Tag Archive for 'Howard’s End'

Howard’s End: not E. M. Forster but Van Onselen and Senior

Published
by
Kim
1 year, 7 months ago
in Advertising, Blogging, Books, Writers & Writing, Federal Elections, Howardia and Media
. 27 Comments

Here’s another don’t waste your $34.95 book review, and for many of the same reasons as Mark identified as failures in an earlier 2007 federal election tome from Melbourne University Press – Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07.

If anything, Peter Van Onselen and Philip Senior’s Howard’s End: The Unravelling of a Government is an even more tedious read. That might have been evident from the fact that even the now obligatory astroturf “news” stories about the book couldn’t find too much in the way of “shock! horror!” type “revelations” to excerpt, as I observed at the time.

The blurb claims:

In the tradition of Pamela Williams’ The Victory, Howard’s End analyses and makes sense of the result and its far-reaching implications for the people of Australia.

Well, that might indeed be a worthy aim, but the problem is that the book doesn’t do much analysis, and very little sense-making and if there’s anything in it about the implications for the people of Australia as opposed to the future of the Liberal party (such insight filled gems as “rebuilding the Liberal Party after the 2007 federal election defeat was always going to be difficult…”) I’ve completely missed them.

If political journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, this is apparently the first draft of the first draft. Through 192 pages, the book tediously recounts the events after Rudd’s ascension to the Labor leadership on an almost week by week basis. Mungo McCallum did much the same thing, but at least it was funny. If you’re looking for a reminder of the interminable “perpetual campaign”, then probably you’re pushing the tragic in political tragic a bit further than it normally should go, but you might do better to read Mungo, or indeed click on the archive of this blog. There’s only so much interest in reading exactly what John Howard announced about training policy on day whatever of the campaign, or what Rudd said in a press conference whenever in May. It reads as if someone’s sat down with a stack of newspapers and paraphrased the tedium of day to day political reporting.

But it gets worse. Continue reading ‘Howard’s End: not E. M. Forster but Van Onselen and Senior’

The Great Pretender

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 8 months ago
in Books, Writers & Writing, Elections, Federal Elections, History, Howardia, Media and Polls
. 12 Comments

There were numerous examples of the “exciting excerpt from new book on politics” thing around in the weekend papers, a phenomenon noted earlier here with regard to Peter Van Onselen and Phillip Senior’s Howard’s End. The Courier-Mail ran some underwhelming excerpts from that tome – the thrust of which appeared to be that Kevin Rudd sometimes reacted badly to some of the bombs lobbed at him last year (as in the Burke “affair”). That doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t know at the time, and it’s probably unfair to judge the book as a whole on the basis of these excerpts. The marketing ploy seems to be to run a bit of copy which can be spun into something contemporary – another brick in the wall of the prevailing “media narrative”.

We also saw some similarly underwhelming excerpts in The Australian from Christine Jackman’s Inside Kevin07, which were then spun into news stories. Or rather, the bit about ALP polling on Peter Costello was. No one seemed to find it particularly stunning a revelation that ALP wonks were playing around with butchers paper when workshopping campaign themes.

The Costello story, of course, has played into current speculation about the Liberal leadership, and a campaign by certain commentators to tout his leadership credentials. But it actually highlights something very problematic both about the interpretation of polling by the media and the political class and these sorts of “first draft of history” journalistic books. Continue reading ‘The Great Pretender’