Book description
Award-winning and best-selling biography of Paul Keating with new
contentIntroduced by Carmen Lawrence, former Premier of WA and senior
minister in the Keating government. "Others have fair claim on the
economic transformation of Australia, but Paul Keating's so-called 'big
picture' vision, his political courage, the requisite luck and his gift
for story-telling have earned him most of the credit. Certainly no one
did more to bring about the successful economy we now enjoy - and
inhabit. But history will just not behave. If this transformation not
only brought economic growth and prosperity, but in some degree also
laid the ground for the debasement of political debate to tin-eared
sloganeering and second-hand managerialism, should he not share the
credit for that as well?" From the Afterword by Don Watson. In
December 1991 Paul Keating wrested the role of Prime Minister from Bob
Hawke and the bruises from that struggle were part of the baggage he
brought to the job: the other parts included the worst recession in 60
years and an electorate determined to make him pay for it. Keating
defied the odds and won the 1993 election, and in his four years as
Prime Minister set Australia on a new course - towards engagement with
Asia, a republic, reconciliation, a social democracy built on a modern
export-based economy and sophisticated public systems of education and
training, health and social security. Widely regarded as a
quintessential economic rationalist, Keating's record clearly shows that
his vision was infinitely broader and more complex. Don Watson was
employed as Keating's speechwriter. Based on the diaries Watson kept
through the four turbulent and exhausting years of Keating's Prime
Ministership, on its release Recollections of a Bleeding Heart was
widely deemed a masterpiece. It is at once a groundbreaking 'inside'
account of politics and a profound and extraordinarily frank study of
the most intriguing and visionary politician in Australia's modern
history. Now, when vision and character have all but vanished from
politics, Don Watson's Recollections makes absorbing - and essential -
reading. Don Watson's Recollections of a Bleeding Heart: Paul Keating
Prime Minister, won the Age Book of the Year and Non-Fiction Prizes, the
Brisbane Courier Mail Book of the Year, the National Biography Award and
the Australian Literary Studies Association's Book of the Year. His
Quarterly Essay, Rabbit Syndrome: Australia and America won the Alfred
Deakin Essay Prize. Death Sentence, his best-selling book about the
decay of public language won the Australian Booksellers Association Book
of the Year. Watson's Dictionary of Weasel Words was also a bestseller.
American Journeys won the Age Non-Fiction and Book of the Year Awards.
It also won the inaugural Indie Award for Non-Fiction and the Walkley
Award for Non-Fiction.
