The book exemplifies Serle’s integrity and experience as a narrative historian. The text is crowded with information, presenting Monash in a richness of character that nobody could have predicted. Equally, few are qualified to assess its adequacy. Serle clearly seeks to recreate Monash and reverse his fading reputation. There were also whiffs of scandal about Monash, and Serle has taken the opportunity to write some excellent polemical, or counter-polemical, accounts of Monash as a military commander. He also provides strong evidence for the common belief, shared by Monash at times, that his career was threatened but not finally destroyed by anti-Semitism. In unlocking the Monash Papers, Serle found the legends of Monash’s sexual irregularities to be more than justified.

Serle is a sober judge, and we can accept without any qualification his assertion that the Monash Papers are ‘the most extensive to have survived in this country’. He admits that the papers exercised an ‘irresistible’ attraction to an Australian historian.

The scale of the papers, and the obsessiveness with which Monash collected and organised them, tends to dominate the text of the book without ever becoming an object of analysis. Reviewers have already pointed out that Serle resorts to lists to convey some of his points. No wonder, when Monash even made lists of events he did not attend! From time to time Serle seems overburdened, struggling to avoid suffocation under the weight of Monash’s megalomaniac self-documentation. There is little doubt that the papers reflect Monash’s enormous sense of posterity rather than merely the methodical habits of the Compleat Engineer.

Future biographies of Monash will test the appropriateness of this judgement, but I found this book, even the key centre parts dealing with World War I, a homage of endurance rather than insight.

Serle’s very formalistic duty to the facts (the documents) tends to flatten the prose. Literary flourishes are few. One alien Clarkism can be found in Serle’s description of Monash’s obstructors in the creation of the State Electricity Commission in the 1920s: ‘sour men of little faith’. There is little authorial wit, except for Serle’s observation that ‘Like so many Australians voyaging to Europe, he [Monash] was impressed with the Ceylonese – historically, Australians’ favourite Asians.’

Also, a dour Australian manner diminishes the emotional range of the biographer. As manager of the SEC staff, Monash ‘talked to you as one bloke to another’. A trade union leader of the period who admired Monash was, in Serle’s view, ‘no fool’.

Sometimes this laconic, conversational mode works. Often it leaves the reader uncertain of the author’s tone and intentions. ‘The Course of True Love’ is a puzzling title for a chapter on Monash’s marriage to Victoria (Vic) Moss: puzzling because Monash is portrayed as a spectacular philanderer before and after marriage. One passage in Monash’s sexual tactics receives the banal comment ‘All’s fair in love’. When Monash’s daughter Bertha was born, ‘Vic had a reasonably easy time of it’.

During John and Vic’s early separation one almost expects a footnote to Rogers and Hammerstein. Wanting her back, Monash ‘had grown accustomed to her now’. The same chapter – ‘A Rough Passage’ – ends with the colourless observation that Monash’s promotion in the militia was ‘uncommonly good going’ for a man of thirty-one.

It may seem unfair to draw attention to such blokey mannerisms of style, but they weaken many authorial bridging and concluding passages. They also reflect deeper interpretive problems in the biography.

I do not refer here to the chapters and sequences dealing with Monash the technician, practical man, administrator and technological ‘progressive’, Monash the antipodean Walter Rathenau. Serle’s most convincing chapters show his extraordinary range and depth of skills as an engineer, commander in the AIF, and chief of a very large statutory corporation.

Nor do I criticise the chapter (‘Pillar of Society’) and related sequences on Monash’s so-called ‘status-hunger’, his ability to outplay the local establishment at their own games. Serle’s depiction of Monash as a ‘double outsider’ – the ambitious Australian born of German-Jewish parents – is one of the most fascinating revelations in this book. It is a superb contribution to revisionist accounts of the Australian Dream of rising from ‘nowhere’ to ‘greatness’ yet retaining ‘the common touch’.

My doubts concern Serle’s handling of Monash’s early life, his family relationships, his youthful ambition, his self-described ‘race for a position in the world’, his sexuality, and perhaps also his conception of ethnicity. To be sure, it is only Serle’s deep commitment to immediacy and concreteness that allows me to raise these doubts, to suspect that the important and the unimportant are arbitrarily juxtaposed.

It must be added, too, that the inadequacy of Australian historical writing to the emotional realities of great episodes or individuals in our past is a far deeper problem than many realise. Manning Clark is one of the few to have addressed the issue in his prose. In Serle’s case, it is not so much Monash’s ‘double outsider’ status which creates problems, but Monash’s genius as an individual. The engineer of bridges and battles was in the first instance an engineer of the Self, of himself.

A straightforward example is Monash’s profound theatricality. We are told that once he had seen a pantomime around the age of thirteen. ‘J.C. Williamson’s had won a lifelong addict’. The passion for theatre of all tastes recurs throughout the book, largely in the form of Monash/Serle lists rather than as a telling obsession.

Theatrical experimentation and fantasy quickly became an essential ingredient in Monash ‘s aspirations to leadership and eminence, his sense of individual superiority over the crowd and the Establishment alike. He did not aspire to the stage, apparently, and in Serle’s opinion he was not even a great orator. Rather, Monash pursued the theatre of public life, including high society, with uncommon self-consciousness and attention to technique.

His famous militia career originated as much in the pursuit of ‘the gorgeous uniforms and all the pomp of officership’ (Monash’s words) as in mundane soldiering. By 1887, in his early twenties, Monash was learning to savour ‘the self-confidence engendered by actual success over other men, or the consciousness of my power’.

Theatricality becomes a byword for Monash as the biography gathers momentum. It was essential to Monash’s personal and military victories during the war, notwithstanding the practical skills also required, and it triumphed in the post-war State Electricity Commission job, where Monash easily outperformed any and all politicians in decisiveness, strategy, and political mobilisation. It was essential in the origins of the Anzac Day marches, and in the superb tale of what must be called Monash’s Mahal – the Shrine of Remembrance in Melbourne. It is not tasteless to add that Monash’s huge funeral procession was his greatest performance.

Serle appears to be very uneasy when dealing with this private and public theatricality, but it explains Monash’s perennial ‘showmanship’, his flair for public relations and ‘self-advertisement’. his many forays into journalism (to which he early aspired), and his propagandistic public writing such as The Australian Victories in France. The ‘mix of vanity and modesty’ is ‘bewildering’ to Serle, but it seems to be all of a piece.

Similarly, in one concluding passage Serle says that ‘an acknowledged great man … has to act a part, and to be stoically resigned to having to be an actor’. Monash’s outlook late in life, he adds, ‘did not require much adjustment to the acting role’. Surely this is misplaced empathy in Monash’s case. He struggled at every point to write his own script, and with the exception of the Governor-Generalship he played the roles of his choosing.

One of the many fascinations of Monash’s life is that he stormed the heights of Australian society from a series of enclaves which overlapped: his professions, the militia, the university, etc., leaving behind the German-Jewish milieu of his parents and family friends. He seldom permitted himself an outright challenge, and for this reason never entered politics. As Serle repeatedly points out, he feared a certain kind of open competition.   

According to Serle’s account, Monash only once considered politics. After the war, he fantasised about becoming minister of defence. Again on Serle’s evidence, one doubts his suitability to that post in particular, for he never showed much interest in problems of defence and foreign policy. The issue remains clouded, however, for Serle has him in 1910 convinced of the inevitability of war in Europe yet almost at the end of his active career in early 1914. Though Monash played a major role in the creation of an Australian civic religion – the AIF legend and its postwar enactments through to the 1960s – he remained aloof from politics in any articulated form. It is surely a delicious moment when, having epitomised the Digger ethos so successfully that insurrectionary right-wing followers wanted him to become dictator of Australia during the Depression, Monash sanely rebuffed them.

Much remains to be understood about the phases and the degree of self-consciousness with which Monash progressively transformed his sense of national identity. His Jewishness was clearly subsumed in the larger problem of self-emancipation from the pan-German milieu to a complex ‘British-Australian’ identity. Serle unconvincingly implies that Monash possessed a profound knowledge of Jewish history: a Jewish historian must surely tackle this problem now that the Monash Papers are accessible. But again, nothing is clear-cut with Monash, for he simultaneously reaped the benefits of a Prussian education at home, and never forgot them. At the same time as he embraced ‘British’ patriotism, he foresaw and came to embody the possibilities of Australian nativist and nationalist symbols, such as the citizen army, whose populism conflicted with the still dominant British Imperial cultural order. Finally, there is the all-important question of the sources of Monash’s ‘ruthless egotism’, a phrase of Eggleston’s which Serle inexplicably rejects. The evidence assembled by Serle suggests an early and almost insatiable contempt for the father, Louis Monash, and an unusually strong attachment to his ‘wronged’ mother, Bertha Monash. The evidence clearly suggests a breakdown in the marriage; Louis’s failure to attend his son’s bar mitzvah is especially convincing.

On page eight, however, Serle asserts that ‘So far as we know, it was a fairly undisturbed and unremarkable childhood: not unhappy, not oppressive, no evidence of slights or taunts, no conspicuous tensions or deprivations which might implant driving ambition and an implacable will to succeed.’

The picture which emerges in the following five hundred pages is utterly at odds with this very strange passage. What emerges is a young boy and adolescent privy to his parents’ conflicts and separation. He aggressively took his mother’s side, supplanting his father in the family. His love for and imagined seduction of his mother became the prototype of his relations with countless other women. Extraordinary skills in seduction then constituted the psychic infrastructure of Monash’s adult ‘race for a position in the world’ of men. He carried all before him, the public, the diggers, the politicians, and more.

Left behind him were his lovers. In the words of this book’s most moving line: ‘Outside the Windsor Hotel, Lizette was grieving uncontrollably’.