Out of parliament for ten years, Chifley helped to rebuild the Labor Party in New South Wales. He continued to read economics and pursued his local civic activities: regional newspaper director (National Advocate), Bathurst Hospital Board Member and Abercrombie Shire Councillor. His moderate views, labour movement contacts and studious intelligence commended him to federal Treasurer R.G. Casey when he appointed a royal commission in 1936 on the banking system. Chifley’s minority report recommended nationalising the private banks.

Early in World War II, the Menzies government appointed him director of labour supply and regulation in the new Ministry of Munitions. He resigned to contest the general election of September 1941. His return to federal parliament (for Macquarie) was part of the New South Wales resurgence of the ALP. Appointed Treasurer and later Minister for post-war Reconstruction by Curtin in late 1942, he succeeded his prime minister in 1945 and fought off a Liberal challenge in the 1946 federal election.

As a reformist prime minister until 1949, he enjoyed mixed success with his 1945 banking legislation, and his 1946 and 1948 constitutional referenda seeking greater federal powers over the economy. His policies eased Australia from war to peace without mass unemployment. He wooed a suspicious ALP to the International Monetary Fund (1947) and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1948), and he supported Asians’ post-war challenges to European colonialism.

The polarities of the Cold War undermined his political centrism. Although Chifley was a firm opponent of Communist Party influence in the labour movement – as he showed in repressing the 1949 strike by New South Wales coalminers and setting up ASIO – he was harried by Menzies’s equation of ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’. From 1947 to his death in 1951, that Cold War logic skewered him – first when he tried to make private banking illegal (and was pilloried as a socialist dictator on the make), and second when he tried to stop Menzies from outlawing the Communist Party. In the latter quest, he was humiliated by the anti-communist zealots of his own party. He died in 1951.

Forty years ago, L.F. Crisp published one of the best Australian political biographies, Ben Chifley. David Day’s spacious and readable account adds much. Crisp devoted three-quarters of his words to what Chifley did after 1940–41; Day uses more than two-thirds of his words on Chifley’s progress up to that time. Crisp’s is the more ample account of Chifley as senior figure in the second longest national Labor government (1941– 49, when Crisp was himself a public servant under Chifley). Day’s is richer on Chifley’s roots in the Bathurst region and on his formation as an activist. Readers will still turn to Crisp on Labor in government, but Day’s emphasis is rewarding in a number of ways.

First, we learn much about Chifley’s family, including the nine years (from ages five to fourteen) he lived with, and worked for, his grandfather at the farming village of Limekilns. While Day describes this as ‘a life of self-denying privation’, where Chifley absorbed the Irish ‘habit of poverty’, he conjectures that there was plenty to interest young Chifley and to solicit his independence.

Second, Day shows us Bathurst as a place of cultural opportunities (as Jill Roe will do for Miles Franklin’s Goulburn). By his assiduous use of regional newspapers, Day is able to evoke Bathurst’s public sphere and to show Chifley’s abridgment of its class and religious divides. That Chifley remained an active ‘citizen of Bathurst’ (Crisp’s phrase) even while treasurer and prime minister comes as less of a surprise in a life shaped as Day has shaped Chifley.

Third, when Day reveals Chifley’s complex private life, the reader can see the length and local origins of his extramarital intimacies. Chifley married Elizabeth (Lizzie) Mackenzie of Bathurst in 1914. They did not have children; Day wonders whether their relationship was sexual. He has become convinced that Chifley’s sexual relationships were with two other young women of Bathurst: Phyllis and Nell Donnelly. Phyllis worked for him when he was an MP and lived in the same Canberra hotel. Chifley was with her, not Lizzie, when he died. The Donnelly family told Day that Nell also was a long-standing girlfriend, though some Chifley relatives deny that either sister was involved with him. It would seem that Lizzie accepted these enduring arrangements and that they were a source of emotional stability for all concerned – fidelity of a kind.

Day dwelt on these revelations in a recent lecture about his dilemmas in ‘Writing the life of a Labor saint’. But has Chifley’s halo ever rested on our not knowing who was in his bed? If one were to jeopardise Chifley’s ‘sainthood’, it would be by reflecting on the motives and consequences of the policies through which he approached the ‘light on the hill’. On this score, Chifley’s reputation is safe in Day’s hands. The only offence Day’s Chifley might give modern readers is the racism that he shared with most of the labour movement. Day shows us Chifley voicing hostility to southern Europeans in 1928 and backing Calwell’s deportation of Asians in 1949.

Some biographies find the truths of their subjects in their private life, but not Day on Chifley. His most persistent characterisation links political persona to occupation and to local activism. Chifley’s plain oratory owed much to ‘The classroom of the local Railway Institute’. His 1946 election policy speech ‘Was not unlike the annual reports presented by the directors of the National Advocate or the board of the Bathurst Hospital or the Abercrombie Shire Council’. His imperturbability was that of an engine driver, ‘A position with clearly delineated spheres of responsibility’. Confidence in such boundaries ‘Helped him cope with the stresses of the footplate as it had later with the stresses of government’. Train drivers epitomised the respectable working class of the industrial era, in contrast to the ‘Independent and hard-drinking bush-worker’ idealised by the Bulletin. Chifley’s austere and purposeful nature suited ‘The rigid rules of the railway service, its strict hierarchy and its ban on drinking or smoking at work’.

Chifley’s administrative strength, his focus on the unadorned fact and his diffidence about popular hedonisms contrasts, in Day’s account, with the florid populism of Billy Hughes and Jack Lang. The latter emerge as reckless splitters, Chifley as the patient healer of a labour movement whose torment, 1916 to 1940, ended in eight years of political creativity which Day, like Crisp, narrates with gratitude.