But her book’s opening is more W.H. Auden than Shakespeare (‘I sit in one of the dives / On Fifty-second Street / Uncertain and afraid / As the clever hopes expire / Of a low dishonest decade’)*. Auden echoes through Brett’s initial assertion: ‘It’s been a dismal decade.’  The reader knows, then, where the writer stands. And from the question that follows, ‘When did it start, this sense that Australia has lost direction?’, the reader understands where Brett is going. In a less fractured political climate this might be a welcome starting point for an examination of our body politic, an investigation any open-minded citizen–reader might join. But the Australian political mood is not receptive to scrutiny, to the kind of intellectual exchange, the give and take one hopes for in a democracy. In a striking passage in her introduction, Brett notes the following:

One of the more depressing sights of the past few years was Prime Minister Morrison sitting with his back to Anthony Albanese during Question Time in June 2020. He did it again to Tanya Plibersek in October that year. We know Morrison doesn’t like answering questions, especially when they come from women, but it showed an ignorant disrespect for our parliamentary traditions. The term His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, which dates from the early nineteenth century, was a major advance in the development of parliamentary government: one could oppose the government of the day without being accused of treason. Robert Menzies would never have done it.

The invocation of Menzies is telling, and a pointer to one of the book’s more piquant ironies. Brett established her public and professional reputation with Robert Menzies’ Forgotten People (first published as an essay in 1984 in Meanjin and as a book in 1992). In 2017, retired from academia (a story – in itself – of progressive disenchantment and told throughout Doing Politics), she published The Enigmatic Mr Deakin, and won the 2018 National Biography Award for it. So, the critic of current politics – Liberal and Labor – is also the acclaimed historian of two towering figures from the conservative side of politics. And she is frank about her debt to Robert Menzies. In the 1980s, teaching politics at the University of Melbourne, she ‘wanted to give the students something to read on Menzies that was neither hagiography nor polemic’. She found it in ‘The Forgotten People’, a pamphlet containing the speech Menzies had written for radio in 1942 (and, significantly, the only time Menzies ever used the phrase ‘the forgotten people’). Brett: ‘I was bowled over by the speech and started having ideas about it, lots of them. In fact, I have been having ideas about that speech ever since, and have returned to it again and again as a lever to prise apart the interconnections between political ideas and social experience in twentieth-century Australia.’

Sometimes, those connections have been forged through the power of speech. One of the many virtues of Doing Politics is its analysis of rhetoric (not in the pejorative sense) in Australian politics. Brett never discounts rhetoric, recognising its potency in the hands of experts (Deakin was ‘silver-tongued’). She also astutely differentiates Menzies’ ‘forgotten people’ from John Howard’s ‘battlers’ and Scott Morrison’s ‘quiet Australians’, separating sense from slogan, sociological intuition from marketing.

Doing Politics has a broad span, appropriate to its title. Politics for Brett includes shifting conceptions of country and city, multiculturalism, climate change’s challenge to our short-term thinking, the tumult in universities, and current political disdain for higher education (contrast Menzies’ championing of it). Brett writes about all of this century’s prime ministers – Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull, and Morrison – but, significantly, begins the book with a chapter on Alfred Deakin. Why? Because the story of Deakin’s various periods in power was also one of the necessity for compromise in politics, for the primacy of policy and its implementation over political will to power. ‘Complex policy problems have many stakeholders,’ Brett writes. ‘Stable solutions require give and take, with major players prepared to live with what, to them, are less-than-perfect outcomes and to share the credit.’

The contrast with our current fractious politics could not be more marked: ‘Around 2000, as pressure mounted for Australia to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions, the culture wars were joined by the climate wars. Together these have diminished Australian public life, too often reducing it to sterile adversarialism which prioritises anger and indignation over sympathy and compassion, and leaves little room for doubt and the compromises on which successful democracies are built.’

‘Sterile adverserialism’ catches the impacted state in Australia’s politics today, and the public disillusionment to which it leads.

Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives.*

In Brett’s analysis, we lack sympathy and compassion, imperatives for a decent society. But why should we listen to her? Because her whole book is the revelation of a lifetime’s groundwork in understanding our history, the way we interact, what we value, and the particular structures Australia has built to buttress our democracy, our way of life (she is an advocate, for example, of Australia’s independent electoral commission and compulsory voting system). But more than that, what emerges from the various chapters of Doing Politics is a personal account of intellectual and moral formation and growth – what makes Judith Brett tick. Never a crypto-autobiography, Doing Politics is nonetheless a historian’s non-fiction Bildungsroman, generous and illuminating about her influences and sources. She makes frequent reference, for example, to the late Graham Little, renowned political scientist and another committed public communicator. Little’s theory of political leadership, Brett writes, connected ‘the insights and knowledge of psychoanalysis with the public world of politics’. Anyone who heard Little’s public broadcasts will know what she means. They were deft analyses – of politicians, their ambitions, their motivation, and their humanity. And – a rare quality – they always left subject and listener with room to move.

As Judith Brett does, for all her forthrightness. And in case you think she is the earnest swot she confesses to having once been, read her final chapter on ‘The Chook in the Australian Unconscious’. It’s a bobby-dazzler.

*The quotations are from W.H. Auden’s poem ‘September 1, 1939’, almost every line of which is apposite in this context.