Whitlam is the only Australian prime minister to have spent formative childhood years in the national capital. His father, Fred, a senior Commonwealth public servant, transferred his family to Canberra in 1928 when Gough was an eleven-year-old schoolboy. In Brown’s words, Whitlam father and son ‘walked the landscape of Canberra as both a potential city and an actual practice of government’. It was a tiny community, this national capital, with a population of 6,000 and a new Parliament House sitting gleaming in the paddock. As it grew, its planned streets and suburbs, its national buildings and institutions, its prosperous inhabitants, and its privileged identity as both author and creature of national policy, made Canberra (then and now) different.

Brown, head of history at the Australian National University, argues that Whitlam drew inspiration from the image and the reality of the national capital, and that the city, cocooned within a federal territory controlled directly by the Commonwealth, became a ‘laboratory in which the enlightened exercise of Government could be tested and then applied elsewhere’. Returning to Canberra later as the parliamentary representative of the unsewered sprawl of south-west Sydney, Whitlam ‘had at least seen what planning could do’. Equally, Brown acknowledges the tensions and resistance between government and city that emerged when Whitlam’s legislative and administrative program came to challenge the traditions and interests of Canberra’s public service and its mandarins.

Brown is not the first to identify the debt Whitlam owed to the national capital. Indeed, the title of his essay, ‘Furnishing the Prime Ministerial Mind’, pays homage to Graham Freudenberg’s insight in A Certain Grandeur (1977). But Brown takes the argument further, exploring and separating out the strands of Canberra’s otherness: Canberra not just the national capital but also the community of individuals – politicians, public servants, policy makers, academics, and journalists; Canberra the physical site of national government and also the cultural aspiration to deploy the power of that government in shaping people’s lives.

Canberra’s prosperous security and self-conscious sense of mission, then, may well have consolidated Gough Whitlam’s discrimination-free, middle-class status, while also awakening in him that ‘unapologetic principle of equality’ identified by Pearson.

Brown’s essay is a highlight of Jenny Hocking’s anthology of academic studies on the Whitlam government that promises, in its title and blurb, to reveal neglected aspects of Whitlam’s reform agenda that continue to have relevance today. Indeed, it asserts that the Whitlam government had a ‘21st century agenda’. These are provocative promises; unfortunately, the book fails to deliver on them. That is not the fault of Brown or the other contributors. They are well credentialled and bring detail and nuance to a wide range of Whitlam-related topics. Along the way, they give us some wonderful vignettes of 1970s politics.

Melanie Oppenheimer and her co-authors, for example, have unearthed an archive of local community activism in central Victoria, as residents groups sought small grants of national funding through the Australian Assistance Plan: a revolution in public financing that delivered, as we read, teaching aids for remedial reading in Cohuna and a survey of childcare needs in Korong among others. Michelle Arrow explores the 1973 Royal Commission on Human Relationships, chaired by Justice Elizabeth Evatt, as it grappled with the complex policy and politics of ‘sexual citizenship’.

But how do such rearward glances demonstrate the claimed Whitlam ‘agenda’ for modern Australia? Are we looking for templates to apply, or implicit threads of continuity between then and now? Did the Whitlam government have such an agenda? This seems, prima facie, unlikely. Perhaps a more realistic understanding is that it sought to address, but failed to resolve, the complex policy and social issues that faced the Australia of the 1970s – such as energy policy, human relations, constitutional reform – and that still face us today. But should we look to the 1970s for keys to solving them?

Prime Minister Gough Whitlam pours soil into the hands of traditional land owner Vincent Lingiari, 1975 (photograph by A.K. Hanna, Wikimedia Commons)

Such questions would normally be addressed, in a collaborative project like this, in a preface written by the editor – a preface that explained the rationale and significance of the project, identified how each contribution adds to the argument, drew out key themes, and related them to the existing literature to show that what we are learning is actually new and meaningful. The editor of this collection, acclaimed Whitlam biographer Jenny Hocking, has not provided this necessity. In its absence, the book lacks coherence and fails to substantiate the promise of the title.

Hocking has contributed an erudite essay that only serves to illustrate the broader problem. Exploring Whitlam’s constitutionally bold manoeuvre of using S57 of the Constitution to resolve a dispute between the two houses of parliament through double dissolution and joint sitting in 1974, she suggests this was critical to the success of Whitlam’s reform agenda. Quite possibly true. But how does this narrative inform our understanding of contemporary reform politics? What is the implication for ‘modern Australia’?

Someone has tried to impose coherence on the eleven essays here by labelling them chapters and grouping them under two headings, ‘Governing for the 21st Century’ and ‘From Inspiration to Implementation’. These categories are too broad to carry analytical meaning and in any case are never elaborated. So the reader is left with the publisher’s blurb on the back cover, replete with its unexamined assertions (‘more and more visionary’, ‘clearly a forerunner’). There is not even an index.

In a field that has enjoyed so much excellent scholarship in recent years, not least by Hocking herself, it is very hard to see what this collection contributes.