Michael Hogan, ed. - A Lifetime in Conservative Politics: Political Memoirs of Sir Joseph Carruther

Michael Hogan, ed.,

A Lifetime in Conservative Politics: Political Memoirs of Sir Joseph Carruthers

Sydney, University of New South Wales Press, 2005

Pp. xiii + 251. Hardback $54.95 ISBN 0 86840 872 7

Joseph Carruthers was premier of New South Wales from 1904 to 1907. Born in Kiama in 1856, he entered politics in 1887, became a minister under Parkes in 1889, served in the 1897 Federal Convention and remained an elder statesman until his death in 1932. In his last years, he drafted two versions of autobiography, the second alarmingly discursive. Michael Hogan has skilfully excised and conflated the material, and his helpful marginal notes clarify the author’s reminiscences. Carruthers was a puzzlingly unpredictable writer of memoir. Sometimes he was evidently influenced by the subsequent writings of others, but at key points, such as the year he quit as premier, his own memory failed (until tactfully corrected by Hogan). Carruthers included sketches of contemporary figures, notably the men of 1897, which naturally recall the pen-portraits in Alfred Deakin’s then-unpublished Federal Story. But whereas Deakin could use a few words to capture an identity, Carruthers concentrated on their appearance and their speeches. This emphasis upon externals is equally evident in the guarded release of information about himself. We learn, almost in passing, that he entered politics after ‘I had the great misfortune to suffer a great bereavement in the death of a dearly loved little daughter’ (p. 64). Hogan finds him ‘strangely reticent’ (p. 161) in failing to explain why he did not follow up his hankering for a career in Commonwealth politics. Nor is there much information about the illness which forced Carruthers to resign the premiership, beyond the statement that it took him thirteen years to recover. Something was going on beneath the Carruthers carapace, but his memoirs offer at best a glimpse. Why did he write at all? Of course there are also positives: life at Sydney University in the early 1870s, cricket, British bigwigs pontificating about a war with Germany during his only visit to the old country in 1908, Billy Hughes in a bad temper and with a strange preference for stale bread. Hogan is to be congratulated on the end product, and thanked for omitting the original material on the death of Lord Nelson, the torpedo fish and the history of Scotland.