What do Wayne Swan and Greg Combet have in common with Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor?
Yes, they all played prominent roles in the Gillard minority Labor government and announced their various departures following Julia Gillard’s knifing last year.
But like the former Prime Minister herself, each of these men are penning their own accounts of the tumultuous period of Australian politics under the Gillard-Rudd leaderships.
Labor powerbrokers Mr Swan and Mr Combet and retired independents Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor have signed book deals with the likes of Allen & Unwin, Melbourne University Press and Random House, making the ‘Politics’ sections of bookstores set to expand considerably in 2014.
In the battlefields of the bookshop, Mr Combet’s The Fights of My Life will be published in July and will sit alongside, Mr Swan’s The Good Fight: Six years, two prime ministers and staring down the Great Recession, to be released in August.
Hitting bookshelves in June and July, Mr Oakeshott and Mr Windsor write about the negotiations that resulted in an agreement to form minority government with Labor and, in those final hours of Ms Gillard’s leadership, how they found themselves stronger supporters of the Prime Minister than some of her own party members.
Ms Gillard’s own memoir, My Story, presents her account of her three years and three days as the 27th Prime Minister. To be published in October by Random House, the book will reveal “what life was really like as Australia’s first female prime minister” and “what was hidden behind [her] resilience and dignified courage”.
The political memoir is a staple of many parliamentary careers, but as these former leaders step out of the limelight, they are seeking to cement their own histories of their leadership beyond the spills and the carbon tax.
Independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor announce their support for Julia Gillard in 2010.
Independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor announce their support for Julia Gillard in 2010.
Independent MPs Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor announce their support for Julia Gillard in 2010.
They don’t want us to just remember the newspaper headlines, the broken promises, or Tony Abbott’s three word slogans. They want Australians to remember the way they led the nation and the legacy they left, in their own words.
When Bob Carr released the Diaries of a Foreign Minister earlier this month, his musings of flying business class and ambition for a “concave abdomen defined by deep-cut obliques” made newspaper headlines across the country.
If the memoirs of Julia Gillard, Wayne Swan, Greg Combet, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor follow Carr’s lead, they will have fulfilled their purpose: to diminish the memory of those newspaper headlines from when they ran the country and replace them with new headlines they have written themselves.
Related: Title and cover of Julia Gillard’s book revealed
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