MENZIES ENIGMA

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 32116, 11 October 1969, Page 4

MENZIES ENIGMA

Politics to People. By Edgar Holt. Angus and Robertson. 144 pp. Illustrated. This informative little book is sub-titled “The Men of the Menzies Era,” and it concentrates on the political relations Of Robert Menzies. The Menzies era is conceived as extending to the untimely death in 1967 of Menzies’ suesessor, Harold Holt, a tittle less than two years after he bad become the Commonwealth’s Prime Minister. The well-liked Holt carried on the policies of the often-disliked Menzies. This book adds something on the political side to Kevin Perkins’s biography of Sir Robert Menzies, but it does not offer the same full picture of the man. It is valuable to have its rapid sketches of the other leaders— Hughes, Lyons, Bruce, Page, Curtin,

Chifley and Evatt—and its narrative of the in-fighting in the Canberra jungle. But its Time-bright account does not solve the enigma of Menzies—how so unpopular a man could achieve so long a term of office in a democracy; Menzies remains the stark Australian with the mysterious instinct for power and the ability to exercise it, on occasion, ruthlessly. His lack of interest in the arts, his never-hidden contempt for fools, his arm’s-length treatment of the press, his complete lack of bonhomie, pile up the personal disadvantages that only a supreme efficiency and strength could caneel out. It is almost refreshing to find him with a streak of Scots romanticism and a weakness for the picturesque regalia of the honours showered upon him.