After much hesitation and over-thinking, I plunged into starting my new book one day in July last year. Progress has been slow until recent weeks – I’ve been unwell since I got covid again in September. But now it’s coming together – I think this book has momentum, I think it’s going to work.

My title is ‘John Curtin and His Afterlives: A Biography’. John Curtin (1885-1945) was prime minister of Australia from 1941 to 1945 and is often ranked as Australia’s greatest prime minister. David Stephens writes, ‘John Curtin has over the years become the Mount Everest of Australian political biography’. Curtin has, indeed, proved difficult to ‘climb’ for biographers. Stephens mentions Lloyd Ross, who started writing a biography in 1945 immediately after Curtin’s death. He spent decades on the mountain, amassing invaluable material but he had trouble with the manuscript, as well as falling out with the family over certain claims in his initial series of newspaper articles published in 1958. His biography was finally published in 1977 to a mixed reception. Tom Fitzgerald saw gaps in Ross’s account and began his own research around 1975; he ‘became so enmeshed in his investigations that the work was still in progress when he died in 1993’. His papers are now held at the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library where I work. There were other historians planning biographies, including Curtin’s Australian Dictionary of Biography entry author, Geoffrey Serle, who died before he could write a full-length account. Through the middle came David Day, whose 1999 book has become the standard cradle-to-grave account. It was a swift ascent – remarkably, he notes that he only properly began the biography in 1997 (p. 586). 1999 feels like yesterday to me, but Day’s biography is now twenty-five years old. Since then, there have been many more books published on John Curtin, including John Edwards well-received two-volume John Curtin’s War, which has a lively summary of Curtin’s life up to his prime ministership and then a minutely-detailed account of the war years from the government side, with Curtin as a focal point.

It’s understandable that people have told me there’s already enough books on Curtin and everything’s been said. But that’s not the way biography works. A New York Times reviewer counts 800 biographies of Curtin’s American contemporary, Franklin Roosevelt. ‘Roosevelt’s story is worth telling again and again’ he writes; it applies to Curtin too. The reviewer gives an excellent guide (in the negative) to the qualities a new biography of a well-trodden subject should aspire to: ‘The prose is clean, but flat, with little sparkle or literary grace. There are no new analytic thrusts or parries, no new sources or imaginative reinterpretations of old ones.’ Style matters, and I intend to bring a distinctive one to my book, aspiring to this sparkle and literary grace! Let me hope for new analytic thrusts and parries too. I am blessed with many new sources – Trove’s digitised newspapers have reopened the past. My day-by-day crawl through 1925 to 1927 over the last six months have revealed so many lost details and incidents which will add greatly to my portrait. I am also giving new emphasis to the drama of Curtin’s election campaigns and the story of his wife, Elsie. Bringing a Western Australian perspective to his story (as Toby Davidson did in Good for the Soul: John Curtin’s life with poetry) is also important. In one book about Curtin, we read that he moved into ‘a house in Fremantle, near Cottesloe beach’, a mistake a local wouldn’t make! (The confusion comes from the electorate of Fremantle then covering Cottesloe and many other Perth suburbs.)

I’m imagining a biography which will cover all of Curtin’s life – but I’m trying to do more than that as well. ‘The afterlives’ is about my consideration of the memorialisation of Curtin. It’s about the material remains of his life – many of which I am currently a guardian of – and how they connect us to the past. It’s about the (mis)adventures of previous biographers and the fraught quest of trying to tell the story of another person’s life.

I’m drawn to John Curtin because he was a true believer in socialism. He sacrificed himself for the labour movement, believing in a better world that he could see on the horizon. I admire him, while also being intrigued by the drama and tragedy of the compromises he had to make as he made reluctant peace with what was possible and what seemed necessary. I’m drawn to his paradoxes – his warmth and his aloofness; his energy and his frailty; his passionate beliefs and the simple plainness of his life. I look forward to following his trail for the next few years and intend to post about it here on this blog and also on the new Twitter account I’ve set up, https://twitter.com/JohnCurtin1885.