Race Mathews on back-bench biography.

Memoirs by one-time Labor ministers have become two-a-penny, but those of backbench MPs remain relatively rare and thereby the more interesting. Those of Ken Fry--MHR for Fraser in the ACT 1974 to 1984--have special significance, consequent on his having been qualified by ability and perhaps ambition for a portfolio that failed to eventuate. The book offers more numerous hints as to why this should have been so than the author may have fully appreciated.

MPs are popularly supposed to operate in a lather of ambition. The reality is that only a minority ever see themselves as carrying the proverbial marshal's baton of ministerial office in their knapsacks. Life on the backbench offers greater opportunities for job satisfaction than is commonly thought, and what matters for most MPs is less rising above them than their retention. The option for some will be to adopt an ombudsman, civic leadership and quasi-community development role in their constituencies, which has the added attraction of enhancing the chances of their re-election. Others, with larger majorities or inclinations to living dangerously, may opt for an active involvement, predominantly in the work of parliamentary committees and other activities external to their electorates. I have sometimes thought myself that, were I to have my time in parliament over again, I would prefer the chairmanship of a major committee such as, say, Public Accounts to a ministry.

Fry was significantly older than most of his fellow newcomers to the parliament during the brief lifespan of the Whitlam Government, and had more in common, perhaps, with an earlier generation who took their places there in the immediate aftermath of World War II, following the formative experiences of the Great Depression and life in the armed services. His account of his childhood and young manhood prior to volunteering for the Second Australian Imperial Force with his mates in 1940 feels much more akin to that of David Day's Ben Chifley or John Curtin than the predominantly white-collar and professional workers whom Whitlam carried into office with him in 1972, and again following the Snedden refusal-of-supply double-dissolution election in 1974.

His postwar experience as a small chicken-hatchery businessman in Bathurst--Chifley's home town--was likewise exceptional in a caucus that the conservatives frequently assailed on the tendentious grounds that nobody in it had ever had to meet a pay-roll. It was only with his appointment as a public servant in Canberra in 1968 that he came to have something more in common, in career terms, with the predominantly younger colleagues with whom he shared the government benches behind Whitlam and, later, Hawke. It was also in this latter period, and after leaving parliament in 1984, that he came to outshine most of them academically, with degrees from the Australian National University as BA, LitB and PhD. The values he brought with him into parliament were also more firmly those of Chifley's 'light on the hill'.

It was perhaps in part these same values, along with some bruising pre-selection experiences at the hands of the NSW Right, that caused him to throw in his lot with the caucus Left and ultimately become its convenor. The association may have been more problematic than his account suggests. His recollection that 'generally' he had great admiration for Whitlam and his politics may owe more than he supposes to hindsight and is certainly inconsistent with the obstruction and opprobrium that Whitlam experienced at the hands of much of the Left, both externally and within parliament. It is interesting to speculate how, had Fry entered parliament earlier, he would have voted when Jim Cairns challenged Whitlam for the leadership, or what side he would have taken in Whitlam's mostly lonely struggle to throw off the dead hand of the left Trade Unionists' Defence Committee hegemony in Victoria. In general, parliamentary leaders acquire no lustre in the eyes of the Left until they are in retirement or, better still, dead.

It was consequent on a falling out with Whitlam over East Timor that Fry experienced what many would see as having been his finest hour. Right or wrong as history may judge his championing of the cause of East Timorese independence to have been, it stemmed from deep and passionately held convictions, not least among them his sense of Australia's endebtedness to the East Timorese for their frequently self-sacrificial support of Australian servicemen operating behind enemy lines during the war against Japan. The episode richly illustrates the considerable influence that backbench MPs can exercise through strategic use of their access to committees and other forums, both within Australia and overseas.

Fry writes that he was disappointed not to have secured election to a ministry. It is not clear that the sentiment was well-based, or even perhaps strongly felt. Given the adherence to principle that provides his book with its underlying theme, the holding of a portfolio may have required more compromises than he would have found comfortable. Even so, his contribution to the well-being of his constituents and the national interest was admirable. The strength of his book is as a reminder that politics is a mostly honourable vocation and that its practitioners, such as Fry, are also more often honourable than tabloid journalism and the conventional wisdom choose to admit.

Race Mathews was chief of staff to Gough Whitlam as Leader of the Opposition 1967-72.