The Power of Speech: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image.

• Author: Smith, Philippa Mein
• Position: Book Review

THE POWER OF SPEECH: Australian Prime Ministers Defining the National Image

Author: James Curran Published by: Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic, 2004, 320pp, A$35.

As its title suggests, this book comprises an analysis of how Australia's prime ministers have tried to articulate a sense of national identity since the 1960s, based on the premise that the language used by prime ministers offers a view of changes in the nation, in this case in Australia since the Menzies era. The subjects are Gough Whitlam, Malcolm Fraser, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard and how they viewed Australia. Such a study is timely given the competing models of Australian history and identity advanced by John Howard and his predecessor Paul Keating in the 1990s. Each prime minister in turn assumed the task of interpreting the national story to advance his own idea of the nation and of Australian identity.

A historian by training, Curran shows how the respective prime ministers drew on various histories in their speechmaking. The context for his analysis of political rhetoric is the consensus that Britishness was the defining idea of Australia until the end of the Menzies era. Until the late 1960s, Australia (like New Zealand) believed itself to be British. A revived interest in Britishness features in a growing number of recent works that parallel James Belich's argument in New Zealand about the dramatic shift from 'recolonisation, to 'decolonisation', in particular since Britain's turn to Europe by joining the EEC in 1973. In parallel with Belich, Curran does not see the Second World War as a decisive shift in relations with Britain. Instead of wartime Prime Minister John Curtin's 'call to America', he emphasises Curtin's statement that Australians were 'trustees for the British way of life'. Another work in this vein is The End of the British Era brace by Stuart Ward (Melbourne University Press, 2001). Curran's analysis, like Ward's, is influenced by the argument of Sydney historian Neville Meaney that British race patriotism was--and is--central to Australian national identity, and that Australian nationalism developed within the encompassing idea of British race unity. Typically of Australian historians, neither Ward nor Curran cites the New Zealand equivalent of their argument.

Curran considers that the collapse of the British idea led to a void that could not be filled by the Australian bush legend. Turning to Gough Whitlam, he notes that 'Advance...