The big rush to rewrite history

SINCE last year’s election, there has been an unholy rush by participants competing to get their versions of history into print. First out of the chute was Rob Oakeshott’s own explanation for the failure of the nation to find any beauty in the ugliness of Julia Gillard’s minority government he helped install.

In The Independent Member for Lyne (that’s the title), he reveals how dopey he was to believe he could achieve anything meaningful. Tony Windsor, who also dudded conservative constituents to support the loopy Labor-Green-Independent disaster, was the subject of a very friendly biography (Tony Windsor, The Biography) by rural historian Ruth Rae. As dull as Windsor, and despite the best efforts of the author, she failed to persuade this reader that he is anything more than a small-town wheeler dealer with a massive chip on his shoulder. All you want to know and more about Greg Combet, a throwback to an industrial era that saw union thuds smash their way into Parliament House who caused hearts to flutter among the wannabe revolutionaries at the ABC with his protests against modern wharf practises during the dock dispute, Combet stars in the Fights of My Life. Sure to be compulsory reading wherever the teachers’ union controls study lists. Joe Hockey’s authorised biography Not Your Average Joe, by sometime ABC compere Madonna King, was the next to lob and play into the hands of those who were never sure of Hockey’s judgement. This week Wayne Swan launched his work, The Good Fight. It’s about as honest as the string of Budget surpluses he never produced. Belongs on the fiction shelf somewhere near Oakeshott’s fantasy. Still to come, Julia Gillard on Julia Gillard, Peter Garrett on Peter Garrett, and others as their egos demand. Personally, I can’t wait for Paul Kelly to put the catastrophe in perspective in his book, Triumph and Demise, due next week.