Reassembling the disjointed chronology, we read that Carr made up for a ‘lousy’ education at Matraville High with a determined, almost fanatic, reading of literature, history, and political science at the University of New South Wales. Joining the Labor Party as a teenager, he had ‘a fever in the blood’ for a career in politics, but by the age of thirty, as a journalist with Kerry Packer’s Bulletin magazine, he felt he was ‘going nowhere’. By the mid-1980s we find he has entered parliament and has become minister for planning and the environment in the Wran government. ‘Shanghaied’ into leading the Labor opposition after the government lost to Nick Greiner in 1988, he practises the life of an ‘opportunistic feral’, hunting scalps, surviving leadership speculation, ‘dragging’ himself along to weekend party functions, and moving on quickly from mistakes. He narrowly lost the 1991 election, but won in 1995 and became premier. Over the next ten years, he carved a line of pragmatic reform expressed through skilled media salesmanship, and retired on his own timing.

The memoir includes a memorable roll-call of Sydney identities of the era: alongside the politicians and journalists, there is asbestos campaigner Bernie Banton; Olympian Cathy Freeman; convicted rapist Bilal Skaf; Police Commissioner Peter Ryan; Jan Utzon, son of the Opera House architect; and many others. Carr does not cover his brief term as Julia Gillard’s foreign minister, though two interesting ‘fragments’ deal with the complex interrelation of foreign and domestic policy in relation to Palestine and China.

An early, abortive McKell biography resonates. Carr had walked away from the project because he found McKell worthy but ‘lacking in humour and self-deprecation. He would never laugh at his own mistakes, or even admit to any. He didn’t acknowledge the paradox of unintended consequence as a motive force in human affairs, one of my favourite themes. Nor did he talk candidly about his own ambition …’ Carr, a successor to McKell in the line of Labor leaders, has avoided those failings in his own memoir. All successful politicians have supersized egos, and this is part of Carr’s persona. But his success as a memoirist is an attractive capacity for recognising his missteps and errors of judgement as well as his achievements; for acknowledging the collective and institutional, not purely personal, nature of electoral success; and for perceiving the qualities (and luck) adhering to his political opponents.

Former Foreign Minister Bob Carr (photo by Bart Verweij/AusAID, Wiki Commons)

These are characteristics of a reflective personality – living in the moment, in the push and shove of events, but able to appraise his performance with critical distance, in real time, and of using those insights to learn and improve. Donald Trump is not a reflective person; Bob Carr shows here that he is. For example, when pioneering feminist Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a judge of the US Supreme Court, visited Sydney, Premier Carr agreed to host a lunch for her. ‘With astonishing thoughtlessness’, he invited just three people, all men. ‘She must have thought that I had orchestrated some stunning insult.’

Less cringeworthy, and more poignant, Carr beats himself up over an incident when he inspected Goulburn Correctional Centre. One of the prisoners called out from his cell: ‘Hey Bob, why don’t you do something about the cockroaches?’ Carr ignored the voice, did nothing. ‘Very likely I didn’t want to be seen by the prison officers to be some kind of weak, namby pamby, soft touch. I wanted to stay on side with the tough guys. In that spirit, for what it is worth, this is an apology to that disembodied voice.’

Labor leadership, Carr demonstrates, is deeply shaped by the institutional character of the Labor Party. His debt to Neville Wran is explicitly stated. He also took heed of the failure of Labor governments in Victoria, South Australia, and Western Australia that preceded his own government: ‘There was a unifying factor: scandals with management of public funds due to the collapse of the state banks, huge borrowings and unions blocking public sector reforms; big deficits.’ In Carr’s eyes, John Cain’s government in Victoria had ultimately failed because its affiliate trade unions, especially those representing public sector employees, used their influence in Labor Party factions to block public sector reforms in efficiency and productivity enhancement.

In Opposition, Carr warned his shadow cabinet that ‘what had happened to the Cain government should not be allowed to happen to us’. He makes the provocative suggestion that ‘how many middle-level disputes you are having with public sector unions – over productivity and costs – might be a quick health check for a Labor administration’. Much of this argument is directed at Labor-union relations at the state level, where unionised employees of the state public sectors – teachers, police, firefighters, rail workers – exercise great influence over Labor policy and politics. Bill Shorten’s name is nowhere mentioned, but he might still be an intended recipient of advice from this pragmatic survivor.