Joshua Black, ‘Scandals or Spectacles’ Australian Political Memoir

Enter any Australian bookshop over the last couple of decades, and you are likely to have been inundated with publications written by politicians trying to tell their life story, spill gossip and throw barbs at their colleagues. However, this was not always the case. For most of the 20th century Australian politicians were generally reluctant to write memoirs, and even when they did, someone as jovial and interesting as George Reid managed to produce a frightfully dull and dreary volume. It is only quite recently that a culture of decorum and statesmanship that prevented politicians from speaking candidly in retirement, has given way to a frenzy of honesty, or at least self-justification.

In this week’s episode of the Afternoon Light podcast, Robert Menzies Institute CEO Georgina Downer talks to Joshua Black, from the ANU’s National Centre of Biography, about the phenomenon of Australian political memoir.

Joshua Black is a postgraduate student in political history at the National Centre for Biography, ANU. Hailing from Sydney’s southwest, he completed his B.A. at the University of Wollongong, with an Honours thesis (2018), entitled ‘For What Purpose?: The Political Memoirs and Diaries of the Rudd – Gillard Labor Cabinet’, investigated the relatively unexplored field of political memoirs and their position in Australian political historiography. Josh has published and presented historical research on the history of Australia's political culture in a number of forums, and has contributed to public discussion in forums such as the Conversation, Inside Story, the Australian Book Review and ABC Radio. In 2021, he co-edited a special issue of the Australian Journal of Biography and History with Dr Stephen Wilks.