For he told us almost nothing of himself. What quarrels he had with his parents, what marks he got at school, what it was like to share a bedroom for eighteen years with the Reverend Tim Costello. Why he was caned so often, and left his parents' religion and joined his wife's. What he thought about God, and Christ, and why he thought Christ anti-union. Whether his fundamentalist parents liked him wedding an Anglican. How long he was in and around the Labor Party and why he left. What his close Labor friends the Eassons thought of his defection to the anti-Christ, the dark side and his boots-and-all marriage to a Liberal leader's daughter.
We don't know if he ever saw a movie, or went to a play, an opera, a ballet, read a novel or bet on the Melbourne Cup. We don't know if he was raised teetotal, and what pain attended his first alcoholic drink. We don't know if he had a pet dog, or a visiting parrot he befriended and fed. We aren't told where he stood on Apartheid, Nelson Mandela, Bobby Kennedy, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Pogo, Peanuts, Pink Floyd. His grandparentage, parentage, childhood, school days, undergraduate years, adolescent comradeships and rapid marriage take between them twenty-two pages; the fight for the GST seventeen.
No great emotion troubles the rising young mover and shaker - no lust, no fleshly disappointment, no drug-bust, no hangover, no detailed love of a football team, no hot, rousing day at the cricket, no beloved eating house, no details of how he fell in love or felt at first sight of his firstborn baby. No thrill at first putting on a lawyer's wig or walking at thirty-two into Parliament House.
Few feelings of any human sort are admitted. We seem to have an ambition-machine here, or, worse, a policy nerd, a number-wrestling corporate accountant, a two-legged White Paper. The caustic clown, the parliamentary Groucho, the happy Houdini, the unstoppable Woody Woodpecker has gone missing. The jesting gladiator we love to boo and clap and curse has vanished into air, into thin air, and into the Official Version, rewritten history.
