Peter Craven

Tony Abbott’s history of Australia comes as a surprise. It has a spellbinding verve which will beguile friend and foe alike. We don’t expect such narrative command from a former prime minister of Australia. In office, Abbott was a believer in the ‘lean and lift’ principle of civic life, with a marked preference for the lifting side, which led to policies like work for the dole and budgets which were generally perceived as rough on the poor. His great ideological influence was the radical conservatism of Bob Santamaria and the formation of the Democratic Labor Party, the anti-communist ‘Groupers’ who caused the Split (in 1956) which stopped Labor from achieving government again until Gough Whitlam won the 1972 election.

Elizabeth Harrower (1928-2020) became an Australian literary classic before she had fully established herself as an Australian writer. She had a rough childhood in Newcastle, New South Wales, and once contemplated lying on the road in the dead of night waiting to be run over. She described herself as a ‘divorced child’, saw her father Frank very rarely, despite his best efforts, and felt an inexorable loneliness during her days in the industrial city by the sea. Later she found herself in Scotland and loved it; and for much of the 1950s she lived in London.