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Toby Davidson. Good for the Soul: John Curtin's Life with Poetry. Crawley WA: UWA Publishing, 2021. 472 pages AU$34.99 ISBN: 9781760801250 (Paperback)
'Prolonged interactions between poetry and Australian politics are as rare as they are peculiar' (374), writes Toby Davidson in this well-researched and in many ways ground-breaking book. That's not strictly true, though, as John Curtin's own experience as an editor of union journals would attest. Davidson amply documents how left-wing politics at the turn of the twentieth century energetically cultivated a balladry of protest alongside Shelleyan hymns to liberty, as well as scurrilous parodies of famous poems, directed at opponents. While he was in the Victorian Socialist Party, Curtin was friends with Bernard O'Dowd, whose metrical treatises were influential on his thinking and often quoted by him. But I imagine that what Davidson means by 'Australian politics' is the narrower, professional sense of that meretricious trade carried on by our elected officials, one whose ingrained cynicism would seem at odds with those verbal arts not primarily dedicated to worldly power and influence.
In fact the only poetical allusion by an Australian prime minister that I can recall is the obvious one: Sir Robert Menzies's invocation of Thomas Ford when regaling Elizabeth II at a state dinner in 1963, 'I did but see her passing by / Yet I shall love her till I die'-a trimming which leaves the fat off a racier lyric. According to political historian Mark Rolfe,
Menzies remembered thousands of lines of Wordsworth, Shakespeare and many other poets whom he quoted in speeches. Our second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, had a similar predilection. Our first prime minister, Edmund Barton, liked to pepper his early parliamentary speeches with Greek and Latin quotations that he learnt in a degree in classics and English literature at Sydney University. (28)
More recently there have been PMs who could generate the odd figurative spark: Paul Keating, most famously, among whose bons mots was his reference to Opposition leader John Hewson as a 'feral abacus'; or Gough Whitlam, with his 1975 put-down of Malcolm Fraser as 'Kerr's cur.' Former New South Wales premier and federal foreign minister Bob Carr is one of very few conspicuously bookish pollies, but favours history and fiction. In the digital age,...