Curtin's Gift: Reinterpreting Australia's greatest prime minister

(Paperback)

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John Curtin, prime minister during the darkest days of the Second World War, is remembered as the reluctant hero of Australian politics. In the Australian story he is the recovering alcoholic and the accidental prime minister who saved Australia from invasion by Japan, overrode the opposition of Churchill and Roosevelt to bring home Australian troops from the Middle East, and created the Australian alliance with the United States. However, there is much more to the Curtin story than this.

John Edwards challenges our understanding of Curtin's place in Australian history. He offers a reinterpretation of the leader and the man in which Curtin emerges as a deceptively cunning player in the chess game of politics. He also argues that overblown claims for Curtin as the warlord have obscured his much more important legacy in laying the economic foundations of today's Australia.

Curtin's Gift is a fresh and thoughtful look at one of Australia's most revered prime ministers.

Author Bio

John Edwards, PhD, is Chief Economist at HSBC. A graduate of Sydney University and George Washington University, he was a journalist for twenty years before becoming a senior economic advisor to treasurer and then prime minister Paul Keating. Edwards began his career in journalism on the Australian Financial Review and was later political correspondent for The Australian and Washington correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald. In 1996 John published the best-selling biography, Paul Keating: the inside story. He was awarded the John Curtin Prime Ministerial Library Fellowship at Curtin University in 2000.