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GARRY WOODARD AND JOAN BEAUMON1
By any objective criteria, Sir Paul Hasluck had a remarkably successful career in public life. He was a rare combination of successful politician, skilled writer and respected historian. Appointed as Minister for Territories in 1951, after little more than a year in federal parliament, he later held three of the highest public offices: Minister for Defence (1963-64), Minister for External Affairs (1964-69), and Governor-General (1969-74). Earlier in his career, as a young officer in the Department of External Affairs in the 1940s, he had the responsibility of representing Australia in the fledgling UN, including at the Security Council. His official histories of Australian government and politics during World War II still dominate their field.
Yet, Hasluck's memoirs of his childhood and early adult life, published in his retirement years and written possibly when in Government House, convey a startling sense of regret and failure. Mucking About concludes with Hasluck's decision in 1949 to enter federal politics:
From that point onward my life ceased to be my own. I was unable to do many things I would have liked to do and was required to do many things I had no personal interest in doing. Duty took charge ... My future road had little variety except that some hills were steeper and some curves more hazardous than others. I kept assiduously to my political career, often feeling I was the wrong driver in the wrong truck. (Hasluck 1994:335)
Some of this palpable sense of loss was a reflection of Hasluck's temperament and personality; his preference (so obvious in Mucking About) for a life of reflection and solitude, his inability to relate easily to his political colleagues and his public service subordinates,2 and his own consciousness of his `failure as a human being' (Hasluck 1994:34).f Possibly his inability to win the prime ministership in the mid-1960s contributed to his sense of failure as he reviewed his life-though he denied he wanted the position (Hasluck 1997:130). But it presumably owed something also to his time as Minister for External Affairs. Spanning, as it did, a period which ranks with the conscription debates of 1916-17 as the one of the most divisive in Australian political history, Hasluck's time in External Affairs marked him...