Arguably, the most intriguing section of the book deals with the Hawke– Keating era and, in part, the role of the media in the rise and fall of both Bob Hawke and Paul Keating. While massaging the media has long been part of a prime minister’s toolbox, the Hawke–Keating years saw an intensification of this strategy. Indeed, Abjorensen implies that a significant aspect of Hawke’s fall from power in 1991 was his belief that he had a ‘direct line into the public psyche’, bypassing the press gallery in favour of ‘his preferred radio presenters’. Keating, on the other hand, knew the importance of cultivating journalists desperate for good copy. This undoubtedly assisted in boosting the ambitious politician’s successful second bid for the leadership.

The author is especially critical of Keating’s alleged obsession with ‘big picture’ themes at the expense of acknowledging the general concerns of voters. While this probably contributed to his defeat in the 1996 poll, the neoliberal agenda (such as privatisation, corporatisation of the public service, free markets, and the ideology of competition) was also a key election issue, and John Howard’s Coalition appeared – wrongly as it turned out – to be offering the electorate some relief from rapid economic and social change.

Alfred Deakin (photograph via Wikimedia Commons/Swiss Studios/John Oxley Library/State Library of Queensland)

Elsewhere in the book, Abjorensen demolishes some fondly regarded myths. Edmund Barton, often viewed by political historians as the ‘natural choice’ as the first national leader, is convincingly revealed as a sick and exhausted man by the time of Federation, who was given a great deal of encouragement by his fellow ministers to leave office. In another important revisionist account, the author vividly portrays Australia’s second prime minister, Alfred Deakin, not as a noble founding father but as a man who betrayed his Liberal ideals and his political allies for temporary political advantage.

While the book is often entertaining, its focus on systematically describing and explaining the reasons for each leader’s departure from office is ultimately limited in scope: just as we are beginning to understand the life and times of one leader, the conveyor belt moves on and the next prime minister’s rise and fall is presented in the text. There are no images of prime ministers to help the reader view each leader as a ‘real person’; Abjorensen’s completist approach to the task necessarily means that in order to fit twenty-nine former prime ministers into a short book, biographical aspects are neglected in favour of narration; and finally, the authorial voice is undermined occasionally by an uncritical use of secondary-source quotations. The evidential basis of Abjorensen’s various quotations from self-serving ex-politicians might also have been corroborated more fully with other sources. But what self-respecting author looking for some added historical colour could resist Stanley Melbourne Bruce’s gentle dig at his successor, Joseph Lyons?

He [Lyons] was a delightful person. He couldn’t run a government but he could win elections. His resemblance to a cheerful koala, his eleven children, his family-man appeal, were irresistible to voters. He did, however, need someone to hold his hand in the early days and I did it …

Despite some reservations, this study of prime ministerial exits usefully reminds us that much of the history of the Commonwealth Parliament has been marked by periods of intense instability and uncertainty. In the early twentieth century, the dominance of progressive Liberal politicians was challenged by the rise of the Australian Labor Party, which shared much of the ideology of Deakin and other Liberals but was more disciplined as a voting bloc. This was anathema to many independent-minded Liberals. By the end of the 1900s, the progressive Liberals had been pushed, reluctantly and painfully, towards conservatism in reaction to Labor. The more recent exits have been less ideological than in the past and more driven by internal political conflict, a reflection, perhaps, of the great divide between the ‘insiders’ (the political, business, and media class) and the ‘outsiders’ – the rest of us.