Perhaps in the age of the Internet, social media, and massive leakages of government secrets – along with a rising passion for transparency – new standards rule. Certainly, I find nothing in the book that would seriously embarrass or damage relations with neighbours, though a few personal vanities might be wounded. Spain, Holland, and Canada could be miffed at being treated as second-class allies of the United States: ‘We’re not that kind of ally,’ opines Carr jokingly. On the other hand, they might regard it as a badge of independence, given how often Carr himself is troubled by Australia’s ‘too-desperate embrace of the US’. Close reading also suggests that there have been discreet excisions of some matters that might threaten security or damage relations. There is one odd exclusion. On page 134 we are promised, in Jerusalem, a visit to Ramallah and discussions with the Palestinian leadership. Did it occur? Or have all references been removed?

As for cabinet confidentiality on domestic matters, Lord Widgery put the issue succinctly in the case of Richard Crossman’s diaries (1976–77): ‘[I]t may be that in the short run (for example over a period of weeks or months) the public interest in restraining publication is ... compelling to maintain joint cabinet responsibility ... [but] there must however be a time limit after which the confidential character of the information will lapse.’ Last century I put that time limit at about six years, but the world moves much faster these days. Indeed, we already know so much about the inner workings of the Rudd–Gillard governments that, while Carr provides a distinctive and sardonic perspective, he adds little that is new. No doubt a few egos will be bruised, but cabinet ministers are a tough lot.

Although you would not guess it from much of the media comment, Diary of a Foreign Minister provides a serious, at times profound, commentary on contemporary issues in Australian foreign policy by a man of intellectual acuity and historical awareness. Though the diary form is necessarily episodic, a number of themes help structure the book. Throughout we have the tragic catastrophe of the Syrian civil war; with the great powers deadlocked, Carr can only lament ‘a tragic end for the principle of the Responsibility to Protect’, though he did pursue possibilities for medical succour. Paralleling this is the often farcical civil war within the Labor Party, in which Carr was but a bit player. He did his best to avoid ‘the fetid politics of the Gillard government ... levitating above the domestic’, but worries that these immediate shenanigans are but symptoms of an existential crisis for the ALP.

'Did Carr too receive a threatening epistle from on high?'

Then there is his understandable obsession with the critical triangle – the United States, China, and East Asia. He is an instinctive admirer of American liberal internationalism, and its practitioners – the Clintons, Kerry, McCain, Obama – with their sense of responsibility towards the world. Yet he is troubled by American judgement (‘about their capacity to be driven by anxiety and paranoia into producing a Cold War with China’). Thus he is concerned with the impression that there is ‘not a sliver of difference between the Yanks and us’, for he remains ‘opposed to provoking China and opposed to feeding any Chinese notion that we are all ganging up to contain it’. His dream, shared with other East Asian powers, is amicable relations between China and the United States; his nightmare a breakdown in that bilateral relationship.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry and Australian Foreign Minister Bob Carr address reporters after their bilateral meeting at the U.S. Department of State in Washington, D.C., on March 18, 2013.

His instincts on the vexed Israel–Palestinian question seem right. Expanding Israeli settlements on the West Bank are likely to frustrate any peace process, and that time is running out for Israel to achieve its last best outcome – a two-state solution. I share his hope, memorably expressed, that ‘the Abrahamic faiths can rediscover commonalities’. I hope he is equally right in believing that the Commonwealth of Nations – ‘this drowsy old outfit’, as he puts it – can be turned into ‘a community of democracies’.

Surprisingly, his domestic instincts are more suspect. Ultimately, Carr deserted Gillard and supported Rudd in the belief that the latter could save more of Labor’s furniture. Whether he did so remains debatable: ultimately, Labor’s primary vote was the lowest in modern times. And Carr’s repeated acclamation of the Papua New Guinea solution to the boat people problem as ‘a masterstroke’ reminds one that in another life he did much to debase the ‘law-and-order’ debate in New South Wales. It is likely that the downward spiral in Australian refugee policy will do more to damage the nation’s international reputation than anything since the White Australia policy.

Throughout his tenure, Carr was living on borrowed time, serving as he did ‘a death-haunted government’. Ultimately, he was foreign minister for one year and 189 days, the shortest term, apart from Rudd’s, of any foreign minister in the last generation. Yet given the brevity of his term and given that so much of diplomacy is ‘slow boring through hard boards’, his achievements are remarkable. He helped to ‘harvest’ votes for Australia’s Security Council bid, though he regarded it as ‘quixotic’ and was despairing on the eve of success. He established a close personal friendship with the Indonesian Foreign Minister Marty Natalegawa, and it is arguable that in this period Australian–Indonesian relations reached a high point, though, as we now know, they were at the very time being undermined by rogue elements in the Australian security services. Carr played a critical role in securing CHOGM for Sri Lanka, preferring engagement to the Canadian boycott, which he dismissed as ‘more appropriate for an NGO’. He played a leading role in bringing Myanmar back into the comity of nations, persuading other nations to follow Australia’s example and lift, not merely suspend, sanctions. Much to the local Israeli lobby’s annoyance, he masterminded a shift to a more even-handed stance on the Israel–Palestine question in the United Nations, outmanoeuvring his prime minister in the process. And his actions over Melinda Taylor, a young Australian lawyer with the International Criminal Court, imprisoned in Libya, were exemplary. He kept in personal touch with her parents and husband; he sent the Australian ambassador in Italy, accredited to Libya, to Tripoli; chartered a plane himself from Istanbul to Tripoli; saw the Libyan prime minister and foreign minister; and, over the objections of his senior officials, brokered a peace deal with the ICC, involving an apology to Libya, which secured Melinda’s release. It was a pretty impressive eighteen months.

The book is a pleasure to read. The prose is as muscular and forthright as the man himself. Memorable phrases abound: a comment is ‘lodged in my prefrontal cortex like a shard of glass’, and droll witticisms pepper the writing: ‘“Mate, mate”... the mating call of the NSW Right.’ An omnivorous historical scholar, Carr is at ease with Israeli archaeologists discussing Herodian antiquities or pondering in a Beijing museum the glories of the great emperors of the Qing dynasty. He has a novelist’s flair for vivid evocations of places and people. Beekman Place, the residence of Australia’s UN ambassador in New York, is like ‘a stage set for a comedy about upperclass life in Manhattan [with] pre-historic Rockefellers [rumoured] to be stranded on some of the upper floors’. Another New York residence is ‘like one of the palatial apartments in Proust: gilt panelling, museum-quality French antiques, ranks of footmen [and] ten Picassos in the dining room’. All this makes him rather snooty about Australian establishments: Parliament House, Canberra – ‘a bad attempt at a Mughal mausoleum’; or Kirribilli House – ‘the cottage that passes for a residence for a head of government’. Having found private Picassos in New York, he hunts for Caravaggios in Malta and is ‘sicken[ed] at the acres of belly and parted groins’ in the Lucian Freud exhibition in London. 

There are the pen portraits capturing the essence of the great and the good. The Jamaican foreign minister, with ‘his rolling basso-profundo voice, a truly operatic voice [that] could topple governments’; or Mick Romney: ‘the finest looking specimen of a presidential candidate since Warren G. Harding, another candidate from central casting’; or Bill Gates: ‘modest, even shy; a Christ-like glow’; and our own Kevin: ‘purse-lipped, choirboy hair, speaking in that sinister monotone.’ At times he becomes effusive: ‘any time with Hillary [Clinton] ... my heroine ... is pure champagne.’ But the classic case is Henry Kissinger (‘my favourite world historical figure’), on whom he has an adolescent-like crush. Indeed, the mutual backslapping between America’s Metternich and the neophyte Australian foreign minister descends into caricature.

It has been said that diaries run an ever-present risk of narcissistic overtones. To this risk Carr has undoubtedly succumbed, to the delight of the local media. There are the complaints about travel services ill-befitting a foreign minister; there are the food fads – the organic steel cut oats, the protein shakes, and the ‘stigmatisation’ of all sugars; there is the obsession with exercise, with sumo squats, walking lunges, and one-legged Romanian deadlifts all in pursuit of ‘a concave abdomen defined by deep-cut obliques’; and the sartorial affectations – a Bulgari or an Hermès tie today? Yet there is about all this a sense of self-mockery, captured in his reference to ‘a Fuhrer directive’ on his food requirements or the ironic self-deprecation of ‘my legendary and hallmark modesty’. In many ways, these narcissistic overtones serve as a relief from the complex and demanding reflections which make up the bulk of the book. Carr no doubt now recognises that, in an unsophisticated polity with a juvenile media, a little irony may be a dangerous thing.