I don’t really intend this blog to be solely political commentary – lots of other things will be covered as time goes on. But at the moment I am waiting for The Making of Julia Gillard to sidle onto the shelves of bookshops around the country. This limbo period can be a really difficult time for any writer I think – you’ve done all you can, the book is complete, yet it isn’t out yet. So, in that sense, because readers haven’t seen it, it doesn’t yet exist. However, it will be around from Monday, which is when I start talking about it on radio and TV.

Tracking Julia Gillard has become second nature over the past months, and I continue to do it: not just because it’s now a habit, but because it continues to be fascinating. And this week, of course, there has been all that kerfuffle about Question Time, beginning with an argument (you can’t call it a debate because it was a series of assertions, plus points-scoring) about which side of politics is better at encouraging women into Parliament. A huge quantity of heat, though not light, was generated Julia G and Julie Bishop. And didn’t the media have fun with that. It’s worth remembering sometimes that when it’s Rudd v Turnbull, the press gallery admiringly discusses who has won the verbal battle. But Gillard v Bishop is much more likely to be considered a catfight (horrible word).

Continue reading Waiting for Julia…

The Making of Julia Gillard

Jacqueline Kent
Penguin Viking paperback $32.95
Released 21 September 2009

The Making of Julia Gillard is the first complete biography of Australia’s most powerful woman. Julia Gillard is an exceptional Australian political figure.
The first woman to be deputy prime minister [[ and tipped by many to get the top job in the future – she is admired on both sides of politics as well as by the public. Yet Gillard is not loved by everybody. Her career has been marked by pitched battles with jealous rivals and powerful factions. To conservatives she is still ‘red Julia’; to some on the Left she remains a politician too willing to compromise. She is widely perceived to be ambitious, and yet does she want to be prime minister?

The Making of Julia Gillard tells Gillard’s remarkable story, including her Adelaide childhood, her time as a fiery student activist, her battles to get into Parliament and her relationships with the important men in her political life:

Simon Crean, Kim Beazley, Mark Latham and Kevin Rudd. It also shows a woman whose private life has not always been easy.
In this immensely readable book, acclaimed biographer Jacqueline Kent draws on interviews with Gillard’s friends and foes – and with Gillard herself – to reveal the complexities of a woman whose public appeal is based on her apparent ordinariness.

Writing the life story of an Australian woman politician in mid career was a very different kind of project for me. I had already written two biographies of women – editor Beatrice Davis and social reformer and musician Hephzibah Menuhin – but they had been whole life stories. Julia Gillard is only in her forties, and who knows what she may yet achieve?

Gillard herself greeted the project with less than total enthusiasm at first. Indeed, when I first approached her with a polite letter, copies of books, my credentials, etc., I heard nothing for months. A phone call to her office elicited a not-particularly-polite brushoff from one of her press people. Continue reading The Making of Julia Gillard