Zara Holt: the woman behind the PM

Zara Bate had her own career before she became a prime minister’s wife ... and a dame. This is her story.

Dame Zara Bate was the wife and widow of the missing prime minister, Harold Holt. A new novel reimagines her life.

Kimberley Freeman’s new novel, The Secret Year of Zara Holt, is based on the life of the real-life fashion designer and businesswoman Zara Holt, who is perhaps better known as the wife, then widow, of Australian prime minister, Harold Holt.

The novel draws on key historical events – including Holt’s baffling disappearance – but this isn’t a biography. The characters are heavily fictionalised, and the narrative focuses firmly on Zara’s inner world.

The Secret Year of Zara Holt by Kimberley Freeman

Historical romance isn’t usually my genre of choice. But give me a strong-willed woman with a sketchbook, a complicated love life, and an ambivalence toward her husband’s political career, and apparently I’m all in, because a few chapters into the book, I found myself unexpectedly captivated by Freeman’s novel and its bright, creative protagonist.

Charting the decades from the 1920s to the 1960s, the story begins in Zara’s early adulthood, following her rise as a designer, her creative struggles, and her enduring but complicated relationship with Holt (or “Harry”.) The relationship between the two provides the plot’s throughline, but romance is not its central focus.

At its core, this is a book about women.

Zara Holt with her husband, Prime Minister Harold Holt in 1969/

One of the novel’s pleasures is the warmth of Freeman’s female characters. Zara’s life is not only shaped by her relationship with Harry, but also by the many women around her: her sisters and mother, her friends and collaborators, and later the younger women she inspires.

Whether portraying sisterhood, motherhood, friendship, or collegiality, Freeman paints a warm, generous picture of women who work and live together and support one another throughout the course of their lives. As one character gently reminds Zara, “You have dear friends. Wonderful family. So many people love you. If there’s one little wrong note in your marriage, is that so bad?” It’s clear that although her complex relationship with Harry is immensely significant to Zara, it is far from the only love that matters in her life.

Freeman’s novel brings Zara Bate, who became Dame Zara Holt, out of her husband’s shadow.

One of the particularly compelling things about Zara is that she does not set out to be exceptional. In fact, she wants – often desperately – to have a life just like those of the women she sees around her. “I was in my mid-twenties and I didn’t want to be left on the shelf. I wanted a husband, a house and babies” she says.

But despite her best efforts at conforming to social convention, her talents as a fashion designer and her love for her craft are inescapable. Her creativity is evoked in decadent descriptions of pleated bodices and richly coloured silks. Scenes of her setting up a dress shop with her best friend capture the joy of youthful creativity and shared ambition.

Beneath the novel’s warmth, however, is an undercurrent of critique. Zara’s sister sums up the gendered expectations and illusions that define their world: “It’s all in the seeming and not in the being… I longed to marry… but I had no idea that love would be so entrapping”. When her career flourishes, Zara herself is never allowed to forget her position. “I even outearn him (Harry), you know, though we never talk about that,” she confides. “My work comes second to his, and he made me promise that.”

In a haunting photograph from 1967, Zara Holt looks drawn but composed as she leaves Cheviot Beach, Portsea, after her husband’s disappearance. She is flanked by two of her sons. Sam Holt is on the left and Nick Holt the right.

Even as she becomes a nationally recognised designer, her “second job” as a political wife never lets up. “Do you mind when the men all go off together and leave us here?” Zara asks a fellow political spouse. The answer: “You get used to it”. But Zara never really does.

By centring Zara’s life and inner experience, The Secret Year of Zara Holt turns the gendered world of politics on its head. The “world of men” of the 20th century becomes a backdrop, ­fundamentally peripheral to the creativity, kindness, and autonomy of women. For readers who enjoy historical fiction with a focus on women’s interior lives, The Secret Year of Zara Holt is a rewarding, immersive read. Freeman has published more than 30 full- length works of fiction, including under the name Kim Wilkins, and her experience shows. She writes with confidence and humour, crafting a well-structured story of a woman carving out an independent creative life in a world that often expected women to play supporting roles.

The Secret Year of Zara Holt captures the dreams and disappointments that shape a woman’s life, the tension between personal ambition and social expectation, and the complexity of love and relationships across time. It is a story of women working together and supporting one another, navigating the demands of love, ambition, and responsibility on their own terms.

Zara may be remembered in the public imagination as the prime minister’s wife, but Freeman gives her back her own story. The central role of Zara’s life is not as someone’s wife, but as her own self. As she insists, “please don’t call me Mrs Holt. I’m Zara.”

Seren Heyman-Griffiths is a writer and researcher currently based at the University of Sydney.