Dr. Ross Walker

Written in a narrative style, I found this book poses more questions than it answers about the man who was Australia's Prime Minister in the years 1966-1967, until in the end you are left to draw your own conclusions.

Regarded as charismatic, handsome and hardworking, Harold Holt was Sir Robert Menzies hand picked successor for the prime ministership, however his success as a minister did not transfer to the PM's role. He was much more progressive on many issues such as Aboriginal Affairs, Immigration, and engagement with Asia than is perhaps remembered, and it comes as unsurprising to learn that he and Gough Whitlam, whilst political opponents, held each other in high personal mutual respect.

Holts blind spot, was of course Vietnam and the conscription issue, a situation he inherited and then doubled down on. He was perhaps too enamoured of his friend Lyndon Johnston to view the situation Australia found itself in objectively. The author has an academic background in US politics in the 1960's, and you will probably come away from this book wanting to track down a biography of Lyndon Johnson as well. The issue of Conscription is dealt extensively with in the book... and I came away wondering... if National Service had never been introduced and conscripts had never been sent to Vietnam, would the Australian public have been as disengaged and uninterested in that war as they were 40 years later with the war in Afghanistan?

At the end of the day, you are left with the impression Holt's life went wrong when he became Prime Minister... he was unprepared for the harsh realities of leadership, the need for decisiveness and to control the agenda, and the machinations of his more ambitious colleagues, no longer brought to heel by Menzies. I also suspect that despite his apparent charisma and likeability, he was one of those politicians of this era whose personality did not translate well in the new environment of television.

Holt's one release was the sea. He loved being in the ocean, loved being in an environment where all the cares of the world could not reach him. On the morning Holt disappeared in the surf at Cheviot Beach, he'd taken an unpleasant telephone call from Billy McMahon, whose self absorbed machiavellian political ambition knew no bounds... Perhaps it was enough to make a man want to walk into the ocean and not come back...

At times I didn't enjoy the way this book was written, though the author provides a warning on this in his introduction. The flipside is, it did make you think...

- Copy purchased by the Reviewer from Readings, St Kilda.… (meer)