Hayden’s memoirs are essentially a rite of political passage. In his first chapter Hayden comments how he started off on the left – enjoying a ‘simple, sustaining creed’. However, over time, he ‘progressively shed this clumsy ideological baggage’. In turn his democratic socialist values were ‘supplanted’ by social democratic ones. He now describes himself as a ‘secular liberal humanist’. This message is repeated a third of the way into Hayden’s lengthy tome and, once again, in his epilogue. Obviously he has a point to make.

The author puts his ideological transformation down to ‘maturation and the experience and responsibility of handling so much of the public’s affairs, during thirty-five years in public life’. Yet, as his book makes clear, Hayden’s ideological growth has also reflected his changing social circumstances.

Bill Hayden was born in Brisbane in January 1933. He was a ‘child of [the] Great Depression’. His parents George and Violet Hayden were ‘busted’ by the Depression. George Hayden was ‘foreclosed in a small musical instrument and repair shop in Rockhampton’. Soon after the family moved to (then) working class South Brisbane.

According to Bill Hayden, his father ‘never fully recovered his self-respect from the shock of failure and the humiliation of being dispossessed’. George and Violet ‘hated a system which had treated them … so villainously’. Their ‘hate and distrust’ were Bill’s ‘legacy’.

But that’s not all. As the author recounts, for most of his life he loathed his father ‘and his memory’, for George Hayden, who became a full-time piano tuner, was also a part-time drunk and wife-basher.

George Hayden was born in California. His parents were Irish from Cork. George quit a seminary while training to be a Catholic priest. In time he became both a committed atheist and a member of the militant Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He jumped ship in Australia. Violet Hayden was a Catholic who identified with Ireland even though, like most of her generation, she never travelled there. Bill’s initial education was at St Ita’s Convent in Dutton Park, but he soon moved to the Dutton Park State School – following his father’s annoyance at not acquiring the convent school’s piano tuning work.

Young Bill Hayden may have detested his father, but he acquired many of his personal beliefs. He became not merely a convinced atheist but ‘a narrow bigot in many ways, even a sectarian anti-Catholic’. Here too, over the years, Bill Hayden was moderated. Certainly he remains an atheist – unable to embrace the faith of his mother. But he seems to have developed a respect for the anti-Communist Catholics he once opposed within the Labor movement – especially around the time of the Labor split of 1954–57.

Bob Santamaria emerges relatively unscathed from Hayden: An autobiography. The author maintains that ‘his flaw was zealotry’, but he concedes that Santamaria ‘was more correct on the nature of Communism than a great number’ of his contemporary detractors – including, at one time, Bill Hayden himself.

One of the strengths of the book is the author’s willingness to make honest – and, at times, unfashionable – assessments of his one-time political colleagues. The list includes a number of Labor saints.

Take Bert Evatt, for example. Dr Evatt was a minister in the ALP governments of John Curtin and Ben Chifley, and led Labor from 1951 to 1960. Hayden accuses Evatt of ‘characteristically impulsive, wilful, self-serving behaviour’ in the lead up to the disastrous Labor split of 1954. Hayden also describes Evatt’s contribution to the debate over the ANZUS Treaty as ‘defensive, rambling and largely irrelevant’.

The late Lionel Murphy is another canonised Labor saint to receive a serve in Hayden’s book. The author criticises Murphy’s refusal to support Gough Whitlam in the late 1960s when he was under attack from the majority of the ALP national executive. Hayden accuses the one-time Labor Senate leader of not attempting ‘to ensure due process, fair hearings and restrained conduct by that inquisitorial bench ...’.

Bill Hayden comments in passing that leftish hero Tom Uren ‘put too much innocent trust in Moscow, and later Beijing’ for his comfort. And Hayden: An autobiography reveals that Dr Jim Cairns (who worked briefly – and disastrously – as treasurer in the Whitlam Government) once told the author that he found some of the principles of economics confusing. You can say that again.

However, it is not only those on the left who come in for a Hayden-administered serve. So do such ALP identities as Jim McClelland and Bob Hawke – although the author is complimentary about the latter’s performance as Prime Minister. Yet even today Hayden still believes that he was entitled to lead the ALP in the 1983 federal election – an opportunity that was denied by Hawke’s acquiring the Labor leadership.

Former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser, who defeated Hayden in the 1980 federal election, also comes in for severe criticism. The author comments: ‘With his mixed Oxford accent, Fraser always puts me in mind of what an English public school bounder is probably like’.

Bill Hayden is relatively positive about former Liberal Prime Minister John Gorton and ex-Governor-General John Kerr. He describes Paul Keating as ‘easily the most seminally important peacetime leader this country has had’. And Hayden is praiseworthy about Gough Whitlam’s role in reforming Labor in the 1960s and early 1970s, while acknowledging that soon after its election in December 1972 the Whitlam government ‘found itself inadequate to the task of governing’. To Hayden, Whitlam as prime minister was ‘like a riverboat gambler’.

But Hayden: An autobiography is not just about personal and political assessments. For the first time – in public at least – the author has opened a part of his soul and given at least a glimpse of the private Bill Hayden. At times this is amusing – on occasions it is very, very sad. Hayden gives a self-deprecatory account of an assignation (when he was a young policeman in Brisbane) with an older woman – a nurse, in fact. The author reveals his anger – and anguish – when he found out that the married lady in question was enjoying the favours of more than one member of the Woolloongabba Police Station.

Bill Hayden’s account of the death of his eldest child, Michaela, is the most moving part of the book. Michaela Hayden was killed when knocked down by a car at age five in October 1966. It seems that this is the first occasion on which the author has been able to discuss this family tragedy. He is honest enough to concede that, although his wife, Dallas, ‘wishes we could talk about [Michaela] at times’, he ‘still cannot’.

Of all the players in Hayden’s life, Dallas emerges from this book as the most impressive. The book contains a photo of Dallas as a beautiful young woman, pasting up ‘Vote Hayden’ stickers when Bill ran for Oxley in 1961. The book concludes with Bill and Dallas living in retirement near Ipswich sharing ‘a deep friendship and a mutual trust incomparably greater than any other relationship either of us had ever experienced’.

Apart from Dallas and the Hayden daughters, few women find their way into Hayden’s memoirs. Susan Ryan gets a couple of brief references but Ros Kelly is not mentioned at all. Yet both served as ministers in the Hawke Government when Bill Hayden was Minister for Foreign Affairs. It seems that Bill Hayden’s life story is a very blokey affair.

Hayden: An autobiography starts well but does not sustain the pace. In fact the least interesting sections involve the author’s periods as Minister for Foreign Affairs (1983–1988) and Governor–General. Apart from a forensic analysis of Robert Menzies’ involvement in the ANZUS Treaty (the main point of which is to rationalise the author’s view that ANZUS was overrated), there is little new to either area. This is unfortunate, since the author is of sharp mind and harsh judgement. So it would have been interesting to have his assessments of some of the world’s leading figures – including those who make up the House of Windsor.

Bill Hayden’s account of how, over time, his ‘experience of government’ has taught him ‘the limits to government’ makes for an interesting story. Moreover it is a well-written one. That’s about all a reader can ask of an autobiographer. Oh, yes. I would have appreciated a convincing argument as to why, after some two centuries, Australians are (apparently) not mature enough to have an Australian head of state. Bill Hayden may argue that he is not a ‘deferential royalist’ but he is a complacent one, maintaining that evolution is the way to go. On this basis the Australian colonies would never have federated in 1901 – or perhaps, later. But then, the impoverished piano-tuner’s son from South Brisbane has been a guest at Balmoral. Which probably explains why today’ secular liberal humanist is today’s – and probably tomorrow’s – continuing monarchist.