Hocking provides us with a scrupulously documented account of Whitlam’s family background and early life, without engaging with Walter’s provocative thesis, which attempts to explain Whitlam by his childhood upbringing. We learn that his second name, used to distinguish him from his maternal grandfather, Edward, derives from Field Marshal Gough, the charismatic British commander in the Sikh Wars, under whom Whitlam’s great-grandfather served. We also discover that his paternal grandfather served four years in Pentridge for forging cheques. Above all, we see how blessed Whitlam was in his family and later was, and still is, in his own domestic scene. In this sense, his is a most fortunate life.

Although Gough Whitlam’s paternal ancestors had been jacks-of-all-trades, his father, Fred, was a distinguished public servant, rising ultimately to become Commonwealth Crown Solicitor. Fred Whitlam was the very model of a modern public servant: learned, cautious, measured and dispassionate. His wife, Martha, although burdened by deafness, was an imposing and generous hostess, a woman of firm and progressive opinions, ‘a gentle feminist’. His father was the fount of Gough’s values and many of his interests; from his mother came his pungent wit, memorable but sometimes cruel.

The household ethos was Christian nonconformist – abstemious, serious, hardworking, frugal and socially conscious. During the Depression, Martha regularly prepared ten lunches, one each for Fred, his brother ‘Uncle George’, who lived with them, for Gough and his younger sister Freda, and six for the unemployed who would regularly call round for food and work. Fred was deeply religious but tolerant and ecumenical, at various times worshipping as a Baptist, an Anglican, a Methodist and a Presbyterian. In this ‘home-centred family’, reading was the preferred pastime and even here seriousness prevailed: myths and legends were preferred to fairy tales, despite the young Gough’s tears over the fate of Persephone. Frivolity was out but there was much fun of a high-minded kind: noisy debates at dinner, wide-ranging discussions of world affairs and constant referrals to reference books to settle intellectual disputes.

Loved by his parents and respectful of them, despite early differences with his father over religion and occasional chafing at his father’s close supervision of his education, Whitlam was to be equally fortunate in his own domestic life. Margaret Dovey, a swimming champion, was a gregarious extrovert, unlike her more reserved husband, and came from a lively and well-off legal family with a rather eccentric head, the prominent Sydney lawyer Bill Dovey. The sedate Fred Whitlam would have considered the Doveys frivolous. Even before Gough entered parliament, Margaret bore the brunt of domestic responsibilities, and later became very much the constituency hostess, as well as chief carer of their four children. She returned to her professional career as a social worker in the early 1960s, until Gough’s elevation as leader put an end to that. Relatively late, they both discovered the joys of international travel, he as a relief from the horrors of caucus, she as an escape from domesticity. Travel also gave them quality time with one or more of their children. Hocking paints an endearing picture of Margaret putting her foot down after six or seven hours of gallery touring accompanied by non-stop lectures from a didactic husband.

Whitlam had a thoroughly respectable war, making hundreds of flights as a navigator out of Northern Australia across Papua New Guinea, the adjacent islands, and Indonesia. Now that personal stories, whether of rising from log cabins in Double Bay or family sleepouts in a Volkswagen in Eumundi, have become the fashion among politicians, it is remarkable how little use Whitlam made of his wartime service. He just did not see it as a narrative relevant to politics. This reticence may also explain why I never knew, until reading this biography, that the Labor Party had a quiz king before Barry Jones. Gough Whitlam was the Australian National Quiz champion in 1948 and 1949, and runner-up in 1950. While his performances brought him to the notice of Ben Chifley, he was perhaps wise not to make too much of it. Barry Jones sometimes lamented his quiz-king fame, growing a beard at one stage to disguise his Pick-a-Box notoriety.

Politics was the abiding interest for Whitlam. It could scarcely be otherwise with a father immersed in the upper reaches of constitutional politics, with a home where the broadest political topics were grist for dinner-table conversation and with a heap of newspapers and periodicals regularly on hand. The home itself was in a city which existed for politics, making Whitlam unique among Australian politicians. One of his earliest political memories was seeing members of the Labor caucus in the Wellington Hotel celebrating the fall of the Bruce–Page government in 1929. As he later confessed, living in Canberra made him one of those who had ‘centralism thrust upon them’. He never had much time for the states. Now that we are all centralists, we do well to remember that a key theme of his political career was the struggle to extend the authority of the national government.

Hocking charts with care the development of Whitlam’s political interests. He was active and successful on his airbase on the Gove Peninsula in campaigning for a ‘yes’ vote in the 1944 Post-War Reconstruction and Democratic Rights referendum, but its defeat had ‘an immeasurable impact on him’. His interest in human rights was spurred by his father’s involvement with H.V. Evatt at the United Nations when working on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Hocking shows, too, how changing environments over his pre-parliamentary years shaped interests that remained with him throughout his life. Meeting Aborigines, including the Yunupingu clan, for the first time, while stationed at Gove, began a lifelong commitment to indigenous rights; wartime experiences in the South Pacific, as the European and Japanese empires faded, furthered his interests in post-colonial politics; and his first house with Margaret, in Cronulla, brought a recognition of the dismal infrastructure and services in the outer suburbs of the Australian cities that his government would one day set out to right.

Writing of Whitlam’s parliamentary career, Hocking seeks to maintain the focus on her protagonist while sketching in the often complex political background, a difficult task in the early stages, because Whitlam is a minor player and the party history particularly turgid. Although there is a lot about the anti-communist referendum of 1951, we learn little of Whitlam’s attitude and nothing of his role, despite the fact that he was by then a parliamentary candidate. He also goes missing for nine pages during the Evatt–Petrov saga, although by this time he is in parliament.

Nevertheless, the main features emerge clearly: his skilfully organised and well-researched early speeches; his participation in the late 1950s as the junior member of the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Constitutional Review; and his election as deputy leader to Arthur Calwell in 1960. The first established him as a ‘dominating parliamentary performer’; the second was ‘transformative’, re-energising him about the possibilities of reform, despite the obstacles thrown up by the constitution; the third made him a major player in national politics.

The dominant theme of Whitlam’s period as deputy leader was the growing alienation between him and his leader. There was animosity almost from the start, since Calwell had never wanted him as deputy. Calwell was for stasis, presented as a refusal to abandon principles for power. Whitlam was committed to pragmatic evolution, presented as the modernisation of party policy and the reform of an organisation made up of ‘faceless men’. They differed on almost every major issue: State Aid for private schools, White Australia, nationalisation, self-determination for Papua New Guinea, Unity tickets, Vietnam and reform of the party organisation. Even the near victory in 1961 did little for their relationship, Whitlam arguing hotly but perversely that Calwell had been ‘duchessed’ by the Fairfax press, even though such ‘duchessing’ led to moderation on nationalisation and a more nuanced foreign policy, both aspects of the modernising agenda. Following the 1963 election defeat, there was ‘open warfare’ between the two men, and by 1965 relations were ‘sulphurous’. In 1966, with Whitlam’s characterisation of the Federal Executive as ‘twelve witless men’ over their stance on State Aid, Calwell saw his chance: ‘We have got the numbers to get rid of the big bastard.’ They did not, but Whitlam was saved from expulsion by only two votes. On the other hand, Calwell easily saw him off when he challenged for the leadership a few months later. But with the electoral debacle of 1966, Labor’s biggest defeat in a generation, Whitlam at last came into his own, becoming the greatest Opposition leader in modern Labor history.

Labor Opposition leaders tend to be one of two kinds: long-serving Opposition leaders denied ultimate success, or brief holders of the office, virtually prime ministers-in-waiting, who succeed to the highest office. Evatt, Calwell, Bill Hayden, and Kim Beazley are all examples of the former; Bob Hawke and Kevin Rudd of the latter. There have, of course, been a couple of short-termers – Mark Latham, Simon Crean – who did not make the grade. But Whitlam is the only Labor leader since 1945 to prove himself as Opposition leader before becoming prime minister.

The prospects for longevity, however, were not good in the early years. His impatience, his ‘unbridled self-belief’ and his ‘crash through’ style worried his supporters and antagonised his enemies. He quickly revolutionised and reorganised policy-making within the caucus. He goaded the party into organisational reform, telling his Victorian enemies, in ‘one of the most strident, coruscating denunciations of colleagues ever heard’, that ‘certainly the impotent are pure’. The animus of his predecessor remained undimmed, ‘shameless, undisguised’, his determination to get ‘that elongated bastard’ undiminished. Calwell was mixed up in nearly every plot to bring him down, hoping that at one stage Vietnam would undo him, since his policy was not sufficiently robust for Calwell and the left. The climax came in April 1968 when the federal executive, in defiance of Whitlam, decided that Brian Harradine was not a ‘fit and proper person’ to be a member of the federal executive. For good measure, they also endorsed a Victorian report censuring Whitlam for his criticisms of the party. Whitlam responded by seeking to rally the caucus against the executive by putting his leadership on the line. Calwell walked the corridors to build the vote against him, telling him that Whitlam was ‘no more capable of leading the Labor Party to victory than you would be leading a crippled, blinded, wing-clipped duck [incidentally, not a bad description of the Labor Party under Calwell] to a waterhole’, while the challenger, Jim Cairns, campaigned under the telling slogan ‘Whose party is this – his or ours?’ Whitlam scraped home by six votes. The results sobered nearly everyone, and the 1969 party conference saw a comprehensive range of broadly supported policy changes.

The massive swing to Labor in the 1969 election, which nearly toppled the Gorton government, ‘changed everything’. The Promised Land was in sight and now Moses was unchallengeable. The prospect of ministerial seats, cars and perks disciplined the fractious caucus. One internal challenge did remain: the need to eradicate the nest of vipers that was the Victorian executive. Ignoring his allies of a generation, Clyde Cameron masterminded the destruction of the Victorians. As Hocking puts it succinctly, ‘The Victorian executive conceded nothing and lost it all’.

As a result, the divisive State Aid issue, which had prompted the final confrontation with the Victorians, was finally resolved in favour of a needs-based support for private schools. At the same time, the growing alienation of the Australian people from the Vietnam War facilitated compromise on the issue between Whitlam and his party critics. Finally, in 1971, came the triumphant rapprochement between Labor and Communist China, which preceded by some weeks that between President Nixon and the Chinese. These events signalled the end of the Liberal hegemony in Australian politics.

Only one event marred this last phase of his Opposition leadership. From his earliest involvement in politics, Whitlam had had little time for upper houses. To the standard conservative argument for a second chamber, he had retorted in 1947, ‘Democracies do not need to be saved from themselves.’ While he would not have put it so crudely, he probably shared Paul Keating’s view that the Senate was ‘unrepresentative swill’. At the 1969 party conference, he had even thwarted a modernising push to remove the commitment to Senate abolition from the party platform. Yet in 1970 he threatened to use the Senate to ‘destroy this Budget and to destroy the Government which sponsored it’. Hocking offers no explanation for this uncharacteristic behaviour. Was it the malign influence of the Senate leader, Lionel Murphy, the Labor figure most complicit in the modern renaissance of the Senate? We do not know. What we do know is that five years later these words would come back to haunt Whitlam.

One problem in understanding Whitlam’s trajectory within the party is that Hocking’s analysis of caucus dynamics is disappointing. She presents a first-class picture of the caucus, when Whitlam first entered it, as backward-looking, beleaguered and torn by sectarianism and personal animosities. But we get little analysis of how it changed in the next twenty years. It comes, therefore, as a surprise that this ‘aloof, educated, too clever’ figure without the proper class background, and a relative newcomer to boot, turns up on page 191, ranked fourth in the 1959 caucus executive ballot. An even bigger surprise comes four pages later when the same figure is elected deputy leader. Hocking does search for explanations on this occasion and finds them mainly in negative factors: not aligned, not Catholic and, more positively, young. This is useful, but we want more for so surprising an outcome. Similarly, there is little analysis of Calwell’s win over Whitlam in 1966 or of the alignment of forces in Whitlam’s narrow victory over Cairns two years later. One measure of this lack of attention to the texture of caucus is that, by the end of the volume, over half of the men – there were no women – who were to form Whitlam’s cabinets have received at best only a single mention. True, some of these were unimpressive and others were relative newcomers, but by definition they constituted the most prominent figures in the caucus.

Even more surprising is that we hear very little about his supporters. We learn quite a lot about his caucus opponents at various times – Calwell, Eddie Ward, Tom Uren, Cairns, Cameron, Murphy. Of his caucus supporters, only Lance Barnard, Whitlam’s ‘chief comrade-in-arms’, is given any attention. Barnard was critical: ‘the most significant partnership of my own political life’, as Whitlam acknowledges. As Hocking points out, Barnard was ‘the perfect counterpoint’ to Whitlam: affable, of impeccable Labor lineage, versed in the party machine and skilled in number counting. He was utterly loyal to Whitlam, refusing the temptations of the leadership itself. Whitlam was to some extent a loner and did it very much his own way, but surely he had more lieutenants than Barnard?

This is a sympathetic and thoroughly workmanlike biography, lacking ‘a certain grandeur’, perhaps because this first volume recounts only the rise and rise of Gough Whitlam. The fall is yet to come. Hocking portrays Whitlam as the ultimate social democratic politician. Indeed, he was probably the epitome of the social democrat in the English-speaking world. Whitlam’s tragedy was that he came to power just as the brief social democratic moment began to fade, possibly forever. But for that we must await the second volume.