I,Diarist: Examining Australian Politics from the “Inside”

Political diaries can claim literary, political and intellectual significance, yet they have rarely been subject to serious or extended enquiry. In this article we offer the first comprehensive survey of the Australian political diary. We also analyse these writings in some depth, suggesting that, taken as a whole, the diaries reveal three Weberian “ideal types” of the politician: the “patrician”, the “professional”, and the “radical”. These ideal types are used to shed a new light on the functioning and limitations of parliamentary democracy in Australia.     

The Rise of the Insider: Memoirs and Diaries in Recent Australian Political History

The memoirs and diaries composed by politicians represent an increasingly important form of history. This article provides a comprehensive survey of such writings in Australia. It suggests that they have become more popular, diffuse, confessional, immediate, ambitious, interventionist and cynical over recent decades. The significance of these developments is considered and some tentative explanations advanced.     

Charles Gavan Duffy's Ministerial Tour: Oratory,Electioneering and the Meaning of Colonial Democracy*

During 1871 and 1872 the Victorian Premier, Charles Gavan Duffy, led his minsters on a banqueting tour of the colony during which he made a series of speeches in defence of his Government. Little noticed since but controversial at the time, Duffy's tour called into question the centrality of parliament and the meaning of colonial democracy. Earlier interpretations, derived from the study of colonial New South Wales, paint Australian politics in this period as ideologically somnolent and unprincipled. Yet Duffy's tour and the associated hullabaloo reveal the intellectual vitality and vigour of democracy's brash antipodean form. Its significance has been overlooked by historians. However Duffy's oratory tour was undertaken almost a decade before Gladstone's 1879 apparently pioneering Midlothian campaign, and the electioneering practices he initiated in the early 1870s shaped elections in the years that followed.     

From Contestation to Autonomy: The Staging and Framing of Anti-Hanson Contention

The rise of Hansonism provoked a campaign of demonstrations, rallies, marches and walkouts. This movement was frequently received within the media as violent, disruptive, and illiberal. However, I argue that anti-Hanson contention represented a noteworthy form of active citizenship. It contested the presence of the One Nation Party, undermined the ideological claim that Hanson represented 'ordinary' Australians, and garnered substantial publicity. The anti-Hanson campaign was concerned not only with the staging of dissent in public space, but with how that dissent was framed within the public sphere. Reflecting these public dynamics, the anti-Hanson movement moved over time from a reliance on contestational gatherings, that directly opposed the One Nation Party in physical space to autonomous gatherings, that attempted to create separate spaces of anti-racist politics. Ultimately, therefore, the campaign can be understood as a flexible, democratic and self-reflexive form of political mobilisation.