Although you might not guess it from media comment, The Latham Diaries (MUP, $39.95 hb, 429 pp, 0522852157) is the most important book yet published on Labor’s wilderness years. It provides a pungent characterisation of Labor’s post-1996 history; conveys a profound understanding of the challenges facing a social democratic party in contemporary Australia; and its damning account of Labor’s feuds, machinations, and toxic culture suggests why the party is incapable of meeting those challenges. It is also the most rancorous and at times rancid memoir ever penned by an Australian politician. For someone so sensitive to invasions of his own privacy, Latham throws around personal slurs and innuendoes with much abandon. Yet his effective use of a larrikin argot lends the book a gritty authenticity rare in such writing. Much black humour and some telling stories move the book along with a compelling pace until it is finally overwhelmed by self-pity, blustering defiance, and denial.

The diaries are not a set of regular daily entries but rather occasional jottings that appear to have undergone a degree of stylistic polishing. Sporadic in the early years, by 1998 they average about one a week. Although the entries are supposedly uncut, it is unclear whether any have been omitted. Some report the events of a single day; others cover a week or more. There are also hints throughout the diary of a greater degree of retrospectivity.

Geoffrey Robertson, the author of The Tyrannicide Brief, enjoys the same high public profile as those old lags who constitute the élite of Australian expatriates in London: Clive James, Germaine Greer, and Barry Humphries. In his case it is as a leading international human rights lawyer, the author of Crimes against Humanity (1999) and The Justice Game (1998), and host of the popular television series Hypotheticals.

At Sydney University, Robertson studied history as well as law. This provides the best explanation of the meticulous research that went into this book, in which the ‘notes on sources’ are as interesting to read as the elegantly written narrative. In 1999 Robertson had a debate in London with Justice Michael Kirby to mark the 350th anniversary of the trial and execution of Charles I. Was it a fair trial? According to Kirby, a monarchist, probably not; according to the republican Robertson, ‘yes’ in the context of legal standards at that time. This is a distant point and very much a lawyer’s one, but, in researching it, Robertson became fascinated by the significance of the events that took place between 1640 and 1660. These included the civil wars, the execution of Charles I, Cromwell’s Protectorate and the restoration of the monarchy in the person of Charles II.

Two-thirds of the way through Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002), its characters come across a house standing in a valley high in the Queensland ranges. The house is empty, abandoned like some landlocked Marie Celeste, but in one room a library remains. Standing before the shelves, one of the characters removes a volume, only to find the pages eaten away to dust, the book, like the house, an empty shell. It is a scene of extraordinary power and implication, resonant with the peculiar energy that builds when meaning coalesces, however briefly, and we feel ourselves in the presence of something that runs deeper than words.

Prochownik’s Dream (as one of the characters helpfully informs us at one point, it is pronounced Pro-shov-nik) attempts something similar, probing questions about the nature of art, the responsibility of the artist to the work, the responsibility of the artist to the past, and the relationship between the artist and those who share his life.