Anne Summers alone kept her head, and as a report, both of the campaign and the two Canberra years before it. Gamble For Power stands out. Focusing on John Button’s switch to Hawke, she gives a close-up of how Bill Hayden was brought to resign from the Labor leadership; she might have called this chapter ‘A View from the Button-hole’. Sensitive and revealing though her narrative is, it puts too much weight on the doings of Button. To Summers, Hayden was a case of sulks. I see him as a major contributor to his own downfall. When he later talked of a drover’s dog being able to lead Labor to victory, he disclosed for how long he had seen himself as a prime minister. Like Gough Whitlam in office, he was reluctant to come to terms with the union movement; and like Whitlam in excelsis, he promoted and demoted (shadow) ministers, as if he did not need their support. His final attempt to detach Paul Keating from Hawke by making him (shadow) treasurer only put Keating in an even stronger position to gain his objectives. The Parliamentary Labor Party, too, had ‘memories’.

Summers’s chapter on the last two years of the Fraser government will be more than a starting point for historians. She shows just what a prickly person Malcolm Fraser had become; he survived on two myths, of his own invincibility and of the infallibility of Tony Eggleton, the Federal Director of the Liberal Party. Being prime minister, he got away with riding much more roughly over his colleagues than did Hayden. He twice dragooned them into agreeing to a 1982 election, but had to pull back from September because of backfire from the Costigan Report, and from December because of his own illness. For much of 1982, Fraser was so obsessed with his own re-election that his government was unable to deal with the problems it had accumulated since 1980. On returning to Canberra in January 1983, he embarked on a programme of generous public spending and rushed to the governor-general when Hayden’s position seemed threatened.

Her meticulous account leaves it open for others to draw up a list of what those ‘problems’ were and select which one, left unsolved, persuaded the electors to put an end to Fraser’s term.

In 31 Days to Power, Haupt and Grattan establish a sense of distance between themselves and the flow of events. Aphoristic in syntax, at times archaic in vocabulary, they preface their narrative with six essays that take up nearly half of the book. They depart from the ultra-empiricism of journalistic narrative and thus enable others to take issue with what they say.

I applaud, above all, their courage in writing a chapter on the Press Gallery, which they call ‘Media Seduction’ without making it clear whether ‘media’ is subject or object in that phrase. I think that they want to say that the Press Gallery treated Fraser rather roughly for reasons of its own and was, in turn, seduced by Hawke. Fraser was simply unhelpful to journalists: ‘If you don’t tip a New York cabbie, he is likely to forget to tell you that you’re just about to step on wet cement’. There was more to it than that; Fraser was often rougher than neglecting the tip; and once David Barnett had left him, whom in his entourage could journalists regard as their equals?

Haupt and Grattan believe that Hawke was reported more favourably not only because he was more useful to them, but because they succumbed to his ‘splendour and magnetism’. With a faint memory going back to occasions before Hawke took to mineral water, I find this description somewhat odd. Hawke won over questioners, at least in private, simply by treating their queries seriously; perhaps, too, the Press Gallery calculated that he would be useful to it in future.

I cannot agree with Haupt’s and Grattan’s summary of Fraser’s eight years in office (1975 –83). They argue that his revolutionary approach to economic management failed because the ‘essential premise’, cutback in the government sector, ‘was never tried’.

The economic outlook which the Liberal Party began to adopt late in 1974 was a hotch-potch of analytic propositions and policy recommendations. The simplest of the analytic propositions, that price levels correlate with the money supply after a time lag, simply did not obtain in Australia. The other leading proposition that government borrowing generally crowds out the investment needs of the private sector, has not been confirmed by inquiry. The distinctive, though not unique, Fraser–Howard incantation of later years was that if inflation came down, employment would grow – a variant of the pre-Keynesian theory of employment: What Australian figures are relevant to this proposition tend to yield both negative and positive correlations.

I doubt whether Fraser or John Howard ever seriously fretted about the adequacy of any of these theories. Their job was to hold together a coalition of supporters frightened by Whitlam. As for seriously reducing the size of government support to the private sector, that was a political impossibility for the Liberal-National Country Party coalition: the reduction of tariffs was an obsession of Whitlam; and as for subsidies to the primary sector – well!

Bob Ellis did not have to try hard to write an individualistic book. He has a moral-religious view of the world: ‘Signs and Portents’ is the heading not of one, but of two of his chapters; Fraser’s defeat in 1983 is a moral retribution for November 1975. Ellis believes in the power of the Word and its modern, technical incarnations: ‘More than ever, this year the poll was fought on the media’; ‘Power, I decided, grows out of the lens of a television camera.’

These beliefs make him pay close attention to how politicians were presented to us during the campaign. In a debate between Howard and Keating, Keating was shot sideways to emphasise his recessive jaw; Howard was shot full face to display his smiling eyes. Ellis just manages to contain his indignation over this; but when Peter Bowers and Huw Evans put Fraser on the spot, Ellis rejoices: ‘Never before in this country had a sitting Prime Minister been so lacerated in a public broadcast, by an organisation he could in theory have closed down.’

To this world of messages exchanged between others, Ellis was an intermittent visitor. When the election erupted, he was in Melbourne for a film conference; in Sydney, his wife was beginning to lose an expected baby. Ellis was not wholly foreign to the political world; he had been writing about it for a decade, and was drafting a policy on film for Hayden right then. With a film script still to complete, he decided to spend much of the coming month on his first book. He met old friends and acquaintances when he dropped in on gatherings and then went home to carve out verbal icons of the stages of Hawke’s ascent.

If you watch Ellis on such occasions, he seems totally unobtrusive. It turns out that he learns, if he doesn’t already know, an astonishing amount about all sorts of people. One of the good things in The Things We Did Last Summer is a thumbnail sketch of Doug Anthony, campaigning in Martin Place in 1983, and courting Bob Eilis’s sister a quarter of a century earlier.

Eilis’s self-portrait introduces at least one voter. Craig McGregor’s somehow doesn’t: Time of Testing is about McGregor, the author of past and future books. As part of this exercise in homage to Norman Mailer, he seems to have invented an adolescent bearing his own name. ‘Craig’ secures an interview with Malcolm Fraser, watches him spill the tea on his lap and hears him exclaim ‘SHIT’. The capital letters were supplied by one of the McGregors, not by Fraser.

A novel attempt to court the youth market.