissaland the subsequent election; "Solidarity Forever", most of us as­ rivals and enemies). With Whitlam, it had to contend with an extraordi­ sumed that the party's leaders and there is a constant ambivalence: nary amount of internal conspiring, particularly the ones in a position to "Gough" on one page and "Whitlam" backstabbing and recrimination nold their seats would, indeed, be on the next. Cameron also describes which at times went very close to out­ solid. The damage inflicted from out­ Whitlam and his supporters as "the right treachery. And, again, if we are side was bad enough; to add to it from enemy", despite the fact that, whether to believe him, the Hon. Clyde Robert the inside would be sheer political he liked it or not, they remained the Cameron, MHR, was the unques­ masochism. majority of the caucus and the over­ tioned ringleader. whelming majority of the Labor rank and file for the whole period of which It is quite extraordinary that Cameron But Cameron saw it differently. Like he writes. should regard this as a matter for self- his Calvinist Scottish forebears, he congratulation, as he does for nearly welcomed the prospect of a great But most revealing is Cameron's ob­ 900 closely written pages. To most cleansing fire to sweep through the session with his removal from the normal supporters of the Labor move­ party - provided, of course, he was the Labour and Immigration portfolio in ment, the events of 1975 were a one who decided whom it should con­ 1975. He keeps returning to it like a catastrophe forced upon it by external sume. Head of the list was Edward dog to an old bone, worrying away at enemies. Labor's own inexperience in Gough Whitlam. it long after it is obvious that there is ALR ; SEPTEMBER 1990 REVIEWS 39 no more meat to be extracted. He in­ sists on referring to it as a "sacking" (it wasn't; Jim Cairns and Rex Connor were sacked, Cameron was moved as part of a fairly extensive reshuffle) and professes a total inability to under­ stand why it happened. Indeed, he seems to have asked almost everyone he met for a theory, and comes up with some truly bizarre ones. The more obvious explanation - that Cameron was identified with the old guard of big spenders, and had there­ fore himself become an electoral liability in a high profile economic portfolio - just does not seem to have occurred to him. Cameron's work in the early days of the government and his use of the Commonwealth public service as a crucible to test such things as maternity leave, anti-discrimina­ tion and equal rights, were of enor­ mous social benefit; they will rightly be seen as his great political monu­ ment. But they did not come cheap. By 1975 the public was no longer in a lavish mood. Just how far Cameron was from realising this can be seen in his condemnation of Hayden's 1975 budget, which he described as a Liberal document, a betrayal of Labor principles and a sell-out to conserva­ Clyde Cameron as a "fresh-faced parliamentary tenderfoot' tive economics. The irony of this summation can best Apart from the ground-breaking in­ For many of those 23 years, and not be appreciated from the fact that he dustrial legislation he introduced, only during the DLP split, Labor's spent most of the next two years run­ there is another, more physical, monu­ members became progressively more ning Hayden to take over from Whit- ment to Cameron's time in govern­ introspective; their main preoccupa­ lam, whom even Cameron admits ment: the Clyde Cameron Trade tion was internal. Cameron was very from time to time, in a rather sheepish Union Training College at Albury- much part of this process and, while fashion, was a major Labor figure. Wodonga, a regional centre which al­ he was able to break the habit of a When Hayden eventually became most, but not quite, worked in the lifetime for at least part of his brief leader after the 1977 debacle, pioneering days of the Whitlam period as a minister, it was all too easy Cameron backed him without much government. to revert when things returned to enthusiasm until Hawke entered par­ what most Australians (and most liament, when he immediately politicians, including Labor switched his allegiance. In the last few From his days in the Australian Workers Union, Cameron had seen politicians) considered normal. years he has spent some time writing the imperative need to produce union increasingly critical and abrasive let­ officials with the skills to take the ters to Hawke. The Cameron Diaries are a valuable ad­ employers and their lawyers on at dition to the political library, but they their own game; hence the project. At least there is some consistency need to be placed in context the writ­ here; the last Labor leader with whom ings of an unusual man, about un­ he felt any real affinity (according to It is a strange piece of modernist ar­ usual events, in unusual times. his own account) was Ben Chifley, and chitecture, mil of winding corridors Cameron's place in history as a social that was back in the days when that pop out in unexpected places or reformer is more solid, and more Cameron was a fresh-faced par­ finish as dead ends; a little, an unkind deserved, than that of an embittered liamentary tenderfoot. Curiously, he critic might say, like Cameron's diarist. still writes about Chifley almost as politics. But this would hardly be fair. though they were contemporaries. It Twenty-three continuous years in op­ MUNGO MACCALLUM was is hard not to conclude that he would position for a keen young reformist traipsing the parliamentary corridors much rather have had his time in the with a zealous sense of social justice limelight in the 1940s than in the had to be frustrating to the point of as a journalist at the same time, and 1970s. paranoia. after, Clyde Cameron. ALR . SEPTEMBER 1990 40 REVIEWS Pacific Pandemonium Blood on Their Banner: emergence of traditional enmities and The labelling of island leaders - such aspirations due to the stretching of as Kanak Eloi Machoro as the Che Nationalist Struggles in the ill-suited constitutions, post-inde­ Guevara or Robespierre of die Pacific, South Pacific, by David Robie, pendence, past their cohesive limits, Dr Timoci Bavadra as the "new mes- Pluto Press, 1989. Reviewed by as with the strengthening of siah" of rural western Fijians, or of Rowan Callick.