The Whitlam Mob

It’s hard to understand now what it would have been like to have the same government in Australia for 23 years. Different prime ministers, but still: the same party, the same ideas, sitting on top of the country, all the way from 1949 to 1972. And it’s hard now to understand what it would have felt like when, at long last, Australia got a new government: the Whitlam government. Mungo MacCallum’s book, The Whitlam Mob, gives some sense of the exhilarating, silly, messy, nasty fight that went on, when a government rushing to make Australia different came up against the many, many people who wanted it to stay the same.

The Whitlam Mob is not so much a history as an amiable after-luncheon tour, with Mungo pointing out the colourful exhibits (a Jim Cairns here, an Al Grassby there) and telling the usual good stories, plus one or two you may not have heard. This is your chance to find out which Whitlam minister assured a press conference that ‘traditionally, most of Australia’s exports come from overseas’, how Malcolm Fraser played a joke with pickled onions, and how much Lionel Murphy was, as they say, a pants man.

Under all the anecdote is a deeper story about how hard it is to change Australia. The Whitlam government released two decades of pent-up ambition and ideas onto the health, education, industrial and legal systems – and the Australian establishment reacted with something like hysteria. It’s true that Whitlam and his ministers, very experienced at planning, but very inexperienced at doing, made big bags of mistakes.

But this book argues that the Whitlam government’s ambition was more important than any of its errors. And that the tragedy is, in Australia, we seem to believe that so much good progressive government ambition was used up, was proven to be too dangerous – forever – in the three short years of Whitlam.

Sean O'Beirne